Chapter 2

The Brass Skull office smelled like oil and old paper, tucked behind a pawnshop three streets from the gate. No sign on the door. You either knew it was there or you didn't belong near it.

I knocked twice, waited, knocked once more. A slot opened at eye level.

"Closed," a woman's voice said.

"I hear you pay for dead men," I said.

The slot stayed open a beat longer than it should have. Then the door dragged inward.

The woman behind the desk was small, gray at the temples, a pair of brass-rimmed glasses pushed up into her hair. She looked at me the way a person looks at a stray dog that walked in on its own two feet, curious, a little wary, already doing math.

"You're new," she said.

"I'm careful," I said. "There's a difference."

"There's also a fee for wasting my time." She folded her hands on the desk. "We don't hire ghosts off the street. Everyone who works a contract for us gets vouched for."

"Then vouch for me after I finish the job. Give me something small. Something nobody else wants."

She studied me a long moment, eyes tracking the mask, the coat two sizes too big, the way I stood too still, the way a person stands when they are not breathing between sentences. I made myself shift my weight, just to give her something to see.

"There's a man skimming from the toll roads on the east side," she said finally. "Works for all three gangs, plays them against each other, has for months. My people want him found and dropped somewhere public enough to be a lesson. Nobody's managed it. He's careful, and he's paid off half the men who'd normally hunt him."

"How much?"

"Enough that I stop asking where you came from." She slid a folded paper across the desk. A name. An address near the old rail yard. "You have three days before he moves again."

"Three days is generous for a man that careful," I said. "Unless somebody already knows where he sleeps."

"We don't hand out gifts here." She said it fast, a little too fast, and I filed that away the way I used to file every small tell of an enforcer lying to my face. "You want the job or not?"

I took the paper without looking at it twice. "I'll need one night."

She almost smiled at that. Almost. "Ghosts don't sleep. Must be nice."

I didn't answer. I was already thinking about the wraith, the low hum under my ribs that had gone quiet the second she mentioned blood money, patient the way it always was right before it wanted something.

The rail yard at night was all rust and dead engines, the kind of place the city forgot to finish tearing down. I found the address, a shack built into the side of a freight car, lamp light leaking yellow around the edges of a boarded window.

I did not knock.

I went in the way I was trained to, low and quiet along the wall, revolver drawn, the smell of blood already thick enough to taste before my eyes finished adjusting to the dark.

He was already dead.

Not shot. Not strangled. Opened, throat to belt, the kind of cut that takes a steady hand and no hesitation at all. His hands were bound behind him first. Someone wanted him still while they worked.

I crouched beside the body anyway, because a hunter who doesn't check her kill is a hunter who gets shot in the back by someone hiding under a floorboard. His eyes were open, fixed on nothing. His pockets had already been turned out. Whoever did this wasn't robbing him. They were sending a message and didn't care if anyone but the body understood it.

I knew this cut.

I had watched Justin teach it to new enforcers with a dead pig strung up in the training yard, the same clean line from collar to hip, meant to look tidy from a distance and be unspeakable up close. It was a Vodeywood cut. Pack discipline. The kind of thing you did to a man who talked too much to the wrong people.

Which meant the toll skimmer hadn't just been cheating three gangs.

He'd been talking to my brother.

I stood, wiped my hand on my coat even though I hadn't touched anything wet, and made myself breathe out slow, the way you do when you want your body to believe it's calm before your mind catches up.

I looked down again, ready to leave, and stopped.

His wrists weren't bound with rope or wire. They were bound with a double loop and a locking twist, the same knot I used to tie into a wrist in under two seconds, the one I'd invented myself and taught to exactly four people before I died. Not a pack signature. Mine.

Someone hadn't just beaten me to this body. Someone had built it for me to find, and signed it with my own hands.

The wraith under my ribs woke all the way up, humming low and pleased, like it had been waiting the whole walk over for exactly this. He was talking, it said, without words, the way it always said things. Someone wanted you to know it.

I stepped back out into the yard. The night had gone quiet in the wrong way, the kind of quiet that isn't empty, just watching.

A shape moved between two freight cars, thirty feet off, gone before I could get a clean look. Not a raider's build. Leaner. Careful with his footing on the gravel in a way that told me he'd walked this yard before, more than once, like he had a reason to know it as well as the men who worked it.

I raised the revolver anyway, more out of habit than hope of a shot.

"Whoever's watching," I called, my voice coming out low and wrong, the way it always did now, "you're standing on a dead man's ground. That's a bad place to be careless."

No answer. Just the scrape of a boot against gravel, moving away, unhurried, like whoever it was had already gotten everything they came for.

I looked back down at the body one last time, at the knot only four hands alive had ever been taught to tie.

Somebody had gutted him before I even got the contract, bound him the exact way I would have, and left him where a hunter with my hands would be sent to find him.

Which meant this had never been about the toll skimmer at all.

Somebody hadn't hired a hunter to clean up a leak. Somebody had built a body meant to speak my name in a language only I would understand, and mailed it to me through a stranger's contract.