Season 1, Episode 6
"Smite: Rules for Fire"
Church at eight. Cian walked in with a split lip and a thermos, looking like a kid who'd mouthed off to a belt sander and kept the attitude. Gemma clocked the bruise, thumbed it once—mother's diagnostic poke—then set a pie on the table like the sacrament.
Clay took the gavel but not the room; the room had already decided it belonged to the problem. Jax sat quiet, that new bone-deep stillness on him. Tig hummed something that sounded like trouble whistling. Chibs, Bobby, Opie—heads up, backs straight.
"Before we talk hits," Jax said, beating the gavel to its first word, "we talk rules. We're done freelancing crumbs to the feds or the press or anyone else. We decide what, when, who signs, and what it buys us."
Clay's jaw ticked. "You volunteering to be schoolteacher?"
"I'm volunteering us to stop getting cute," Jax said. "Cian."
Lazy blue eyes sharpened. Cian set a single page on the table—typed, clean, neat in a way that meant he'd been up all night. He didn't stand. He didn't need to.
"Five rules," he said.
1. "Third-party only. We never hand steel from inside our walls. Anything that leaves this table comes from county cams, neighboring businesses, or a ghost with no address."
2. "Thirty-second doctrine. We never give more than thirty seconds of anything. No audio unless it's their voices. No faces of ours. Ever."
3. "Two-key sign-off. President or VP plus one—not me—sign any handoff. I am the screen, not the key."
4. "Purpose or pass. Every crumb must buy a measurable advantage—breathing room, patrol shift, heat moved onto an enemy we can afford."
5. "No names. No numbers. No plates. We let the feds infer. We don't inform."
He paused, let the words settle like dust. "Break these rules and we'll be eating subpoenas for breakfast."
Clay looked at the page, then at Cian. Something like reluctant respect moved under the gravel. "Two-key sign-off," he said, tapping the line. "Fine. I sign or Jax signs. You don't sign your own sins."
"Copy," Cian said.
"Thirty seconds," Tig mused, grinning. "That's generous. Most of my relationships didn't last that long."
"Upgrade your software," Chibs said.
Bobby scratched his beard. "Purpose or pass. That means we start saying no to our own bright ideas."
"Good news," Cian said. "Most of mine are dumb."
Gemma's voice knifed in, velvet-wrapped. "No more surprises that put a target on my parking lot," she said. "If we aim fire, we build a circle around our children first."
"Already built," Cian said. "I taught three lights in a mile radius to throw tantrums whenever a cruiser speeds. Stahl hates daycare."
"Stahl loves leverage," Opie muttered.
"Then we take it back," Jax said. "We run our rules, not hers."
Clay rapped the gavel—thunk. "Adopted. We hit when we choose. We feed when it buys us time. We end 'polite' the next time a Mayan tries cute on Main."
"All right," Tig said, delighted. "Housekeeping's over. Who we killing?"
---
ATF did what ATF does—smiled while walking a local into a corner. June Stahl found Ralph Munroe at the city yard under a sodium lamp that made everything look guilty. Ralph had a city jacket, a union sticker, and two kids in braces. He also had three OSHA violations reprimanded into a drawer and an ex-wife who still had keys to his house.
"You change bulbs on Fourth and San Pablo?" Stahl asked, voice soft enough to be mistaken for mercy.
"Sometimes," Ralph said, because men who fix lights learn not to commit to absolutes.
"You will today," she said, handing him a work order that wore a city seal like stolen jewelry. "And you'll get overtime."
"What's the catch?"
"Your ladder leans a little longer," she said. "You'll leave a single friend in the housing."
"A camera?"
"A peace of mind," she said, smile thin as paper. "Pointed at the garage with the skull on the wall."
Ralph swallowed the dryness of men who call themselves practical. "You want me dead?"
"I want you solvent," Stahl said. "And I want leverage." She touched his elbow, perfectly professional. "Do your job. The rest is mine."
He did not pray. He took the tool bag.
---
Charming's illusion cracked at 10:17 a.m. near the arcade where kids lined up for pinballs that still ate quarters.
Eddie—the overeager hang-around Cian had bounced two episodes ago—lay behind the dumpster in that contorted posture bodies get when they're placed, not dropped. Zip ties on his wrists. A white carnation in his mouth like a sugar gag. No brass cores this time. No joke. Just a cheap boy with cheaper friends, dead in the heart of town.
