CHAPTER 1136: PATH TO THE THIRD TIER (1).

They moved on, then, half-merciful, half-mercenary. The city did not care for the nuance. Men shouted for order and the Daelmonts paraded fury in the streets. The council called for arrests. Names were printed in the papers that still dared speak truth.

Weeks passed like knives. Their strikes multiplied in detail and consequence—two bank accounts frozen; a shipping bond called back; a governor’s aide arrested for embezzlement and left to rot. The Daelmonts learned to watch their own. Friends became suspects. Allies counted their names twice.

The cost piled in quiet places. Susan’s bandages frayed. Steve’s hands trembled. Hunter grew quieter. Roselle’s smiles became rarer. Cain felt the city file itself into pieces and then attempt to glue itself back together with fresh lies.

One night, a message found them—a single white envelope slid under the barge’s hatch. No stamp, no handwriting, only a phrase printed on pale paper: WE KNOW YOUR NAMES.

Cain read it twice before anything else. His stomach turned toward a familiar noise: readiness.

"Then it’s a matter of who strikes first," Roselle said.

"Whoever is first is not always the winner," Hunter replied. "Sometimes the one who lasts longer wins."

Cain taped the paper to the bench and stared at it like an omen. In the end, it was both threat and acknowledgment. Someone had taken the time to look back at them, to learn the faces and the steps.

He folded his hands and felt the old ache stead. "Then we make sure they can’t find us," he said. "We move, we burn, we cut where it matters most. We make the city bleed in a way that forces the Daelmonts to choose."

Susan exhaled harshly. "And when they strike back?"

Cain’s thumb ran along the hilt of his blade. "Then we answer. Not to them. To the people who thought staying quiet would save them."

Outside the barge, the city breathed a ragged, restless breath. Above it, the towers flickered like wounded things, and somewhere, a fleet manned by men who still believed in order plotted a return.

Cain stood, the small paper in his palm like a talisman for the war ahead. He did not speak of mercy or justice. He spoke of work.

"Pack light," he said. "We leave at moonrise."

They moved into the night with their choices stitched into their backs. The city watched them go, and those who had the power to stop them polished their knives and practiced their lies. The game had widened. The hands that fed the monsters were now hungry, and hunger made monsters make mistakes.

Cain let the thought carry him, not as comfort but as fact. The next steps would ask everything of them. He tightened his coat and listened to the city’s small noises—the cough of engines, the whisper of rain on metal, the distant clank of men preparing for war.

They had chosen the beginning. Now they would live through the middle.

They slept in shifts, two hours on, two hours off; the city hummed around them like a beast that could not remember peace. Moonlight traced the edges of the barge, turning grime to silver; the paper message lay folded in Cain’s boot, where it would not be lost but would not be flaunted. Outside, distant horns sounded—merchant ships waking, patrols answering, men who believed in timetables. Inside, they moved by intuition and thin plans.

At two in the morning Roselle awakened the lot with a hand on Cain’s shoulder and a narrow grin. "They took a bite," she said. "Warehouse at Dock Seven. A courier left the ledger there and—get this—left the door ajar. A mistake," she added, razor-evident. "They’re sloppy."

Cain rose without ceremony. The others followed, the barge unmoored silently as if it were a ghost trying to sneak behind its own past. They rowed to shore beneath a sky that had forgotten stars. The docks were a forest of cranes and slumped containers, a geometry of danger Cain had walked a hundred times.

They moved like nothings—two figures in the shadows, a rustle here, a breath there. Steve shadowed the cameras with a small device that sang the right notes to blind optics; Hunter had mapped the patrol rotations and folded them into a sequence of safe windows. Susan limped but kept her rifle steady; Roselle’s pistol was warm in her grip.

Dock Seven smelled of oil and old money. The warehouse was a hulking thing that used to swallow exports whole and spit out receipts. Tonight it breathed the breath of expectation; someone had left the door where it ought never to be left.

Inside, the ledger lay on a crate, a stack of paper like a small, quiet mountain. Cain stepped forward and lifted the first page. Ink bled into names and numbers—accounts hidden under shell companies, payments routed through brokers, a dozen people who thought their hands were clean. He thumbed through rows until a name caught at him: a senator’s aide, an off-shore trustee, a dockmaster he’d beaten in another life. Threads. The map of their opponents existed in handwriting.

"Copy everything," Cain said. "Every page. Steve, burn the originals after you’ve scanned."

Steve worked with the nervous reverence of someone performing delicate surgery; his breath came in shallow, precise pulls as the device swallowed pages and spit out light. Hunter cross-checked with the phones Roselle purloined from a distracted clerk; Susan kept the door and listened for the city’s small betrayals—footsteps too many, a laugh too loud.

They left with their prize and a plan that began to resemble a blade. Over the following days, they cut at the ledger’s lines: a frozen account here, an intercepted shipping manifest there, a public notice of an inquiry timed to embarrass a funder. They fed truth into channels that had fed lies for decades and watched how even the most secure men flinched when light found them.

The reaction was not immediate war but a slow, suffocating unmasking. Partners pulled away from meetings. A broker who once laughed at threats began using couriers with no names. Newspapers printed reputations like contraband and then apologized when pressure came from deeper places. The Daelmonts, who had the power to make fleets, had less control over whispers.