The van rumbled through East Halworth, tires whispering over slick asphalt, headlights pushing pale tunnels through the fog. Inside, the air was close but steady—not grim, not fearful. Just the quiet of people saving their breath. Eleven Vipers rode shoulder to shoulder, weapons resting across their knees, the occasional clink of steel as casual as change in a pocket. Sykes had the wheel, eyes forward, hands loose on the rim—just another run through streets they all knew by heart.
Harper sat near the back, wedged between a dented ammo crate and Rico's shoulder, knees pulled tight to make room for another box shoved under the bench. The edge of her ammunition belt dug into her thigh, metal biting bone every time the van lurched. A pistol rode her hip, tapping against her leg in a steady rhythm as the tires hummed beneath them.
She kept quiet, chin tilted toward the window, breath fogging the glass as East Halworth slid by—warehouses, busted neon, alleys slick with rain. Her copper hair was yanked into a high ponytail, but strands had already worked free, sweat gluing them to her cheek. She looked calm. And mostly was.
Her hand rested on the butt of her pistol—not nerves, just habit. The familiar weight. The silence before a job. Just another run through the city.
Harper shifted in her seat, tugging at the edge of her vest where it pinched beneath her arm. The cut was never right—too broad in the shoulders, too tight across her chest. Usually, she forgot it once the job started. Tonight, it itched. Her fingers traced the seam again and again, idle, steady, as if fussing with it might force the thing to settle. But it didn't. Neither did she.
Before they left the den, Dante had pulled her aside. Same cocky grin she never admitted made her stomach flip. He'd kissed her—slow, certain, with that little pause at the end like he wanted to say more but didn't. Instead, he just reminded her: tomorrow night. Dinner. Just them. After the pickup, after the debrief. Maybe even a drink that didn't come from a plastic bottle or a cracked flask.
She didn't let herself picture it too clearly. Didn't need to. It was enough knowing it was waiting—steady, simple, normal, for once. Something she could carry through the ride, something that dulled the itch under her vest and quieted the rhythm of her pulse.
Outside, the city slid past in splinters—warehouse husks with hollow windows, fences sagging like old bones. Streetlamps stuttered overhead, painting everything in that sick Halworth yellow, the kind that made blood look brown. Harper leaned toward the glass, scanning without meaning to. Just routine. Just—
Her eyes landed on it.
A black SUV, half in shadow, idling up on the curb. Windows tinted so dark they looked painted over. No lights. No movement. Just waiting.
Her chest tightened. Cars like that carried weight in East Halworth—everyone knew it. Too clean, too quiet, built to swallow men in black coats and spit silence back out. Harper had seen them before, engines idling while Syndicate muscle stepped out to settle debts in alleys that never saw the sun again.
Then the rear bumper angled into the light.
Plates.
Her exhale fogged the glass. Not Syndicate. Just some car. Just another block in a city that always looked like it was about to break.
Rico shifted beside Harper as the van slowed behind a dump truck, his boots thudding to the floor. "Twenty minutes out," he said—low, clipped, steady. The kind of voice that snapped heads without ever getting loud. Along with Wedge, Rico ran most of the jobs.
"We're hitting Yard Forty-Two. North docks. Our containers should be staged dead center, between the east and service gates. Me, Harper, Sykes—we'll sweep the main stack, confirm the load. Kade and Juno, take front access. Flick and Marco—walk the fence. Taz, Ollie—hold the south corridor near the loader path. Everyone else, spread out, keep the perimeter loose, eyes everywhere."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, shadows dragging down the planes of his face. "No freelancing. No cowboy shit. We're not here to plant roots. In, out, ten minutes."
Someone snorted from the far bench—probably Marco—and a couple boots thumped the floor in rough agreement. Juno muttered something about "always ruins the fun," but nobody pushed it further. The van settled back into its quiet hum, the weight of Rico's voice still hanging there.
Harper shifted, her gaze flicking to the window. The SUV was gone now, swallowed by fog and distance, but the picture of it lingered. She glanced at Rico, searching for any sign he'd seen it too. He only tapped his knee against hers—just once—and threw her a grin, quick and crooked.
"Don't get cocky just 'cause it's routine."
He sounded steady enough. But Harper couldn't tell if he'd missed what she'd seen—or if he'd just chosen to ignore it.
In and out. Ten minutes.
Then she could ditch the vest, kick off her boots, maybe let Dante cook for once and pretend the world outside didn't stink of burnt oil and bad luck. She shifted, trying to carve a little space in the crush of bodies and crates.
She didn't like jobs like this—rotating crews, rhythms she hadn't learned yet. Too many new faces. No shorthand, no trust. With her usual team there was flow, instinct, a language made of glances and small moves. A look meant cover fire. A step back meant go.