Unser's Vic hit the curb hard enough to jar truth. Hale came fast and loud and got quieter when he saw the flower. Cian reached the alley a heartbeat before the scene tape did, because he knew exactly where to be fifteen seconds early in this city.
He crouched, slow. Eddie's eyes were open. Cian closed them with two fingers because nobody else would. He felt Jax at his shoulder, breath held.
"First one inside our line," Jax said, voice gone flat enough to cut.
"Public," Unser added, old sadness in the vowels. "That's the point."
Hale looked at Clay like law looks at bad weather. "You bring this."
"We bring flowers to graves," Clay said, unreadable. "Somebody else brings this."
Cian saw the message written in the absence: no brass, no key, no cleverness. Alvarez had said he was switching mediums. He had. From art… to audience.
A deputy tugged tape between two nails. Unser planted himself in the alley mouth. "You boys walk away," he said. "You see nothing here but a town that just learned what it can't afford to ignore."
Jax held Cian's gaze one beat longer than was good for either of them. We aim? the look asked. We aim. Cian straightened, carnation heavy in his pocket. He left Eddie to the county and his mother to God.
---
Ralph climbed a city ladder at Fourth and San Pablo with a coil of wire and a stomach full of rocks. He opened the light standard, slid the little pebble-lens device into the housing, made the connections with the care of a man fixing his own noose. He closed the panel, climbed down, smiled at the nice fed who paid overtime in cash, and told himself he'd undo it later if he found a door that didn't lead to losing his sons.
Cian's mesh hiccuped five minutes after the pole went "fixed." A new MAC address on the block. A new whisper in the ether. He turned his head toward the corner and let his eyes unfocus. There—just the faintest change in the way the day felt, the kind of sixth sense you get when you've stared at grids long enough to taste them.
He texted Juice: new eye at 4th/San Pablo. not ours. paint it deaf.
Juice: you want blind or stupid?
Cian: stupid. let it watch a loop. happy little trees.
Juice: bo-b-ross'd.
---
Church again, not because it was time—because murder in daylight makes every hour church. The gavel stayed put. Men leaned in.
"We answer," Tig said.
"We do," Jax said. "But we don't buy a war we can't afford."
Clay cut in. "We killed one of theirs in Indian Hills. They put a boy in our town. You don't answer that with words."
"Words buy time," Cian said, sliding his palm over the micro DVR he hadn't shown them yet. He felt the little sin hum. "And time buys clean shots."
"Speak your mind," Bobby said.
Cian exhaled through his nose. He put the micro on the table, set a small portable screen beside it, and hit play. Thirty seconds of warehouse night unfurled—grainy, gray, familiar. Blue tow nosing in. Overspray glow. A shadow stepping through the frame—Mayan patch flashing, yes. But not alone.
"Freeze at twenty-two," Cian said. The frame halted. He stepped in, fingertip tapping the left edge. "Panel van we clocked at the orchard is the same here. Look at the back door."
Chibs squinted. "Sticker."
"Not Mayans," Bobby murmured. "Not Vago. That's a—"
"Iron cross," Jax said, jaw going hard. "Nord."
The room chilled. Opie's mouth became a straight line. Tig's grin died. Clay didn't move.
"Advance." The frame jogged two clicks. The van door cracked; a man slid out with a duffel. He turned just enough to brand himself by habit: spiderweb ink on the neck, cheap skull ring on the trigger finger. Not a Mayan. Not a Samoan. Nord.
"Caleb Finch," Bobby said, cursing under his breath. "Darby's half-wit cousin."
"Which means Darby rented his idiots to Alvarez," Chibs said, voice gone knife.
"Or Darby wants us bleeding on two fronts," Tig said, delighted and furious all at once. "Bless his little white heart."
Cian killed the frame and let the silence do math. "I held this because I needed to know if it was noise or truth," he said. "Now I know. It's truth. It bites everyone."
"Bites Darby most," Jax said, heat in the eyes.
Clay finally moved—just his hand, just enough to remind the room where authority lived. "We use this to light the Mayans," he said.
"Or we give Stahl a crumb that sends her at Darby while we carve Alvarez," Jax shot back. "Split their attention."
"Or," Cian said, "we make Darby choose. Publicly. In front of his own boys. You want to sell overtime to a fed? You sell that man fear of losing his little empire."
