The summoning was terrifying because it bypassed the entire established food chain. Sam, the victim, was recuperating, likely furious. Vikram, the rescuer, was busy. Kevin was irrelevant. John Corvini cut through all the carefully structured hierarchy and called two names directly: Pranav. Sanvi.
We stood in the sterile common room, the silence broken only by the distant mechanical hum of the compound's ventilation. John was standing at ease, radiating his quiet, inescapable authority. He didn't need us to be friends; he needed us to be functional.
"Someone tried to kill Sam. Someone violated the terms of our business in this city. This is not a task for executioners, nor for accountants. This is a task for clarity."
He looked at Sanvi, acknowledging the brutal, unthinking efficiency she possessed. Then he looked at Pranav, acknowledging the cold, analytical lens that had failed to save him in the fish market but was now being repurposed.
The order was simple, yet immense: Find who tried to kill Sam. Don't come back empty-handed. The subtext was brutal: Prove your individual worth, or disappear.
We were oil and gasoline, brains and violence, structure and impulse, forced into a partnership neither of us wanted, a partnership predicated on mutual, barely contained contempt. Sanvi hated Pranav's caution; Pranav despised Sanvi's recklessness.
Our investigation dragged us immediately into the city's sewage-layer: the damp, neon-alleyways that smelled of cheap bleach and older secrets. We moved through backroom gambling dens, into abandoned storefronts, and among the street-level parasites who fed on scraps of information. This was Santa Fortuna, stripped of the Corvini polish - a rotten, desperate hive of low-stakes fear where violence was the default currency.
Our dynamic was an immediate, grating disaster.
"We start with the weapon manufacturer," Pranav stated, consulting the minimal forensic notes Asrit had provided from the scene. He had spent the first few hours in the compound's archive, memorizing reports. "That rifle wasn't standard military issue. It points to the North End market, specific supplier. We approach with trade leverage, not fists. We buy the name, we don't beat it out of them."
"Trade leverage is slow," Sanvi snapped, the low rumble of her voice a constant threat. She pulled her battered switchblade from her pocket, the blade whispering as it caught the neon light. "Fists are fast. We're in a hurry. You think the people who sold the weapon want to debate supply chain ethics with a failed college boy?"
"I think they want to live long enough to take our money," Pranav countered, forcing his voice to remain level. He had learned the lesson of his capture: emotion was failure. He could not afford to be emotional with Sanvi.
Our first stop was a dilapidated, stinking warehouse run by a man who specialized in laundering illegal parts, a small-time operator named Memo who looked permanently stained with oil and guilt. Sanvi didn't bother with the door. She smashed the glass window beside it with the heel of her boot, the sound shocking and absolute. She slid through, ignoring Pranav's hissed protests about unnecessary noise.
The confrontation inside was entirely Sanvi's domain. She moved with a frightening directness, smashing chairs and terrifying the vendor. Her presence generated raw, immediate fear. Her violence was precise only in its intent: give us the name, or lose something vital.
Pranav stayed back, keeping his hands clean, reading the room while Sanvi generated the chaos. He didn't look at the fear she was generating; he looked at the patterns, the vendor's nervous tick, the location of the safe, the sudden flicker of his eyes when Sanvi mentioned a specific, high-end supplier name known to deal only with Mexican import groups.
He took control when the vendor finally broke, not through more violence, but through the promise of stopping the violence.
"The rifle was sourced from the East Side docks, Memo's contacts," Pranav confirmed, looking not at the sweating vendor but at Sanvi. "It was a bulk order, high-grade polymer. Not a street hit. This was professional, but executed by amateurs."
"The point is not how they killed, it's who," Sanvi growled, wiping the blood from her knuckles on a piece of packing tape.
Bit by bit, clue by clue, the truth formed. Sanvi smashed the doors and extracted the raw information through fear. Pranav synthesized it, finding the inconsistencies, the loopholes in the lies that the informants tried to sell. He found the common drop point, the pattern of communication, the signature of a crew attempting to mimic the Corvini's own operations.
The trail led south, deep into the rival territory, confirming what Asrit's limited forensics had only hinted at: the assassination attempt was ordered not by an internal competitor, but by a rival Mexican cartel leader who believed Sam's recent supply chain issues meant Corvini weakness.
The name was finally confirmed in a dilapidated, abandoned church, the final piece of the puzzle, a discarded burner phone, giving us the name: Mateo Varela.
Sanvi's face was transformed, lit by a terrifying, cold satisfaction. The bloodlust was back, magnified by the days of forced servitude. "We have him. Varela is six blocks from here, hiding in a cheap motel near the old theatre. Let's finish the job. Now. Before he moves. We take his head back to John."
She was already moving toward the door, her pistol unholstered, the lure of immediate violence too strong to resist.
Pranav grabbed her arm, his grip surprisingly firm. He was cold, utterly calm, the fear long replaced by calculating ambition. "Stop. That's a trap."
"It's a target!" she hissed, yanking her arm away. "John told us to find the killer. We found him. What's the next step? Debate the ethical implications of using lethal force in a house of God?"
"The next step is not acting on impulse!" Pranav argued, his voice a low, commanding whisper. "If we kill Varela, we solve a problem for Sam, who will get the credit and use it to maintain his fragile status. We don't work for Sam. We work for John."
He stared at the peeling paint of the church wall, seeing the massive structure of the Corvini organization in his mind. "We need to take the intel back to John. We prove we are smarter than the gun. Varela is a tactical target. The information, the evidence of a Mexican cartel's reach into Corvini territory, is strategic gold. We prove our worth is in strategy, not body count."
Sanvi stared at him, hatred and frustrated bloodlust battling in her eyes. "You're scared to get your hands dirty, Pranav. You just want the credit, and you want to avoid the mess."
"I want to give John Corvini the ability to leverage this truth against his _entire_ operation, against every rival who thinks we are weak," Pranav countered, his gaze unwavering, cold and hard. "We were told to find who tried to kill Sam. We found him. The hard part is not the execution; the hard part is knowing when not to pull the trigger."
They stood locked in a silent war of wills, strategy versus instinct, the core tension of their forced partnership. Pranav's ambition, fueled by John's talk of betrayal, was now a cold, ruthless drive for political leverage.
Neither of them realized that someone else, someone far more influential in the Corvini family, a true master of the long game, was already three steps ahead of their petty argument, moving the pieces on a board they couldn't even see. Their investigation had been observed, their movements predicted, and their discovery was about to be weaponized in a way they couldn't possibly anticipate.