Here, it was just silence and elbows.
Still—orders were orders.
─•────
Through the tinted glass of the black SUV, Brock watched the van roll past—slow and unguarded. Same make. Same busted taillight. Same faded sigil near the rear wheel, barely visible unless you knew where to look.
He didn't need the photos in Vex's folder. It was the Vipers.
The girl in the back turned her head as they passed—copper hair pulled high, green eyes scanning like they expected ghosts in every shadow. For half a breath, she looked straight at the SUV—his SUV—and Brock's gaze met hers through the tint, though she'd never know it. Then the van moved on, swallowed by fog and broken streetlights.
Brock leaned forward, eyes on the receding taillights. His voice was low, certain.
"That's them."
Knuckles grinned behind the wheel, blue eyes catching a strip of neon. "'Bout time."
The others sat silent in the rows behind. Mason gnawed absently at the scar tissue along his knuckle, the way he always did before a fight. Vale tapped a rhythm against his throat mic, counting heartbeats until the first shot. Jenson and Briggs were still in the third row, rifles vertical between their knees, faces blank.
This wasn't a grab crew. It was annihilation detail—clean, quiet, absolute. Two more SUVs waited deeper in the district: one near the yard itself, one on the approach road. Engines low. Lights dead. Syndicate teams didn't drift. They locked.
Brock rested his rifle across his thighs, sliding the bolt with a clean metallic click. The sound was small, but in the hush it carried. No nerves in the motion. No wasted breath. His men knew the rule: no gaps, no improvising. They weren't here to think. They were here to erase.
He keyed his radio, voice flat into the mic.
"Target confirmed. Tail begins."
A double-click came back through static. Tight. Wordless. Obedience.
For a moment the SUV stayed frozen on the curb, engine idling low, the night pressing in like a held breath. Brock waited, eyes steady on the fog where the van had gone.
Then he gave a single nod. Knuckles eased them into motion, tires whispering over wet asphalt as the SUV slipped from shadow to shadow, alone but never unsupported.
The stillness broke. And the city would burn with it.
─•────
The van rolled up to the chainlink gate, headlights catching rust that spidered through the mesh. Sykes didn't even slow—just lifted a stolen access card to the reader, and the light blinked green with a tired buzz. The motor groaned, pulling the gate aside, and he eased them through like they'd done this a dozen times before.
Gravel hissed under the tires as the yard opened around them. Steel towers rose in stacked rows—containers four, five high, weather-beaten to dull reds and flaking blues. Serial numbers bled white against rust, half rubbed out by salt air, half painted over by years of grime. The headlights cut thin beams down the narrow lanes, slicing walls of metal just wide enough for the van to pass, just tight enough to make Harper's vest feel heavier across her ribs.
She leaned forward, elbows pressed to her knees, eyes tracking every turn. No forklifts humming. No dockhands shouting. None expected this late, but the silence still felt absolute, swallowing even the low growl of their engine. Corners. Shadow. Steel on all sides.
The air reeked of saltwater and diesel, old rain pooling oily beneath the stacks. Every breath carried the tang of wet iron, the sting of rust ground down to dust. Harper breathed it in steady, her fingers running along the strap of her vest while her brain mapped the sprawl the way it always did: sightlines, blind spots, exits that narrowed too tight. The stacks rose high enough to block the sky, cutting her field of view to strips of flickering halogen.
One in three lights were dead. The rest buzzed and blinked, throwing patches of sick yellow across the lanes. Each one carved more shadow than it erased.
It wasn't strange, not here. But places like this had a way of pressing down on you. Making you feel small. Like the steel could shift and close whenever it wanted.
Quiet was good. Usually. But this quiet pressed different—under her vest, into her chest, weight she couldn't shake. Not panic. Just pressure. A knot that cinching her gear couldn't loosen.
The van rolled to a stop In a clearing between the stacks, tires grinding down to silence. The engine dropped to a low idle, and one by one the Vipers spilled out—boots crunching dirt, weapons slung loose or resting easy in practiced hands. No chatter. No rush. Just movement born of repetition.
Harper lingered at the door a beat longer, her eyes sweeping the rows. Three container lanes fed back toward the road. To the west, a chainlink fence sagged open, rust bitten and torn. Beyond it, half-hidden beneath the dead arm of a crane, an access gate swung loose on broken hinges.
She clocked it the moment she saw it. Filed it away the way she always did: exits first, everything else after.
Her boots hit the ground last. She kept her head on a swivel, letting the others fan out—some lighting smokes, some checking gear, all of them sliding into the rhythm they knew by heart. She stayed by the van, eyes tracking shadow over steel.