Opie's shoulders had gone still the way cliffs are still. "Darby gets men hurt who can't afford it." His voice had the weight of Donna, kids, rent, breakfast. "We take him first."
"No meth on the patch," Jax said, that vow from Indian Hills still burning. "Darby is meth."
Clay watched them both, read the room, and found the knife's cleanest edge. "We do both."
Chibs arched a brow. "How we doing two wars with one set of bones?"
"We don't," Clay said. "We make them fight each other. Cian feeds Stahl thirty seconds of Caleb's neck tattoo walking out of our burned house. No names. No plates. Let her pattern-match. She raids Darby's cookhouse; Alvarez loses a supplier; the Nords start asking why they're the ones eating the subpoenas while Mayans paint crows."
"And while they're kissing in the mirror," Tig said, "we hit a Mayan stash where it hurts."
"Locations?" Jax asked, already riffling through maps in his head.
"Cody's phone," Cian said. "I pulled a half-deleted chain. Soria's tow… then 'drop behind the old feed store'… then a set of numbers that aren't a plate—they're a gate code." He slid a slip of paper across. "Stockton yard. Alvarez's overflow. We hit soft. We leave loud."
Clay nodded once, satisfied. "Church reconvenes at six. Until then, we pay a visit to Mr. Ernest Darby."
"Blessing of the day," Tig said, genuinely happy.
---
Ralph's new eye watched a loop of yesterday's breeze move a flag across Teller-Morrow's lot. Stahl leaned on the hood of her borrowed Chevy and smiled at the screen like a woman who'd taught pride to sit and it had finally stayed.
Behind her, in the bank's reflective glass, Opie's bug learned to sing Lynyrd Skynyrd on a fifteen-minute cycle. She made a note to bring that up later. Donna walked by with groceries and didn't see her future take a seat in her kitchen.
---
Ernest Darby received visitors at a half-empty bar he claimed was a legitimate business. He wore a button-down to hide the tattoos you can spot from a block away and a smirk that thought it paid the light bill.
"Afternoon, Ernest," Clay said, sliding into the booth across from him like a pastor with a knife in the hymnal. Jax and Opie flanked him. Cian took the corner where the mirror couldn't see him clearly.
"President Morrow," Darby said. "Congratulations on your new… annex." He nodded at Jax's patch, at the Devil's Tribe needlework still shining. "Heard you boys are enforcing a no-fun policy. Terrible for the economy."
"Economy'll live," Jax said. "You won't."
Darby's smirk quivered and then remembered it had a job. "You need my goods more than I need your permission."
"We don't need your anything," Clay said. "We came to tell you a story."
He set the portable screen on the table and hit play without flourish. Thirty seconds. Blue tow. Gray grain. Panel van door. The spiderweb neck tat strolling into their fire.
Darby's eyes did a micro-flinch that a lesser man would have missed. He didn't deny. He didn't confess. He chuckled like a man listening to a dirty joke that didn't land.
"Caleb's an entrepreneur," he said. "Takes gigs, pays rent. This town's tough."
"This town gets fatal," Opie said, low. "Especially for entrepreneurs."
"You want to threaten me in my house?" Darby asked.
"No," Clay said pleasantly. "I want to tell you that ATF's got a taste for white meat today. They like stickers. They love neck tattoos. They're going to break something. Would be a shame if it was you."
Darby finally looked at Cian, like the lazy kid had been humming too loud to ignore. "You the one playing film school?"
"Just thirty seconds at a time," Cian said. "Attention spans are short."
Darby's smile curdled. "You feed that fed and I will burn your shop down the old-fashioned way."
Clay leaned across the table, close enough to smell the cheap arrogance. "You try it," he said, voice soft. "And I will take your hands."
Darby's tongue wet his top lip. He looked at Jax and saw no sunlight. He looked at Opie and saw a promise he didn't want to learn the terms of. He sat back and whistled like a coward trying to make the room believe he owned the tune.
"Get out of my bar," he said. "I got a day to ruin."
"We'll help," Tig said from the doorway, surprised he'd been invited to this much fun and delighted he might not need to be.
They left him there with the truth reflected in the front of his own beer.
---
Cian fed Stahl exactly what church voted to allow: twenty-eight seconds of a panel van door and a neck tattoo that solved itself if you'd ever booked a Nord. No audio. No plates. A timestamp that pointed nowhere helpful.
