"A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind."
—GOD EMPEROR, LETO II
The Veder apartment drifted in midnight torpor: a pulse of refrigerator freon, the remote susurrus of freeway traffic, Tom's faint snore two rooms away. Paul lingered at his bedroom window until every tick of the household convinced him no eye would open. Then the sash slid up, the evening air rushed in, and he eased himself onto the sill. Chalk marks on the clapboard showed measured footholds. A breath, a backward glance at the dark room—and gravity welcomed him. He glided down the face of the building, duffel cinched tight beneath one arm, landing cat‑quiet on the patch of winter‑hard ivy below.
Inwardly, he counted pulsebeats—mentat measure of risk—then stepped into the arterial darkness of residential lanes where sodium vapor blurred boundary from shadow.
Side streets lay silvered beneath sodium lamps. He moved through them without hurry, a walker blending into that loose fellowship of insomniacs and shift workers who gave Brockton Bay its after‑midnight economy. Three blocks south, he found what he needed: an elderly Chrysler idling to keep a windshield from frosting while its owner argued with a neighbor indoors. The driver's door yielded to practiced pressure on a blade slipped past the weather strip. A moment later, Paul backed the vehicle into the street and drove away.
Fog crept between headlight beams as he threaded back streets toward the alley where Oscar and his companions had met their last lesson. Earlier, he had bound and hidden them in a dumpster, mouths gagged should their consciousness return. He opened the bin. Four pairs of terror‑bright eyes greeted him above layers of duct tape. Muffled screams. No words. He dragged each boy into the trunk, resin tape rasping in small protests that died behind the shut lid. Seated again, he stripped Oscar's phone from a belt clip, stashed it in the glove box, and turned the car toward Empire turf.
Apartment blocks rose like spent cartridges—brick, rust, and curtained anger. Oscar's building squatted in the middle row. Paul parked beneath a flickering porch bulb and cut the lights. As he stepped out, the entrance door banged open. A broad‑shouldered man in sweatpants scanned the street, hand on the holstered weight at hip. Paul raised his free hand, a half‑wave, half‑apology.
"Liam? Sorry to park here." His voice borrowed the weary cheer of designated drivers everywhere. "Oscar and the boys got wrecked at my place. Figured I'd drop them—"
Suspicion drained from Liam's posture like water from a cracked jar. Two paces closed the space. Paul's other hand rose, small greeting becoming swift jab: knuckles traced a nerve cluster at the throat, blade‑edge of hand found the solar plexus, and swung back up to dislodge a vertebra in the neck. The gun never cleared its holster. Liam sagged into Paul's arms with a wheeze, more shocked than afraid; he was dead before his knees brushed the welcome mat. Paul shouldered the slack weight, nudged the door wide, and laid the body on a nicotine‑stained couch whose cushions exhaled stale beer.
He returned to the car for the duffel. Mask, disposable gloves, and shower cap sealed him from forensic curiosity; fresh duct tape gloves muffled shoe prints. One by one, the unconscious teens were ferried inside and posed: Mason opposite Liam as though they'd died arguing; Oscar behind the couch, shoulders hunched in mock refuge; Fiore draped over the sill of the kitchen window, reach frozen in flight; Gabe slumped on a toilet seat, pants and underwear toward to his ankle, earbuds piping muffled music he would never hear.
Paul stepped back and considered the staging: fear, haste, messy competence. Satisfied, he produced the Sig Sauer he had lifted from Liam's belt and threaded the makeshift oil‑filter baffle he had prepared beforehand onto the muzzle. A slow exhale steadied his wrist. He entered the apartment a second time. This time, deliberately more violently than the last. A single whisper‑round shattered Liam's forehead—entry small, exit a ruin hidden by couch fabric. Oscar's head fell as a bullet cored it. Another hummed across the room into Mason's heart. The kitchen received two hurried shots; plaster dust puffed, Fiore's torso jerked, dishes clinked from the shelf. Down the hall, Gabe's music cut short under a neat hole through crown and ceramic seatback.
Silence pooled, broken only by radiator clicks. Paul studied the positions, rotated limbs by degrees, ensuring each narrative cue aligned: surprise there, retreat here, futile defence in that corner. Satisfied, he scattered drawers, toppled a television, tore up sofa cushions as though searching for something valuable. From a bedroom closet, he drew some three‑thousand‑dollar stashed away, stuffed most into his jacket, letting several loose bills flutter across the hallway. With spray can in hand, he scrawled "ABB" in dripping red beside a crude racial slur rendered in shaky Mandarin strokes—angry, careless, unmistakable. He left the can rolling, hissing faint propellant.
Gloves, mask, and cap folded into a Ziploc that joined the stolen cash. He wiped knob and banister with alcohol‑soaked gauze, shut the door behind him, and eased downstairs. Cold air met him like absolution.
Back in the Chrysler, he unlocked Oscar's phone, found the second‑most‑dialed contact, and pressed call. A gravel voice answered on the second ring.
"Yeah?"
Thickening his accent with Chinatown cadence, he purred, "Empire boy bleed very easy tonight. ABB sending regards." He ended the call with a burst of profanity, set the ringer to silent, and waited. The phone lit twice, thrice—ignored. Five minutes later, he dialed a local news tip‑line, voice shaking with staged nerves. "Gunshots on Forty‑Seventh near Margrave—think it's ABB and the white supremacists." He broke the connection, dialed emergency dispatch, repeated the story, before adding that he dared not linger. Sirens would answer soon. Of no further use to him, Oscar's phone arced into the night, landing on a sidewalk where someone would claim it come morning.
Paul drove the Chrysler back to its origination, parking it precisely against the curb's earlier tire marks. A final wipe of the steering wheel and gear lever, a gentle shut of the door. For the second time tonight, he departed before the owner could emerge to catch him
Alone, he rolled his shoulders against the night chill and began the long walk home, thirty‑one hundred dollars warmer against the ribs; a Sig Sauer P322 with some ten rounds colder at the hips.