Page 247 of Fractured Loyalties

“Dockside. Warehouse grid. The files from Vale’s flash gave me enough to stitch the trail; it gave me all the information I needed about their operations. Volker’s been moving shipments out under a blind shell, a name borrowed from Vale’s offshore. He thinks it keeps him invisible.”

“And?”

I take the brass key from my pocket, the one I took off Kinley’s body before the river ate his scent. It catches the thin light. “It doesn’t.”

She studies me. “You’re going alone?”

“Yes.”

Her jaw tightens. “And Mara?”

“She stays.”

“With me?”

I nod once. “You’ll keep her breathing until I’m back.”

Lydia exhales through her teeth. “She won’t like that.”

“She’ll survive it.”

For the first time, Lydia doesn’t mock. She just watches me, sharp eyes cutting for a weakness she won’t find. “Volker doesn’t fold like Vale. He plays with knives and people, same weight in his hands. You cut his head, his network will thrash.”

“I’ll cut deep enough they don’t grow another.”

Her gaze lingers. She’s calculating whether she believes me, whether she cares. Then she shifts the tablet under her arm. “I’ll hold the house. You text when it’s finished. If you don’t, I burn the floor under his name and pull her out myself.”

“Fair.”

I step outside. The SUV’s parked where I left it, its paint cold under the trees. No headlights out here. No road in sight. Just the dark before dawn and a perimeter that hasn’t shifted. Clean. Still. Silent. Exactly how I like it.

I slip behind the wheel, and I drive off.

The water grows closer with every block, the air turning sharper, tinged with salt and rust. Dock cranes loom in the distance, spines of iron against the rising sun. Volker hides where he thinks the noise of commerce makes him invisible. He doesn’t understand that noise makes it easier for me.

When I kill him, it won’t echo.

The pier lot is half full. Forklifts sleep in crooked rows. A gull drags something dead along a rail and gives up when the wind takes it. I idle two blocks out, watch the shift rotate on my dash cam, then roll past once to map faces. Four outside. Two at the loading bay doors, one smoking behind a stack of pallets, one in the shack pretending the clipboard matters. The bay is stamped with a fake shipper code I saw on Vale’s USB. Same font. Same lie.

I park in a service alley and take the back on foot.

The fence has a weak panel where trucks kiss it on tight turns. I slide through and pause in the shadow of a stack of cold containers. The metal ticks as it warms. I listen. Boots on concrete. A radio squawk. A cough that ends in a curse. Nothing else.

I move.

The smoker never checks his corners. He leans with his back to the pallets like he owns the hour. I take the cigarette out of his fingers, press it to his forearm, and catch his jaw when he starts to yelp. The choke is clean and fast. I set him down behind the pallets and take his badge. His wallet has a photograph of awoman and a child I do not know. I put it back. He keeps his name. He loses his shift.

The shack has a door with a cheap lock. I rap once. The guard mumbles for me to hold. I don’t. The door gives when my shoulder meets it. He looks up from an old monitor with a split screen. He goes for the drawer. I toss the badge onto the desk. It skitters and spins. His eyes track it by instinct. My fist meets his throat and the back of his head kisses the filing cabinet. He drops like a bundle of rags.

On the wall, a whiteboard lists lanes and times. A code at the bottom left matches the numbers on Vale’s index. Same ghost company. I snap a photo and pocket the shack keys. The monitor feed shows the interior bay: two men on stools, a third counting crates with a tablet, a fourth leaning against a pillar pretending to be bored. Off to the right, a door painted the same gray as the wall. Windowless. Wrong handle for a closet. That’s where Volker nests or where the hall to him starts.

The forklift key hangs from a hook. I hang it on my ring. Noise is an option now if I want it.

I step back into the yard and hug the container line until I reach the blind corner under the loading dock stairs. The metal has withstood a hundred storms. It smells like rain from last week and the oil that never got wiped. The bay doors sit four feet above me, slatted. I can see two pairs of ankles through the gap. One taps a rhythm against the dock plate. Impatient. Good. Impatient people miss. Calm ones kill.

The stairs creak under my weight. I make them creak once. Twice. Enough to belong. The nearer man turns his head, sees a badge on my chest and a clipboard in my hand that I took from the shack and didn’t need until now. He relaxes the way amateurs do when they spot a uniform.

“Union drop?” he asks.