They move like a single wound pulling tight.
Inside the safehouse, the map is spread again — greasy thumbprints, coffee rings, inked lines that stitch the city into a net. Carlo's eyes are red from the screen, cross-referencing truck runs and ledger drops. Mostang drills exits into his phone. Diana runs a mental checklist over and over, nails tapping the table. Valeria sharpens blades with a rhythm like a metronome. Kane stands quieter than usual, palms cold against his jacket, the fox-without-an-eye glyph burned behind his lids.
Emma watches them all. She speaks once, and the room obeys like an engine obeys the spark.
"We split into three," she says. "Recon. Cut communications. Hit small and hard. No fireworks. No headlines. Find proof that connects that glyph to Vencor's men and burn it. We take names, not noise."
Diana nods. "Kane stays with me. No lone charges."
Kane swallows. "I won't run."
"Good," Emma answers. "You listen first. You strike second."
— TEAM ROSTER —
• Recon team (Emma, Valeria): shadow entry, close surveillance, visual ID.
• Cut/Intel (Carlo, Mostang): blind cameras, intercept comms, database pulls.
• Exfil/Sweep (Diana, Kane, Celeste standby): extraction, civilian safety, med evac.
Night folds them into alleys. Emma and Valeria move like a darkness-born omen, sliding across rooftops and dropping into the clandestine courtyards where the gang breathes. The neighborhood smells of grease and old fights; music bleeds from a bar three doors down, useless and loud and human. They find the marks — stencilled foxes on delivery crates, chalk scratches on utility boxes. The gang's routes run like arteries through the block. They watch.
Kane and Diana take the perimeter. Diana's voice is low in his ear: "Watch the triggers. Watch your heart." He nods until his jaw aches. Memories scratch at him — Mira's laugh, the way she braided a ribbon once — and every step becomes a promise tightened into muscle.
Mostang and Carlo sit two streets over in a dead van, a laptop between them like a detonator. Carlo's hands fly: packet captures, call routing analysis, a string of burner numbers that light up like a constellation. "Got movement," he whispers. "They use the laundromat as a drop. Schedules line up with the paymaster nodes we just burned. And — look at this — encrypted comms bounce through a private IP leased to a front for Vencor's logistics. They're connected."
Mostang lets out a breath that might be a laugh. "There it is. Cut the loop to the laundromat now, feed them phantom traffic. When they shift men, we shadow."
Emma and Valeria watch a runner hand an envelope to a courier behind the laundromat's back wall. The runner nods — the nod the gang uses. Valeria squeezes Emma's forearm once. Emma's eyes slide to the alley where Kane waits.
Diana signals. Kane breathes out, every muscle tight, and moves like a shadow with his mentor at his flank. They fold silently into the alley after the courier.
The ambush is fast. No fanfare — it's a spine-of-night business. Valeria barrels from the shadow to crash the runner into a dumpster; Emma follows, precise and cold, clipping the courier's arm and pulling him into the light. Kane cuts off the escape path like a blade across skin. The courier fights; Kane's fist finds the angle he learned when he had nothing but hunger and rage — a quick, punishing set that drops the man without killing. Diana clamps a zip tie on the courier's wrists in one practiced motion.
"No killing," Emma says, voice a blade. "We want him breathing. We want names."
They take him back to the van. Carlo's gloved fingers glow blue on the screen as he pulls call logs and cross-references the courier's number with the shell accounts. It all blooms into paper: pickup times, pay windows, a list of names and a truck ID that ties to the fox glyph — and then, the dark thread Emma has been hunting — an admin handle that traces through a shell company to an upstream account registered to a corporation tied to Vencor.
Kane watches the screen as if it were a mirror of his blood. He wants to smash it with a fist and hear bones break. Instead he breathes, slow, and looks at Emma. "Is this—?" he asks, voice raw.
Emma's face is a landscape of cold resolve. "Yes. This is them." She closes her hand into a fist until the knuckles whiten. "We don't break now. We follow the trail."
They move with surgical hunger: target small stash points, intercept drivers, liberate a woman kept for money inside one filthy apartment — her eyes glassy but alive when Diana lifts her into comfort. Each raid yields paper and names, receipts and tattoos that match the laundry carts. Each discovery is another nail in the ledger that points not just to street-level rot but up — up into doors that Vencor keeps padlocked.
At dawn, they return to the hideout. Exhaustion sits like dust on their shoulders, but the van hums with a different heat: evidence bags full, Carlo's logs burning with tracebacks, the woman Diana rescued wrapped in a blanket and whispering the word "Mira" like a prayer.
Emma gathers them in the dim light, the morning soft around the single bulb. She lays the evidence on the table like bones.
"We have names. We have routes. We have the IP that links this gang to Vencor's logistics front," she says, calm as a scalpel. "We'll publish a leak layer-by-layer. We feed the city truth with proof — not just explosions, not just headlines. We hand them the receipts. We give the police no excuse to rally against us without looking up the chain."
Kane stares at the papers — at a photograph of a sleeve with Mira's tattoo. His hands shake once, not from tiredness but from something that's finally stopping its slow burn into nothing. "We do this right," he says simply.
Emma meets his eyes. For a breath, something like warmth slides along the ice. "We do it right. We don't become monsters."
Outside the hideout, the city wakes, unaware of the stitchwork being sewn into its underbelly. Inside, White World files names and prepares the next strike. The fox glyph is no longer just a scar on a dumpster. It's a trail that leads them up, and they will follow it — clean, precise, relentless — until Vencor's hands are empty and the ledger is public.
----
Kane decided to switch. Going with mostang.
Diana accepted.
