Chapter 31

Jack POVI knew something was wrong before the estate gates came into view.It was the traffic first. Stone City's outer roads, usually indifferent and steady, had a different texture to them in the final twenty minutes — more vehicles moving faster than they should, a police unit passing us in the opposite direction with its lights active but no siren, the particular quality of a city that had just been disturbed and hadn't finished reacting to it yet.Ryan felt it too. I saw him straighten slightly, one hand reaching for the comm unit before Dante's voice came through it first."You need to see this before you come through the gates," Dante said. No preamble. That alone told me how bad it was."Tell me," Ryan said."Better if you see it," Dante said. "We're diverting you to the north entrance. Front approach isn't clear."Ryan's jaw tightened. Just slightly. The kind of thing I had learned to read in him over the last weeks, a change most people would have missed entirely."Understo

Chapter 31

Jack POVThe estate changed shape within an hour of Ryan's order.I watched it happen from the study window while Dante worked the phones in the room adjoining, watched staff move with a different urgency than I'd seen before, watched the perimeter security shift from doubled to something closer to total. A council meeting, I was learning, was not a small thing in Stone City's landscape. It was closer to a declaration."How many," I asked, when Ryan finally sat down long enough to breathe."Nine," Ryan said. "Nine operations significant enough in this city to warrant a seat at that table. Some of them allies. Some of them men who'd cut my throat the moment it became profitable to do so.""And Castellano," I said."Castellano gets a seat whether I want him to have one or not," Ryan said. "The council isn't a courtesy I extend. It's a structure that predates me, predates my father, predates most of what currently runs this city. Everyone significant attends when it's called. Everyone si

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Chapter 31

Chapter 31