Richard Mercer was in the middle of a meeting with two of his senior acquisitions managers when his personal phone began vibrating against the surface of the conference table.

He looked at the screen and he saw that it was from Houston General Hospital, causing him to frown.

He stared at it for a moment, wondering what could be the reason for the call. Then he excused himself without explanation, stepped out into the corridor, and answered.

The voice on the other end belonged to a woman who identified herself as a senior nurse in the emergency department.

"Mr. Mercer," she said. "I’m calling regarding a young man brought in this morning. His identification lists you as next of kin. His name is Andrew Mercer."

Richard’s hand tightened anxiously around the phone.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Sir, I need to ask you to come to the hospital as soon as possible," she said. "It would be better if we spoke in person."

"Tell me now," he said, with a low and neutral voice that gave no chance for refusal.

"Mr. Mercer, I’m very sorry to inform you that your son was pronounced dead on arrival this morning at eight forty-three. He was brought in by emergency services responding to a call at an address in Fourth Ward. I’m so sorry for your loss. Please come to the hospital at your earliest convenience so that we can —"

Richard Mercer lowered the phone from his ear.

He stood in the corridor, the phone pressed flat against his thigh, and looked at the wall in front of him.

The look on his face didn’t change, neither did his breathing or his posture.

But something behind his eyes had, and anyone who knew Richard Mercer well enough would have recognised it immediately and taken several steps backward.

He stood there for perhaps thirty seconds.

Then he turned, walked back into the conference room, and told the two acquisitions managers that the meeting was concluded, with a calm voice.

He thanked them for their time and watched them gather their things and leave without questioning it, and he did not move from where he was standing until the door had fully closed behind them.

Then he sat down in the empty conference room, in the chair at the head of the table, and put both hands flat on the surface in front of him.

He sat like that for a full minute.

Then he stood, picked up his jacket from the back of the chair, and walked to his car.

His driver was waiting at the kerb when he came through the building’s entrance, but Richard walked past him without acknowledgement, got into the driver’s seat of his own car, and pulled out into the afternoon traffic, driving to the hospital in silence.

The city moved past the windows in its usual indifferent way, and Richard Mercer drove through it with his hands at ten and two and his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

He hadn’t reacted to the news of his son’s death. He didn’t cry. That was something he had stopped doing decades ago. But was going on inside of him was much more dangerous.

***

When he arrived at the hospital, the hospital’s emergency department reception directed him to a family consultation room on the second floor, where a doctor was already waiting.

The doctor introduced himself, expressed condolences in the language doctors used for that purpose, and explained what he knew.

Drew had been brought in by emergency services at approximately eight-fifteen that morning. Gunshot wound to the head. He had not been responsive on arrival. The trauma team had worked on him for twenty-two minutes before the call was made.

Richard sat across from the doctor and listened to all of it without moving.

When the doctor finished, Richard asked to see his son.

They took him through a set of double doors and down a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and recycled air, and into a room where Drew lay on a hospital bed with a sheet drawn up to his chest and his eyes closed.

Richard stood at the side of the bed and he looked at his son for a long time.

Nobody in the room spoke. The doctor and the nurse who had accompanied him had the sense to stay near the door and leave the space between the father and the bed entirely unoccupied.

Richard reached out and put his hand briefly on Drew’s shoulder. He left it there for a moment, then withdrew it.

He turned and walked back to the door.

"I need to call my wife," he said to the nurse. "Is there somewhere private."

She led him to a small family room two doors down, with chairs along the wall and a box of tissues on a low table.

He closed the door and stood with his back against it. Then he called his wife.

She answered on the third ring, her voice filled with distraction and warmth.

"Richard," she said. "I was just about to —"

"I need you to sit down," he said. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

There was brief pause on his wife’s side, as she quickly picked up on the fact that something was wrong.

"What’s happened," she asked, curiously and anxiously.

"It’s Drew," he said. "I’m at the hospital. He’s gone, Margaret."

The silence that followed was absolute, not even breathing, as though the person on the other end had simply ceased to occupy the world for a moment.

Then Margaret Mercer made a sound that Richard had never heard from her in thirty-one years of marriage. She broke down in tears.

"Margaret," he said.

She said Drew’s name and he sensed how lifeless she sounded.

"I’m coming home," he said. "I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Call Sandra and have her stay with you until I get there."

She said something he couldn’t fully make out.

"Twenty minutes," he said again, and ended the call.

He stood in the small family room for a moment.

He walked out, thanked the nurse, and left the hospital.

***

Richard was home in eighteen minutes.

Margaret was in the sitting room when he arrived, in the chair by the window, with Sandra, their housekeeper of twelve years, standing nearby with the expression of someone who desperately wanted to be useful and understood there was nothing useful to be done.

Margaret’s hands were pressed together in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on nothing. She had been crying since the call and had not stopped.

She looked up when Richard walked in.

He crossed the room, sat beside her, and put his hand over hers.