They left before dawn — gray sky, breath steaming in the cold. Kane rode shotgun in Mostang's borrowed bike, knuckles white on his knees, eyes fixed on the road like he could memorize the distance and turn it into courage. Mostang rode with a steady, practiced calm, helmet low, engine a soft heartbeat beneath them.
"No speeches," Mostang said once, glancing at Kane. "You want to take faces, we take names. You want to kill, you'll end up dead. You want them to stop? You want justice that lasts? You'll learn to do it clean."
Kane's jaw moved. "I'm not here for mercy." His voice was flat, a stone. "I want them stopped."
Mostang nodded. "Then we do it right."
They parked two blocks away from the warehouse district where the gang ran its little empire — cheap bars, a shuttered storefront turned into a storage yard, a small, fenced courtyard where the men gathered like beasts around meat. The graffiti was the same fox-without-an-eye. The smell of grease and piss and old fear sat heavy in the alleys.
Mostang checked the route one last time. "We go in quiet. Two minutes. If it's cleaner to take names and bring proof to Emma, we do that. If it's blood they offer us, we take it, but we don't become them."
Kane's hands tightened. He swallowed, nodding.
They moved like two shadows. Mostang's movements were economy and experience — no wasted muscle. Kane's were stiffer, edged with the memory of small hands and a sister's laugh that had gone wrong the night the gang took everything. He breathed through the anger, focusing on tasks: cover, entry, secure.
Mostang slipped a cheap lockpick into the gate and worked it. The pad gave with a tired metallic sigh. They slipped into the yard, pressed flat against the stacked pallets. Voices — low and drunk — spilled from a back door. A pair of lookouts played cards under a bare bulb.
Mostang signaled: left look, right look, then a quick hand to the throat if a man moved wrong. Kane's heart hammered but his limbs obeyed. They moved between shadows, two hunters with one map.
Inside, the room smelled like old beer and money. A dozen men lounged; a heavyset figure in the corner barked orders — the one Kane had seen in nightmares, the one who'd run that crew when Mira was taken. Mostang's face did not change. He slid behind a crate and tapped Kane's shoulder gently. "You ready?"
Kane nodded. He could feel everything — the chill in his fingers, the iron in his mouth. Mostang counted, silent, then they burst.
The door cracked open and the alley light hit the men in the face. Shouts, a stumble, a single gun hand reaching — then steel. Mostang moved like a shadow and took the nearest man down with a choke that left no noise; Kane charged into the center, harder, angrier. He didn't aim to talk. He aimed to stop the motion of those men.
There was fighting. It was brutal and fast: chairs used like shields, fists crashing, a bottle snapped and shoved aside. Kane found the heavyset man by the back table — the one with Mira's tattoo on his sleeve — and the world narrowed to muscle and bone. He hit, and his fist tasted like all the years he'd been hungry.
Mostang was a calm cyclone beside him — precise, controlling, keeping Kane from doing the thing that would take him away. Every time Kane's anger threatened to become a blade in the dark, Mostang intercepted with a hold, a lock, a hand to the throat that said not yet. Kane learned to channel the stomp of hatred into restraint: a broken wrist here, a snapped collarbone there, but no killing blows.
They worked methodically, cuffing, zipping, and, when a thug reached for a gun, dropping him clean. Kane's blows were savage, but they were also surgical under Mostang's guidance. When the heavyset man tried to run, Kane had him by the collar. He was up close enough to see the dried lines of old fights on the man's knuckles. There was no swagger now — only panic.
Mostang lit a cigarette in the corner as they bound the men. "We don't kill them in the alley," he said quietly, as if to remind both of them. "We bring them to the light. Let White World decide."
Kane stared down at the man who'd ruined his family. The man spat, made a hateful sound. Kane's fingers tightened. He thought of everything — the nights, the screams, the silence after. The urge to drag this man into the dirt and end it all screamed through him. He breathed, counted to four, breathed again.
"Tell me Mira's name," Kane said, voice soft, low.
The man sneered, defiant. "What is there to tell?"
Kane looked like he would break. He raised his hand. Mostang's grip on his shoulder felt like iron and mercy all at once. "Now," Mostang said, quietly.
The man's smirk died. He said Mira's name — the one Kane had carved into his memory. His mouth moved and something in him cracked: fear. He spoke fast, tripping over names and places. He started naming other faces, drop points, a small ledger stub, a van description, the names of two more men who'd been hands in the trade.
Kane listened. Each word landed like a nail. Each name widened the map of who to cut next. The heat in his chest cooled into a terrible, useful focus.
They didn't execute anyone in the yard. They took photos, recordings, the torn sleeves that matched tattoos, and the receipts that put men on routes. Mostang used his phone to record confessions, keep time stamps. They piled the men into the back of the van, closed the crate, and drove.
As they rolled back through the city, Kane stared at his reflection in the glass and felt something shift — not catharsis, not peace, but a new instrument in his hands. He'd faced the men who took Mira. He hadn't become them. He had proof. He had names. He had leverage.
Back at the hideout, Emma received the dossier with a look that was almost a small, fierce approval. The evidence tied the gang to the network even stronger than Carlo's feeds had. White World had what it needed: the faces, the receipts, the internal links back to the paymaster.
Kane didn't cry. He went to a quiet corner, sat, and let the adrenaline drain out. Mostang sat beside him without saying a word. After a long while, Kane leaned his head back and whispered, "She was all I had."
Mostang's voice was low but steady. "Now she helps you. You used this right. We'll use it to cut them out, not to sink into the same rot."
Kane closed his eyes. He felt hollow and full at once — a wound braided into purpose. The hunt would continue. But tonight, he had not been a boy carrying grief into a barroom; he had been a man who could turn that grief into a line of work that could save other people from what happened to Mira.