The vehicle rolled In nose-first, headlights sweeping the clearing before Sykes cut the wheel hard, circling wide between container stacks. He brought it around in a tight arc, then eased it into reverse, engine low and steady as he backed toward the central stack marked for pickup. The rest of the crew moved with quiet precision—some peeling off toward the perimeter, others weaving through the narrow lanes, scanning for motion, for shapes in shadow, for silence that pressed too heavy to be natural.
Harper slid into position along the passenger side of the van, boots whispering over grit, her shoulder brushing close to the corrugated steel. The barrel of her pistol tracked with her gaze, sweeping gaps between containers, fence seams, the stacked shadows that seemed to shift when she looked too long. Across the hood, Rico kept pace, rifle held low but ready, his head ticking left to cover what she couldn't. Every few steps his eyes cut to her, a brief check, nothing wasted. He gave a nod across the hood—quick, precise. She answered with the same.
The van crept between them, engine growling soft, gears rattling faint as Sykes eased it back toward the stack. The rhythm of boots and machine blended into one slow heartbeat, every scrape of gravel louder than it had any right to be.
The stillness wasn't peace. It was waiting. Heavy. Held like breath under water.
The van eased into position beside the container stack—four seacans, two high, stamped with faded serials and cinched in rust-bitten chains. The metal loomed dull and massive, the kind of weight that hummed faintly in the still air, as if the steel itself remembered every storm that had beaten it. Sykes cut the engine, and the silence that followed felt louder than the idle had. He shoved the door open, bolt cutters swinging from one hand, boots crunching over gravel as he headed for the chained latch.
Rico held position on the far side of the van, rifle shouldered, sightline sweeping the end of the lane. Harper mirrored him, her back against the steel flank, pistol angled down but ready. She swept the shadows, corners, fence seams. A blur of movement tugged her focus—just Marco, climbing the ladder welded to a container across the lane, claiming high ground like they'd drilled. Routine. Expected.
Her eyes tracked back to the chained doors. Her chest tightened anyway, like something inside her ribs knew better.
Ten minutes. In and out. That was the deal.
The bolt cutters bit down, and with a metallic pop the chain gave way. The sound ricocheted through the stacks, louder than it should've been, like the steel itself was calling it out. Then came the hinges—groaning long and low as Sykes dragged the door open.
Harper leaned, eyes narrowing, breath caught against her teeth. She expected shadowed outlines, stacked crates, the dense clutter of cargo.
Instead, the container yawned hollow.
Steel walls, bare and echoing. Dust feathering the floor. No shipment. No weight. Nothing.
Her spine snapped rigid. Cold climbed her neck, prickling under her collar like static.
Across the lane, Rico shifted—a half-step, almost nothing, but she caught it. The stillness hadn't changed. But her nerves had. Every one of them lit like wire, warning of something she couldn't see yet.
She moved without thinking, sliding from the van's shadow, boots rasping over grit as she crossed toward the open container. Rico matched her from the far side, pace quickening. Together they closed on Sykes, the three of them standing before the gaping mouth of steel.
The echo rolled back at them, empty. Wrong.
Sykes cut a look at Rico, flat, questioning. "This the right one?"
Rico didn't answer right away. He tugged his phone from his jacket, thumb swiping the screen, brows pinching tight. "Could've sworn it was this stack," he muttered. "Forty-Two… central lane…" His gaze lifted, scanning the rows. "Maybe it's one over. Hard to tell with the light."
Harper didn't move. She kept her eyes on the hollow container, chest tight, listening.
The prickle at her neck didn't ease. It crawled higher, threading up her scalp, sliding down her spine. The wind shifted, thin and sour, carrying it to her—oil. Cold metal. Machinery that didn't belong here.
Behind her, someone muttered into comms. Another whistled, careless, the sound bouncing wrong off the walls.
Her breath hitched. Her pulse hammered in her throat. The shadows didn't feel empty anymore. They felt watching.
"Rico—" she whispered.
He looked up. Her warning died in her mouth.
The shot cracked the lane wide open, thunder snapping through steel corridors. Rico's skull burst sideways, temple erupting in a spray of bone and blood. Hot red mist slapped Harper across the face before the sound even finished. His body collapsed at her boots, phone still glowing in his hand, fingers twitching once before going slack.
Silence.
Just for a heartbeat. Long enough for Harper to taste copper on her tongue, feel the blood cooling on her cheek, hear her own pulse screaming in her ears.
Then the smoke came.
Canisters clattered across the gravel, rolling from unseen hands between the stacks. They hissed as they burst, thick plumes boiling up gray and choking, swallowing the lane in seconds. The air turned acrid, bitter on her tongue, stinging her eyes as the world shrank to shadows and coughs.
And then the world detonated.