Page 51 of Fractured Allegiance

The air inside the apartment feels like it’s pressing against my ribs. Not tight, not suffocating—just aware. The kind of pressure that comes from knowing something happened and pretending it didn’t.

I strip down to my undershirt and sit on the edge of the bed I rarely use. My shoulder still aches where that Bureau op three years ago went sideways, the one that took more than cartilage and gave me less than closure. I press my fingers into the scar through the fabric, like I can force the pain back to the surface.

No luck.

The gun on the table looks clean. The drawer with Naomi’s flash drive stays closed. I haven't played it, because I don't need to see myself to know what I looked like up there—on the roof, watching Lydia move through her space like every shadow knew her name.

She’s not part of the job.

But the mission has already shifted.

I just haven’t told anyone yet.

I look down at my phone. There’s a single message waiting from Drazen’s runner.

“7am. Club. Bring gloves.”

No context. No instruction. Just the kind of line that reeks of implication. The kind that means hurt someone, but make sure it looks earned.

I delete the message and start dressing.

Tactical. Civilian. Not Bureau-clean.

By the time I step outside, the city’s waking up too fast—trucks snarling at red lights, steam punching through manholes, that godawful sound of ambition scraping its nails down the glass of every corporate tower.

And through all of it, I keep seeing her.

Lydia. At the window. At the edge of herself.

I don't know if she knew I was there last night.

But some part of her looked for me.

And some part of me answered.

The club opens before the sun does.

Not to the public. Not to the carefully selected degenerates who pay Dom for curated depravity and the illusion of freedom. This is the hour meant only for the wolves who don’t need masks.

I arrive at the back entrance just after six-forty dressed for the role I’ve spent the past year studying and rehearsing—half-predator, half-consort, nothing clean. The guard at the door recognizes me. He doesn’t nod, doesn’t speak, just steps aside like I’m another shadow sliding into place.

The atmosphere is thick with what’s left behind from the night before—perfume and sweat, alcohol and leather, skin oil and secrets. There’s a sticky tang in the corners of the bar that no amount of bleach will ever erase. It smells like choices people stopped pretending were mistakes.

Dom’s already waiting for me in one of the back chambers. Not the public spaces where he stages performance. This room is made of older things: velvet and bone-colored paneling, achandelier built from repurposed chains and glass teeth. It’s intimate in the way a confession booth is intimate.

He’s seated on a curved settee like a king who built his own throne just to lean sideways across it. Legs stretched out, arms resting across the back, eyes locked on the man kneeling in front of him.

I take a look at the man, and I recognize his type immediately.

He’s no one.

Another runner. Another smuggler. Someone who moved products through a channel that Drazen didn’t approve. Or maybe he just looked at the wrong woman for too long. Or maybe, like most people who pass through this city, he simply forgot the rules long enough to prove how breakable he really was.

Dom’s voice cuts through the room as I step inside.

“Silas,” he says without looking away from the man, “you ever notice how loyalty isn’t tested by what someone says, but by what they refuse to do?”

I stay by the doorway, one hand in my coat pocket. “Refusal’s a kind of truth. Same as silence.”