For a long moment neither of them said anything.

"How," she said finally.

"Gunshot," he said.

"Who," she said.

"I’m going to find out," he said.

She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression that contained grief and fury.

"Richard," she said. "Find them."

He looked at her for a moment.

"Yes," he said simply.

He sat with her for another hour. He did not make calls or even look at his phone. He sat in the chair beside his wife in the sitting room of the house Drew had grown up in and he was present for that hour in a way that cost him something, because every minute he sat still was a minute he was not doing what every part of him wanted to do.

When the hour was done, he stood, straightened his jacket, and went to his study.

He closed the door behind him.

Then he sat behind his desk, and his face changed.

The composure he had maintained since the hospital corridor, through the drive home, through the hour in the sitting room with Margaret’s hand in his, dissolved in the privacy of the closed room into a raw and volcanic anger.

He picked up the heavy crystal paperweight from the corner of his desk and hurled it at the wall with everything he had.

It hit the wall and shattered, the pieces scattering across the floor in a wide arc.

He stood behind the desk, breathing hard, his fists clenched at his sides, and looked at the damage.

Then he sat down, pressed both palms flat on the desk, and let the breathing slow.

When it had, he picked up his phone.

The first call was to a man named Carrasco, who held a senior position in Houston Police Department’s organised crime division and who had been on Richard Mercer’s payroll, in one form or another, for the better part of eight years.

Carrasco answered on the second ring.

"Drew is dead," Richard said, without preamble. "Gunshot wound. He was found at an abandoned building in Fourth Ward this morning and brought to Houston General. I need to know everything. Who was there, what happened, and who walked out of that building."

Carrasco was quiet for a moment.

"Richard," he said, dropping the formality entirely. "I’m sorry."

"Don’t be sorry," Richard said. "Be useful. I want results not condolences. Can you get someone on this today."

"Yes," Carrasco said. "I’ll have someone pull the emergency services report from this morning and start working the location. If there’s anything at the scene we can pull, we’ll pull it."

"I want a name," Richard said. "Whatever it takes. I want the name of the person who did this."

"I’ll call you when I have something," Carrasco said.

"Don’t call me with fragments," Richard said. "Call me when you have something worth telling me."

He ended the call.

The second call took longer to connect, routing through two intermediary numbers before reaching a line in a building that did not appear in any public registry.

The man who answered was named Torres. He managed certain operational matters for WhiteCrest’s less visible partners, and he was not someone Richard called with small things, nor someone who expected small things when Richard called.

"I need to know about the men who were with Drew this morning," Richard said. "The ones at the Fourth Ward location. I need to know who they were and where they came from."

There was a pause on Torres’s end. It was a careful, as he didn’t want to anger the already enraged Richard.

"Mr. Mercer," Torres said. "First, I want to say that I’m deeply sorry about Drew. Truly."

"Thank you," Richard said flatly and uninterested. "The men."

"That’s what I need to discuss with you," Torres said. "I’ve already been making inquiries on our end since we heard. Mr. Mercer —" he paused again, hesitating, as he decided how to deliver something he would prefer not to deliver at all "— the men in that building were not ours."

The silence that followed was long.

"Explain that," Richard said, his voice slowly turning cold.

"We have accounted for every man assigned to operations in Houston this week," Torres said. "None of them were at that location. None of them had any assignment connected to Drew. Whatever he arranged, he arranged it independently. Through his own contacts. The men he used had no connection to our organisation."

Richard Mercer sat very still.

"So my son went into that situation," he said slowly, "with men I know nothing about, against a person he had apparently decided to handle on his own, without telling anyone."

"That is what the information suggests," Torres said.

The fury that had been contained since the hospital corridor, partially released against the wall of his study, reasserted itself and it was now colder, and more focused than the version that had shattered the paperweight.

"And the person responsible," Richard said.

"We have nothing," Torres said, and the discomfort in his voice was unmistakable. "No name. No affiliation. No description beyond what the emergency services report might carry, which your police contact will reach before we do. Whoever it was, they left nothing behind that connects to anyone we know."

"Nine armed men," Richard said. "Drew included. And one person walked out."

"Yes," Torres said quietly.

Richard looked at the wall of his study, at the crack in the plaster where the paperweight had hit, then at the scattered pieces of crystal on the floor.

"That is not a normal person," he said, almost to himself.

"No," Torres agreed. "It isn’t."

"Find him," Richard said.

"We will pursue every avenue available to us," Torres said carefully. "But I want to be honest with you. Without a starting point, without a name or an affiliation or a connection to pull, this will take time."

"Then start now," Richard said. "And Torres."

"Yes."

"When you find him," Richard said, "bring me the information. Don’t do anything with it. Bring it to me first."

"Understood," Torres said.

The call ended.

Richard Mercer sat alone in his study, with boiling rage in his chest but he chose to suppress it as the appropriate time to unleash it would come.