Wednesday came with a checklist longer than any I'd run for a stream.
I had the Numbers sweep the new warehouse top to bottom — every corner, every blind spot, every possible line of sight from the loading dock to the street — twice, because I'd learned the hard way that the first sweep always missed something and the second sweep was the one that actually mattered. I had Doug send over the layout Yankovic's people would expect to see: an entrance, a waiting area, a "business" room set up the way Ashford's had been, oak-adjacent enough to read as serious without looking like I was trying too hard to imitate something above my station. I dressed as Jester, not Somnus — this was Jester's world, and I intended to keep the two as separate as a locked drawer for as long as I possibly could — and settled into the big chair I'd claimed as a throne almost by accident weeks ago, gun resting in easy reach beneath the folds of purple and black, mask on, voice changer humming faintly against my jaw, twenty minutes before anyone was due to arrive.
There is a specific quiet that settles into a room right before something important happens in it, and I'd come to recognize it the way you recognize weather — the particular stillness of dust motes in a shaft of work-light, the particular silence of four masked Numbers standing at the edges of a space too big for the handful of people about to occupy it. I sat in that quiet and let it settle into my shoulders instead of my stomach, the way I'd taught myself to over months of doing exactly this, and waited.
They arrived at 8:04 PM, four minutes past the hour Doug had promised, which I suspected was deliberate — a small, practiced discourtesy, the kind powerful people use to remind a room who's actually in control of its own schedule.
Mrs. Yankovic walked in flanked by two men who didn't bother pretending to be anything other than what they were: broad, watchful, hands never far from their jackets. She herself was smaller than I'd pictured from Doug's description, silver-streaked dark hair pulled back severe enough to read as a decision rather than a style, a coat that cost more than the warehouse's monthly rent draped over one arm rather than worn, as if she hadn't decided yet whether this meeting deserved the formality of actually taking it off.
She looked at me for a long moment before she said anything at all — at the mask, the costume, the boy-shaped stillness of whatever sat behind the smile that never moved — and I let her look, because I'd learned from Ashford, four nights ago, exactly how much information a person could pull out of a silence like that if you let it run too long unchallenged.
"So," she said finally, taking the seat across from me without being invited to, which told me everything about how she intended to run this conversation. "You're the boy who's been stealing my associate's loyalty out from under him for the better part of a month."
"I prefer 'earning,'" I said, voice pitched low and strange through the changer. "Doug's very happy working for me. You're welcome to ask him."
"I did ask him. Extensively." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "He answered every question like a man reciting a catechism. Word for word the same, every time, no matter how I rephrased it. Do you know what that tells me, Jester?"
"That he's loyal."
"That he's broken." She said it flatly, without heat, the way a mechanic diagnoses an engine. "I've run people for twenty years. I know what loyalty sounds like. It has texture. It has doubt in it, somewhere, even in the best of them — a hesitation before the answer, a flicker where the person weighs the cost before they commit to it. Doug has none of that anymore. He answers like a recording. Which means either you've found some very expensive pharmaceutical solution I haven't heard about, or you did something to him that I genuinely do not want explained to me in detail, because I suspect I would not enjoy the answer."
I let a beat of silence sit there, weighing exactly how much of the truth this particular room could survive — the same calculation I'd run in Ashford's basement study, except this time I already knew which way I intended to lean.
"Let's say it's the second one," I said. "Does that change what you came here to discuss?"
Her mouth curved, not quite a smile — closer to the specific, careful expression of someone recalculating a number they'd already written down in pen. "It changes it considerably. It also tells me you just answered a very dangerous question with a directness most people three times your evident confidence wouldn't risk. Either you're stupid, which I doubt, given what you've built here in a matter of weeks with a teenager's resources. Or you wanted me to know exactly what I'm dealing with, because you've decided that scaring me a little now is more useful than managing me carefully forever." She leaned back, considering. "I respect that, actually. It's rare."
"I find honesty saves time," I said. "You didn't come here to be managed. You came here to see if the numbers Doug's been sending you are real, and to decide whether I'm worth the risk of doing business with instead of simply removing. I'd rather answer that question directly than waste your evening pretending to be smaller than I am."
