“And he stopped following me when they called him back.”
Darlene closes her mouth.
For once, she has no immediate insult ready.
That almost makes me cry harder.
I step into the bakery, into coffee and cinnamon and flood blankets and the wounded heart of Halo. It should feel warmer than downtown. Safer. Mine.
Instead it feels like a place waiting for a man who might never come back from the war he has just walked into.
I take off my wet coat and hang it beside the empty hook where Kauss’s used to be.
Then I go behind the counter because people still need soup, and heartbreak does not close the bakery unless you let it.
CHAPTER 26
KAUSS
Vedder City becomes a knife fight in the rain.
By midnight, the streets below downtown lose their ordinary ugliness and take on the sharper, brighter sickness of organized collapse. Sirens bleed through the clouds. Hover traffic diverts around burning lanes near West Market. Holo-billboards flicker over smoke rising between towers, selling luxury perfumes above streets where men are killing each other for loading docks, routes, debts, and names. Rain turns the pavement black and mirror-bright, reflecting red emergency lights, blue police strobes, and the gold glow from restaurants that pretend crime belongs somewhere else until it arrives at their doors.
I stand in the back room of a shuttered shipping office with Arturo and five of Lenrog’s surviving people, wearing a suit I did not choose and blood I did not have time to wash from beneath my claws.
The office smells like wet wool, burned plastic, old tobacco, fear, and the stale citrus cleaning spray someone used hours before murder changed the building’s purpose. A cracked table occupies the center of the room. On it, a projection of Vedder City pulses in layered red markers: contested warehouses,compromised gambling rooms, missing couriers, burned vehicles, dead drops gone silent, Poison Memories sightings, Lenrog loyalists confirmed dead.
Ron has done in one morning what his father feared for years.
He has made chaos aspirational.
Arturo stands opposite me, black suit jacket torn at one shoulder, face drawn tight with exhaustion. He has not slept. None of them have. There is a bandage at his temple and dried blood at the collar of his white shirt.
“West docks are gone,” he says. “Not fully under Ron, but no longer answering us.”
“You say us,” I answer.
His eyes lift. “I do.”
“I am not part of Lenrog’s organization.”
“No.” He gestures to the burning red markers. “You are the reason Halo has not already become a slaughterhouse.”
I look at the map instead of him.
Halo glows near the lower east quadrant, marked with orange warnings and three active Poison Memories clusters. Sweet Tooth is not marked.
I know where it is anyway.
My body knows its direction the way lungs know air.
“We have two options,” Arturo continues. “Retreat and consolidate downtown, which leaves Halo, Rusk, and the lower lanes to Ron by morning, or strike his supply pressure points now.”
“Strike,” says a woman named Cleo, Lenrog’s logistics chief. Her silver hair is pulled into a knot so tight it looks painful, and her eyes are bloodshot. “If he takes the lower lanes, he gets fuel, food, cheap labor, and enough frightened boys to replenish losses by dawn.”
A younger man near the door mutters, “We don’t have the numbers.”
Arturo looks at me.