"Crumbs," Stahl said, sliding the drive into an evidence bag with gloved hands like a woman who didn't want to contaminate her own trap. "I prefer cake."
"Eat better," Cian said. "Now go raid a racist."
"Tempting," she said. Then: "You're very sure of yourself."
"I'm very tired," he said. "Confidence is cheaper than sleep."
She tilted her head. "Heard about the boy behind the arcade," she added, testing for blood.
"Get in line," Cian said, and didn't give her any.
He walked away with the weight of a new plan under his ribs and the old ache of the boy in the alley knocking on bone.
---
Evening pried the day off Charming. Church reconvened with maps. Cian ran the yard on the screen: Stockton gate code, camera angles, the way to make a forklift look like a hurricane. Jax split the crew into two prongs—Darby pressure and Mayan pinch—because sometimes the best truce is the one you refuse to offer.
Gemma slid slices of key-lime like wedges of weaponized sunshine. "Eat," she ordered. "You swing better with sugar."
Cian took a forkful, winced, smiled. "Stings on the way in."
"That's the point," she said.
Opie's phone vibrated on the table and kept vibrating. Donna's name crawled across the screen like a plea. He stared at it until it stopped, guilt and duty wrestling in his eyes. Cian pretended to adjust his radio so he wouldn't have to watch.
Clay rapped the gavel. "We hit at midnight," he said. "We send a message in Stockton and we deliver a rumor to Darby's front door. Tomorrow—funeral arrangements for anybody who thinks 10:17 a.m. is their time to paint my town."
They stood into the work because that's what men like them know how to do. Cian slid the carnation from his pocket, bruised brown now, and tucked it into the coffee can labeled FUSES. He told himself it was a reminder, not a shrine.
On the scanner, a unit called out a traffic stop that sounded too calm. On his mesh, the light at Fourth and San Pablo blinked like a liar, happy to watch a loop it mistook for truth. Above the shop, the Reaper grinned like it always does—mouth full of teeth, eyes full of jokes the living keep telling.
Cian checked the battery on his little radios. He looked at his family and their war, and said under his breath, to nobody and the whole town: "You can aim chaos. You just can't miss."
Midnight made Stockton honest. Sodium lamps buzzed over chain link and cracked asphalt, and the Mayan overflow yard slept like a drunk—mouth open, pockets full.
"Gate code in three," Cian said into the net, voice calm enough to lower heart rates. "Two… one."
Chibs' glove danced on the keypad. The chain sputtered, moaned, and the slide-bolt gave up its faith in steel. The gate rolled back six feet—just enough for a bike to breathe through.
"Eyes?" Jax asked.
"Four cams, two real," Cian said, already feeding them yesterday's breeze. "North post is looping a happy little tree. South is convinced no one ever moves."
They slipped in: Jax, Chibs, Tig, Bobby. Opie stayed in the street with the truck and a face that made strangers think twice about living. Cian ghosted the fence line with a cheap throw phone and a high-dollar brain.
"Hit soft, leave loud," Clay had said. So they did.
Chibs found a forklift born to be a bad idea. Tig giggled and made it a prophecy. They hooked chain to a stack of palletized powder, a forklift pried, and the stack teetered into a shallow trench Cian had noticed on satellite—runoff ditch turned product grave. Plastic sheeting tore like cheap suits. Dust bloomed. Somewhere, Alvarez's accountant woke up without knowing why.
Bobby rolled a pallet jack like a pro and left footprints of chaos—skids askew, tire marks that said idiots more than enemies. Jax popped the lock on a prefab shed and found a tidy ledger, then left it open to a page with numbers that would make a DA lick his teeth.
"Gift," Jax said, setting a single Reaper sticker on the inside of the ledger—quiet, deniable, meant for the first cop to feel special.
Tig clipped a power cable and made the yard lights complain. Chibs stabbed a hydrant wrench into a rusty standpipe and gave the place rain. Cian tossed the throw phone over the fence and let it dial 911 with a pre-recorded breathless note: "Something's wrong at the old yard—sparks, I think—lots of smoke!" He smiled at the sky. "Leave loud."
They walked out the way they came. No shots. No bodies. Just mud, math, and a headache Alvarez would pretend not to have.
"ETA five minutes for county," Cian said, checking his mesh. "Plenty for us to look innocent in another zip code."
"Bless you and your lies," Tig said.
