CASSIAN
The black digital file from Reid arrived with the cold, silent vibration of a death warrant against my thigh.
I sat in the back of the car, the leather smelling of charcoal and rain, and watched the grainy playback on my phone. CCTV footage is a wretched medium, it strips away the humanity of a scene, leaving only the mechanical geometry of movement and consequence.
I watched the warehouse. Not the one my men had gutted hours before, but a cleaner, more sterile facility in the industrial heart of the city.
A place that looked like it had every legal right to exist. The back doors of a nondescript van slid open, and two men hauled Vanni out. My men had tracked the lieutenant's movement with a careful precision that would have made a predator proud.
He was broken, his limbs dangling with the uselessness of snapped rebar, his face a roadmap of the pain I had personally mapped onto him.
