Cain's demand hung in the air like a blade suspended above their throats. The councilors did not flinch, but Cain caught the tremor beneath their composure. They weren't unafraid—they were trained to look like it.
A man at the center of the long table leaned forward, fingers steepled. His suit was darker than the others, sharp lines swallowing the light. His voice was calm, practiced, meant to dominate a room. "The ledger is not for outsiders. Not for thieves. Certainly not for butchers who mistake violence for justice."
Roselle barked a laugh, short and vicious. "You call us butchers while you feast on the city's marrow?" She stepped closer, hand resting near her holster. "Show us the ledger before I paint your walls with something less polite than words."
Hunter's jaw tightened, but he didn't intervene. He had chosen his side, for now.
The councilor's eyes flicked to Susan, lingering on the bandages hidden beneath her coat. "You're bleeding out, girl. Do you really want to spend your last breaths threatening men who built this city?"
Susan dragged on her cigarette, exhaled smoke across the polished floor, and smiled thinly. "Better than spending them pretending to admire parasites."
Cain raised his hand—not to silence his crew, but to cut through the noise. His voice was level, stripped of anything but inevitability. "Ledger. Now."
The man in the dark suit tapped the table once. Two guards moved from the shadows, rifles raised. Their boots echoed against marble as they closed in.
Steve muttered under his breath, his fingers flicking across his device. "Give me ten seconds. I'll bleed every file in this room to the streets."
The guards advanced. Roselle's pistol cleared leather before the first could chamber a round. The crack of the shot snapped the air in two, glass humming in the aftermath. One guard dropped, weapon clattering.
The other froze, finger trembling on his trigger. Cain's blade was at his throat before he could finish the thought of firing.
The council chamber's silence was heavier than gunfire.
Cain turned his eyes back to the man in the dark suit. "You just lost your first layer of protection. How many more before you understand?"
The councilor's expression cracked—just slightly, enough for Cain to know he had drawn blood without cutting flesh.
Another councilor, older, thinner, spoke up at last. His voice was weary but sharp. "If you take the ledger, you'll see names you're not ready to face. Families. Allies. Enemies. Yours among them."
Cain tilted his blade just enough to draw a shallow line of blood on the guard's throat. "Then we'll be ready."
Steve's device beeped, its screen glowing green. He looked up, grin fierce. "Got it. Ledger's out. Every name. Every number. Whole city's got their eyes on it now."
For the first time, Cain saw real fear ripple across the councilors' faces. They weren't afraid of blades or bullets—they were afraid of exposure.
The ledger was no longer theirs. It belonged to the city.
And the city was awake.
Cain steadied his breathing as the elevator shaft shuddered behind them, echoing like a lung collapsing. The city's bones carried every vibration upward, a reminder that they were trespassers in a machine built to consume them.
Susan pressed a palm to her side, wincing, but her grin didn't falter. "We're making noise. That's good. Means they can't ignore us."
Roselle's eyes flicked across the corridor they had broken into, her pistol steady. "Noise attracts vultures. Let's not confuse chaos with cover."
Hunter's silence followed like a second shadow. His betrayal—if that's what Cain wanted to call it—still sat between them like an unburied corpse. Cain let it remain. The time to exhume it would come.
They moved deeper into the spire, the walls narrowing into a ribcage of steel and copper. Humming conduits ran above their heads, carrying the Grid's pulse upward to its control floors. Cain could feel it beneath his boots: a rhythm too precise to be natural, too alive to be mechanical.
Steve's voice broke through the static of the comm, clipped and rushed. "I'm seeing reroutes. They're shifting uplink paths to the upper grid. Whatever you did down there, it scared them. They're consolidating high."
Cain looked up, as though the steel above could become glass if he willed it. "Then that's where we cut next."
Hunter finally spoke, his tone gravel against silence. "You keep cutting without knowing what those lines feed. Half this city breathes because of those conduits."
Susan shot him a glare. "And the other half drowns because of them."
The corridor opened onto a mezzanine overlooking a vast atrium. Once, it might have been a lobby, filled with desks and officials. Now it was empty but for the banners hanging limp against the walls—symbols of the Daelmont family's reach. They stared down like witnesses.
Cain's jaw clenched. He remembered those banners in flame years ago, when he had thought he'd cut the family out of history. But history had teeth.
Roselle knelt by the edge, scanning the atrium floor. Her whisper was a razor. "Patrol. Four men, heavy rifles, sweep pattern. They're guarding something."
"Not guarding," Cain said. "Waiting."
The air thickened as if to prove him right. Across the atrium, a secondary elevator opened with a hiss. From it stepped not soldiers but suits—executives, men whose hands were clean in appearance but soaked in contracts. Behind them came escorts in reinforced armor.
Susan muttered, "Here comes the boardroom."
Cain's blade shifted in his grip, the weight of it speaking louder than any argument.
"Positions," he said.
And as the atrium lights flared brighter, the spire seemed to hold its breath.
The executives didn't shout or panic. They walked with the calm of men who had already bought the outcome. Cain read it in their eyes: certainty that contracts weighed more than steel. That certainty would break. He raised his blade higher, not just to fight, but to remind them the city still had teeth.
Or it wasn't.