Page 8 of The Monster You Made
His lips curl, not quite a smile. “Survival. If Declan falls, Cadmus will eat its own. I don’t want to be on the menu. Aligning with you might just keep me breathing.”
I weigh him. Every instinct screams not to trust him. Once, we fought side by side. Once, I would have called him brother. But years carve men hollow, and hunger fills the gaps. Still, his information feels true, and truth is currency too valuable to discard.
“You get me her trail,” I say, voice low, deliberate. “But if you cross me, I’ll bury you deeper than the Crown ever could.”
Rourke inclines his head, accepting the threat as if it were a handshake. “Fair.”
The bulb above us hums and flickers. A storm outside rattles the shutters. For a moment, the room feels like it’s holding its breath.
I turn toward the door. “Get what you need. Find her. Then we go to Old Vienna.”
Rourke doesn’t follow. He stays seated, fingers drumming on the table, eyes narrowed in thought. I know that look. He’s calculating odds, measuring betrayal against loyalty. I don’t care which he chooses. Either way, I’ll be ready.
Back on the street, the city has fully woken. Vendors bark, carts roll, and the rhythm of daily life hides the undertow of violence. I move through it like a ghost, unseen, unacknowledged. But inside, a storm coils tighter. Declan has set the board. Vera is the piece everyone wants. And I—I am the man who will flip the board over, burn it to ash, and carve a new game from the bones.
I move through the city with the rhythm of a man who knows every shadow by name. I pick streets that lead to dead ends, alleys that double back on themselves, shuttered doorways that slide open for men who look hungry and close for those who don’t belong. Rourke’s voice hums in my ear like a pulse: Old Vienna, Declan St. Croix, summit. The board is set; pieces are moving. The truth has teeth now, and someone has lit the fuse.
The safehouse I choose is smaller and less tidy than the bakery room, an apartment under a laundromat, the windows steamed from constant washing, the scent of detergent and damp cloth pressing through the walls. Inside, a woman named Marta runs the place: short, efficient, hair cropped to a practical angle, eyes that look at you as if cataloguing what you might cost her. Marta owes me nothing but discretion; she does not ask for favors she cannot be repaid. She offers me coffee and a map.
We sit at a metal table scarred with cigarette burns and spilled ink. Marta pours black coffee into a chipped mug and slides the map toward me: Old Vienna, with its routes, embassies, and the old opera house, where the summit will take place. Her hands move with the confidence of someone who feeds secrets to men who cut them like meat.
“Declan likes appearances,” she says. “He loves a crowd. Where he goes, masks and money follow. You won’t get him in the back alley. You’ll have to face him in daylight, where he thinks his influence is a shield.”
I trace the lines on the map with a fingertip. The opera house sits like a jewel, surrounded by ornate streets and polished stone. It will be a military compound. It will be full of eyes. And somewhere in its glow, Declan will be warm and amused, convinced his position keeps him safe.
“There are routes into the service levels,” Marta adds. “Deliveries, staff entrances, less glamor, more shadows. If you’re desperate, you can find an access point under the north eaves. But you won’t get far without a plan.”
Plans are what I make. They are how I measured people’s worth, how I set traps, how I learned to watch for the small tellsthat betray a man’s spine. Declan has a spine that looks like marble and breaks like glass. I will find the fractures.
Marta’s radio crackles, static, then a name. Rourke. He’s found a line, a trail. He wants me to move now. Time collapses. I stand, the chair scraping metal on tile. The city’s noise swells outside, little human dramas I will ignore because the one thing that has always tied me to the machine of the world is the insistence that someone keeps score.
On the way out, Marta slides an envelope across the table, passports in different names, a driver’s license, and a small wad of cash tucked into a corner. “Old Vienna isn’t cheap. You’ll need cover.”
I tuck the envelope into my jacket and step back into the street. The light is flat, the sky the color of old metal. I pull up my collar against the drizzle and move toward the rendezvous point where Rourke says he’ll be waiting with details. If Declan is arrogant enough to summon the stage, then arrogance will be his undoing.
At the corner where we arranged to meet, Rourke is already waiting, hands shoved into pockets, breath fogging in the chill. He looks calmer than I feel, which means he’s lying. His eyes flick to me as I approach, reading and unreadable all at once.
“Good,” he says. “We have a line into the supplier chain. One of Declan’s men, an accountant, moves money through a secure courier. We can intercept the courier, see who he reports to. If we cut the line, we force them to look.”
I nod. The plan smells of blood and timing, two things I understand. We move as if rehearsed: meet the courier, intercept the data, burn the trail. The courier’s route takes us through a dockside warehouse where the night smells of salt and oil and a dozen other men’s poor choices. It’s the kind of place where deals are made without paper, where trust is cheap and easily broken.
The courier steps out of a van with an unmarked box. He moves with the sleepy focus of someone who has done the route a thousand times. We follow at a distance. When he unlocks the back and reaches for the crate, Rourke and I cross the shadow line. Our presence is sudden, violent. Two men rush out, surprised, voices high with alarm. The courier drops the crate and runs. We chase.
There’s a scent to panic: hot breath, the slap of sneakers, the metallic tang of adrenaline. The courier is faster than he looks. We hit him at the second alley, tackle him to the ground. His face is older than I expected, a life etched into lines around the mouth. I grab him by the collar and ask for the code.
He laughs, a thin, cracked sound. “You don’t know what you’ve bitten into.”
We break his hand until he tells us the server drop. Small keys, hidden lockers, a name: Belgrave. The name slices through us. Belgrave is a company, a façade, a conduit for money wrapped in velvet. It is also the name of an estate that holds more than wine and masks; it holds the networks. A chill runs down my spine. Belgrave is the kind of place where men believe themselves immortal.
We take the courier’s keys and follow the route into the belly of the network. The crates open to reveal nothing glamorous: stacks of ledgers wrapped in plastic, drives encased in foam, small boxes of invoices stamped with initials. We bag what we can, document it, and leave a trail that looks like theft. The idea is not to play honest; the idea is to make sure Declan’s people have to look under their own beds.
By dawn, we have enough to draw a map: routes, names, coded initials that match the ledger copies Vera carried. She touched the right veins. The evidence lives. My thumb skims the edge of a drive; her handwriting is on the tab. The sight of it is both a stake and a promise.
Rourke watches me, a slow smile cracking. “You still bleed for this.”
“I bleed because without it, people die in silence,” I say. The words feel hollow and necessary both. This is what binds me: the insistence that someone keeps score.
There’s a price for everything. We both know it. I tuck the drives into my jacket and leave before the sun can climb and the city can notice that two ghosts have been moving through its bones.