---
The other prong went at the same hour because symmetry is a kind of sermon. Darby's cookhouse wasn't a house as much as a broken promise behind a pawn shop—two propane tanks, stained counters, and a jar of pickles no one remembered buying. Caleb Finch's spiderweb neck tattoo showed up right on time, along with his terrible skull ring.
Jax and Opie didn't kick the door. They closed it from the outside and turned the latch, quiet. Then Jax fed a payphone a quarter and called a number that would make Stahl salivate.
"White van. Spiderweb neck. 1843 Ludlow," he said, voice low and happily anonymous. "He's cooking with grandma's cookbook. Lots of friends. Lots of guns."
"Name?" the dispatcher asked.
"Felix the Cat," Jax said, and hung up.
Cian pinged Stahl a different crumb thirty seconds later—the thirty-second doctrine obeyed to the syllable—Caleb's tattoo in profile leaving the warehouse frame. No plates. No names. Just enough to let a fed connect dots with her favorite crayons.
They parked two blocks away and listened to the hymn of state and federal sirens sing their way down Ludlow. When the first door crashed, Jax stood up straight like a man hearing an angel.
"You could've let me hit him," Opie said.
"Later," Jax promised. "We let the feds do the dishes tonight."
They watched Caleb cuffed and escorted, mouth running, eyes stupid. Darby wasn't on site. The cookhouse died without its deity.
"Alvarez won't like his supplier wearing bracelets," Opie said.
"No," Jax said. "He'll like it even less when he thinks Darby sold him out."
Cian smiled into his collar. "Spin delivered," he said. "Let's go home."
---
Home had a camera. The city pole at Fourth and San Pablo watched a loop Cian and Juice had taught it, flag rippling, shadows sliding like clockwork. Ralph—the city guy with union stickers and overtime guilt—had done his part and then gone home to stare at his ceiling, promising himself he'd undo it later.
At 03:06, the loop stuttered.
It wasn't much. A quarter second hiccup, a thin line of static, and then—live. For three heartbeats the feed showed exactly what was: Jax and Opie rolling back into the lot, wet with Stockton's fake rain; Chibs and Tig laughing quiet like men who'd stolen time; Cian crossing the bay with a duffel he didn't intend to keep—filled with burned plastic and empty hose, nothing anyone could charge, everything a fed could infer.
Stahl, in a borrowed Chevy a block away, smiled like hunger.
Then the loop reasserted itself—the happy little tree swaying, the flag performing yesterday like a trooper. Juice's script resumed its fiction and Cian's mesh chirped a late alarm like a smoke detector that coughs after the fire is out.
"Say the word 'stutter' and I'll throw up," Juice texted, already flushing the pole-cam's buffer.
"Say the word 'cake' and I'll forgive you," Cian sent back.
He didn't forgive himself. He rewrote the loop with a thicker blanket and moved the camera's clock forward by eight seconds, because some lies work better when they're late.
---
At 07:40, Gemma Morrow met the pole-camera with every ounce of grace God had regretted giving her. The morning sun threw a glint off the lens wrong, the Reaper reflected moon-small in its glass. She felt it like a woman who'd found a bug in her own kitchen.
She walked into the shop, grabbed a can of black spray from the rack like a lady choosing a shade of nail polish, stepped onto the hood of an old Cutlass in heels, and reached high with the practiced balance of a queen.
"Gem," Jax warned.
"Smile for me, June," Gemma said, and drew a looping heart around the lens—paint blooming black on glass—then a big block letter across the middle:
> KISS
She punctuated the "I" with her middle finger and climbed down like a cat.
Across the street, Stahl watched the screen go noir and snorted despite herself. Hale arrived thirty seconds later with a city codebook and a moral erection.
"Vandalism of public property," he announced.
"Public?" Gemma asked, sweet as poison. "Then it shouldn't be peeking in my yard."
Unser stepped between her and the statute. "I'll write a stern memo," he said. "To the wind."
Hale simmered and wrote a ticket anyway, because tickets are comfort.
Cian stood there and didn't smile. If Gemma's paint hadn't hit the lens, Stahl would've had a clean angle to the 03:06 hiccup. As it stood, she had exactly what Cian always tried to give her: an argument and a few inches of rope.
Gemma tossed him the paint can. "Fix your sky," she told him, meaning more than the pole.
"Yes ma'am," he said.
