Page 4 of Painted Scars
I lean into her strength and warmth. Call upon the armor of glitter I wear. After a few beats, the world feels safe and warmagain. Not enough to sleep, but the right amount to strategize ways to beat the fear that paralyzes me.
CHAPTER 2 - AUGUST
Tonight is the beginning of the end for the Romans. Or me, if I fail. Justice deserves blood. It hasn’t decided whose yet, and honestly, I’ve made peace with whatever the outcome.
The old council suggestion box sits bolted to a brick pillar near the back entrance of the gardens, half-swallowed by ivy and neglect. The plaque still readsCOMMUNITY FEEDBACKin chipped gold paint.
I do a slow loop of the path first, helmet on, collar up, cop instincts ticking off every shadow. Dog walker. Night jogger. Teenagers vaping behind the toilets. No one paying enough attention to clock a man in a leather jacket pausing by a forgotten box.
I check my Garmin. No messages. If this goes wrong, there won’t be time to say goodbye.
I drift closer, one gloved hand sliding over the cold metal. The key is hidden under the loose brick beside it, exactly where my source said it would be. I crack the box open a fraction, heart thrumming, expecting a barrel, a bomb, or nothing at all. Plain manila envelope. I take it and walk away without looking back,boots whispering over wet leaves until I’m off the path and in the shadows again.
Only then do I slit it open with my thumb. Crime scene photos. Closed police files. Dock schematics. The first image is a body crumpled beside a shipping container, blood blooming into the concrete. The next shows armored black SUVs, the kind Pluto’s Morrone family favors when they’re not pretending to be respectable businessmen. Another sheet lists three dead, four wounded, including dockhands.
A scribbled note on the margin in familiar, clipped handwriting.
PLUTO AND NEPTUNE ARE CIRCLING EACH OTHER AT THE DOCKS.
A quiet port war affects everything imported and exported into Shadow Lake. The spark I need to start a war. Katar will salivate when he sees this. He understands numbers, leverage, and how to turn a financial model into a weapon. His kind of playground.
My jaw tightens as I shuffle through the rest. Reports of “faulty CCTV,” patrol logs that don’t match the times stamped on the photos, internal memos from the Mars Order downplaying the incident. Textbook cover-up. Mars protects the image, Mercury will spin the narrative if it leaks, and Pluto and Neptune fight over who gets to dump more bodies in the harbor.
Eight Orders. Eight crowns. One rotten pantheon.
Jupiter sits at the top of the pile, running banks, airlines, construction, everything that keeps the city vertical and bleeding money into their accounts. Neptune has the seas and ports. Pluto owns anything outlawed, and a slice of the docks.Mars, my old leash, runs law enforcement and private security. Mercury owns media and comms. Venus, beauty and medicine. Saturn, food and agriculture. Different domains, same disease.
I should’ve been climbing the police ranks right now. Detectives with my closure numbers don’t get benched. They get promoted. They get the nice desk, the decent hours, the wife, the kids, the dog, and the mortgage they pretend they’re not drowning under.
I tuck the envelope under my jacket and head for my bike, riding back to the abandoned high school Spartacus calls home.
Back at the bunker, the scent of coffee, instant noodles, and damp concrete hit me. A low hum buzzes from the old power box in the corner, from which we draw electricity. Peeling paint and wall stains betray the burst water pipe. Graffiti and a crudely drawn dick with the words CLASS OF 2024 haunt the gas heating pipes. I’ll donate a kidney for fresh air—not happening when something died in the old HVAC system.
We picked the basement to stay off the Romans’ radar. No neighbors, cameras, or curious eyes. Down here, we’re ghosts. No one’s listening but the walls, and they’re more loyal than politicians.
Mismatched desks and folding tables that form our workstations were scrounged from whatever was left upstairs in the classrooms. It’s scrappy and wobbles unless we stuff folded paper under the legs, but it serves as our station for planning missions. The kind of place where justice gets served with caffeine, code, and collateral damage. And it’s my job as the leader to minimize the damage.
We’ve got plenty of cash to fund our equipment needs—stolen from the Romans, of course. Thank you, Katar, my investment man, and Grayson, my computer nerd. We prefer minimal infrastructure, light and mobile, in case we have to pack up and leave the bunker in a hurry.
I make my way to my desk, my boots crunching on something that may have once been a rat or a power bar. Hard to tell. I curse under my breath, lift my shoe, and find a dried red licorice stick. Fire explodes in my veins.
Fucking Katar drops his food everywhere. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a nanny and housekeeper growing up, he waits for the butler to clean up his candy wrappers.
I peel it off my sole and throw it at him. Katar, aka Tristan Tanner, resident enforcer and constant migraine with combat skills. Batshit crazy and the closest thing we’ve got to HR, if HR carried knives. Call him by his previous name and lose an eye.
“Pick up after yourself!” I bark. “I’m not running a fucking daycare center.”
He doesn’t flinch when it hits him, just rolls his neck and checks the exit route of the stairwell. Then he resumes hurling a throwing knife into the butcher’s block serving as his desk. The kind of control isn’t for show. It’s survival. Detention for two years in a psych ward taught him to track every escape.
“Call it tactical clutter,” he says. “It builds character, mostly yours.”
Katar walks the line between useful, unhinged, and brilliant. The mastermind behind our operation’s finances. Danger and risk are the costs of having the smartass on the team.
I set my riding helmet and the takeaway on my desk, peel off my gloves, and address the 3D printer taking up my space. Limited room and power cables mean our tech gets shifted around our makeshift setup to print RFID clones and fobs to access Roman properties. Stake, aka Grayson Spencer, doesn’t dare leave a thing on Katar’s desk. Smart, really. We can’t let our tech become radioactive.
“If I find one more cable in my coffee,” I warn Grayson, “I’ll pull your router out with your teeth.”
Katar runs the blade along his fingertip. “I think Broody Lightyear’s more cheerful of an evening, what do you think, Code Daddy?” He’s never without a witty one-liner and zero regard for consequences.