One of her men shifted his weight, almost imperceptibly, and I clocked it without turning my head — the specific readiness of someone recalculating how fast this conversation could turn violent and whether he'd be fast enough if it did. Yankovic didn't so much as glance at him. She kept her eyes on me, and for the first time since she'd walked in, something under the composure cracked open just slightly — not fear, exactly. Interest. The specific, dangerous interest of someone who has been doing the same job for twenty years and has just found something in it she hasn't seen before.
"Fifty thousand," she said. "Fifty percent of profits going forward, a location I'll have swept and secured for you personally, and fighters delivered weekly — better stock than whatever you've been scraping off the street corners, real men with real records, people who know how to actually hurt each other for a crowd instead of just flailing. That was the offer Doug brought you. It's still on the table."
"I want more than that."
Her eyebrow lifted, fractional, the first genuinely surprised expression I'd gotten out of her all night. "You're negotiating up from an offer that most people in your position would have taken with both hands and said thank you."
"I'm not most people in my position." I let the mask's smile do the talking for a beat, the way I'd learned it could, the fixed white grin doing work my actual face couldn't while I decided exactly how far to push. "I want the fifty thousand. I want the location. I want the fighters. And I want you to tell your people — quietly, the ones who'd actually know — if you ever hear so much as a rumor about a man who can snap his fingers and break bones from across a room. Or anyone else who doesn't bleed like the rest of us. I'll pay for that information separately, and I'll pay well."
The room went very still. Even her men, who'd clearly seen a hundred negotiations, shifted at that — a small, tight readjustment, the kind people make when a conversation has just walked somewhere they weren't briefed for.
Yankovic studied me a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost some of its careful, managed weight — not fear, not quite, but something closer to the specific caution people reserve for weather they've just realized is worse than the forecast said.
"You're asking about Awakened," she said quietly.
"I am."
"May I ask why? And I'd like an honest answer, not the one you think will impress me. I've had enough impressive answers this decade to last me the rest of it."
I considered lying, briefly, out of habit more than necessity, and then decided against it — the same calculation I'd already run once tonight, and once before that in a basement I hadn't told her about. "Because there are people out there stronger than me, and I'd rather know where they are before one of them decides to introduce himself on his own terms. And because I think, eventually, they're going to matter more than anything else in this business. Fighters. Muscle. Leverage. I'd rather be ahead of that than behind it."
She studied me a long moment, something calculating moving behind her eyes that had nothing to do with the fifty thousand dollars still sitting on the table between us. "That's a more honest answer than I expected. Most people your age — and I use that phrase loosely, given whatever's actually going on with you — would have dressed that up as curiosity, or ambition, or some other word that sounds less like fear. You called it what it is."
"I find that saves time too."
"Careful with that habit," she said, not unkindly. "Honesty saves time right up until the day it costs you everything at once. I've seen it happen to smarter people than either of us." She let that sit a beat, then waved it off with the flat, practiced dismissal of someone who'd already said more than she'd planned to. "Anyway. Fifty thousand. You'll have it within forty-eight hours, and the location swept clean within a week. Doug will handle the logistics — he's good for that much, at least, memory or no memory."
"Doug said you were dangerous. He didn't say you were that kind of dangerous." She was quiet a moment longer, weighing something I couldn't see the shape of yet, and then extended one gloved hand across the table between us. "Fifty thousand. The location. The fighters. And yes — if I hear anything, you'll hear it within the day. I have my own reasons for wanting eyes on that particular kind of trouble, Jester, and they predate you by a long time. Consider this the start of a mutually useful arrangement, instead of the start of a war. I'd much rather it stay the former."
I took her hand, mask fixed in its permanent smile, and shook it once, firm, the way I imagined a much older, much more dangerous version of myself would.
"Pleasure doing business, Mrs. Yankovic."
"Likewise, Jester." She rose, coat still draped rather than worn, and paused at the door long enough to look back over her shoulder. "For what it's worth — whatever you are, and whatever you did to my associate — I'd think very carefully before you go looking for the kind of trouble you just asked me about. I've been in this business two decades, and the men who go hunting monsters usually only need to find one before it stops being a story they tell."
She left before I could answer that, which was, I suspected, exactly how she'd meant it to land.
I sat alone in the quiet warehouse a long while after the sound of her car had faded, turning her last sentence over the way I'd been turning Ashford's over for days now, and thought — not for the first time, and not, I suspected, for the last — that everyone smart enough to matter in this world seemed to be handing me the exact same warning in different words.
I was starting to wonder how many more of them I'd have to hear before I actually believed one.