---
Darby didn't take the raid politely. He found a corner of the Why Not? bar and made it a throne, then called all hands. The ones that showed looked tired; the ones that didn't were in cuffs or hiding. He slammed a bottle on a table like a gavel.
"Who sold us?" he demanded.
"Mayans," a kid said, eager to be useful.
"Cops," another offered, resigned to being right too often.
"Clay Morrow," Darby said, daring the room to contradict him. It didn't. Fear and pride make honest cowards.
Caleb, out on bail before his socks were dry because Darby had one good lawyer and three dirty piles of cash, stumbled in with a busted lip and an attitude.
"They had a video," he said. "Like… me. In a… you know."
"Tattoo?" someone prompted, unhelpful.
"Yeah," he said. "Neck."
"Stop being identifiable," Darby snapped, and then realized with a clarity that hurt that he, too, was a man you could pick out of a lineup with a finger and a mirror.
He picked up his phone and called his Mayan contact. It went to voicemail. He called again. The third time, someone answered and didn't speak.
"Pay phones make you brave, Ernest," the voice said finally. It wasn't Alvarez. It wasn't anyone he could threaten into laughter. "You lost a cookhouse. We lost a yard. We can both lose more."
Darby swallowed something sharp. "We settle our own," he said.
"Then settle," the voice said, and hung up.
He looked at his boys and saw a flock not worth shepherding. He needed a public win. He needed a headline. He needed to make Clay hurt. He settled for promising himself he would.
---
By noon, the county had responded to Stockton in the predictable way: tape, clipboards, a sergeant with a headache. The ledger—left open on purpose—found its way into a box with an oh my from a junior deputy. The nightly news got drone footage of pallets dissolved into sludge. Cian watched the chyron from the shop: STOCKTON CHEMICAL LEAK UNDER INVESTIGATION; CARTEL LINKS SUSPECTED. No mention of crows. No mention of Charming. That was the whole point.
Stahl raided three Nord-adjacent storage units by dinner. She got two rifles, a kilo that would test pure enough to make a judge frown, and a flier for a rally no one decent would attend. She texted Cian a single word: Crumbs.
He sent back: Deep dish tomorrow. He didn't mean it. He needed time.
---
Time didn't love them back. Two hours after sunset, a call came in that wasn't theater: 10-53, shots fired—Jasper & 9th, body in the street.
They rolled hard because that's what you do when the scanner says ours. Unser's Vic already blocked the lane. The sheet on the asphalt was small. The carnation on top was white.
Cian stopped three steps from the edge because he knew the shoes sticking out from under the sheet. Ralph's steel-toes, scuffed to hell, union sticker peeling off the back of his phone on the ground. The overtime man. The ladder man. The father with a debt and a camera in a pole.
He had a hole under the left shoulder, neat and final. No wallet. No rings. No witness. Just a worker who'd done a wrong favor and then tried to undo it—and somebody who'd decided that no was a disloyal word.
Hale threw eyes at Clay because he only owned one theory. Gemma went stone, then iron. Jax went quiet in that way that meant he'd keep moving until he had a name.
Unser's voice was ash. "He called me twenty minutes ago," he said, to nobody and the whole town. "Said he was 'thinking of making something right.' Never got the chance."
Cian's stomach turned slow, polite circles. He stared at the carnation and it turned into every other flower he'd pocketed this week. He felt the chain on his chest—Cody's key knocking his dog tag—and a new gravity taking root under his ribs.
"You can aim chaos," he thought, and the sentence didn't have a punchline anymore.
Tig touched his elbow. "Orders?"
"Same as always," Cian said. "We don't miss."
He went home and pulled the pole-cam loop apart line by line until it was deaf, dumb, and blind. He called Juice and taught the audio bug on Opie's truck to get lonely and die. He typed Ralph's name on a scrap of paper, folded it twice, and tucked it with the others into the coffee can labeled FUSES.
Then he set a new rule and didn't ask for a vote: no more polite.
---
By morning, there would be a plan that didn't taste like cake. Darby would make a play he couldn't afford. Alvarez would send a piece off the board he thought he could spare. Stahl would show up with a subpoena and a smile, and Gemma would bring a weaponized casserole to a grieving front step because love is a club you swing when knives won't do.
And Cian—split lip, tired eyes, one more key on his chain—would crack the little drive no one wanted him to and let it speak in full for the first time.
Control is a lullaby. Chaos is the gospel.
He was done singing quietly.