Page 22 of Crown of Ash

He looked at the lot.

He looked at all of it.

Zain was at the gate, watching the street. Seth was still at the quarter panel, had a round in his hand now, was looking at it with the expression of someone running math. Trip stood ten feet to Marcus's left with his arms loose at his sides, weight settled back on his heels, not watching the street, watching Marcus.

And across Second Street, lights had come on.

Not all of them. Three windows in the building on the corner, residential, the curtains wrong for a storefront. One more on the second floor of the narrow house that had no business still being occupied given what the city had done to this block, but was. Marcus could see a shape at that window. Someone standing back from the glass far enough to think they weren't visible.

He looked at the lit windows and his hand curled once against his thigh, an old tell he thought he'd trained out of himself years ago, and opened again. The ground different under his feet than it had been thirty seconds ago.

This was not the rest of Detroit. The people still here had learned which sounds to sleep through and which ones to file away, and the neighborhood had taught them well. But this had been a firefight. Glass in the street, two men down, four more converging on a parking lot at seven in the evening. That was not something anyone left on this block could choose not to have seen.

Sirens. Distant. Could be anything….

Could be anything.

Zain had already heard them. Marcus watched him turn his head toward the sound and then back to Marcus, asking the question without asking it.

The cat and mouse was over.

He'd known it was coming. He'd just refused to act on it until tonight forced his hand.

Jack had been in that car. Elijah's clavicle had a bullet in it or through it or past it, and Nate was re-packing a wound that had already bled through twice. Jude had a photo of himself on a screen somewhere in Drakov's operation. Jaz had heard his real name come out of a stranger's mouth in an elite, protected, members only club and hadn't known why until afterward.

This wasn't potential anymore.

Marcus had people. Not law enforcement, not institutions that needed three signatures and a warrant before they could move. The kind of people whose whole architecture was premised on moving when the official world failed. He'd built Lakefront into something that could call those people. He'd been careful about it, strategic, deployed the connection like a last resort because it was, because once you brought in those forces from the shadows, you did not un-bring them… And debts would be held to account.

It was time.

The sirens were closer. Zain's jaw had set. Trip hadn't moved.

"We're done running plays," Marcus said. Level. The voice he used when a decision had been made, the luxury of hesitation behind them. "Get him ready to move. I need five minutes."

Nobody asked for clarification.

He walked to the far end of the lot and stood in the dark past the sodium lamp's reach, the chemical smell of the water table in his throat and the city humming its low constant note around him, sirens threading through it now like a needle pulling thread, and he took his phone out and looked at it.

It was time to gather his war council… and tally what it would cost his broken soul later.

The phone was warm in his hand from the last call.

Marcus stood at the chain-link fence at the far end of the lot and looked at the screen and did not dial. Not yet. He could hear Nate behind him, the low murmur of instructions he was giving Elijah, something about keeping the arm still, and he could hear Zain's boots on the gravel, tight short circuits of movement that meant Zain was holding something in that wanted out. The sirens had not gotten closer in the last ninety seconds. That was not reassurance. That was a window.

He thought about Andre. It was probably Ghost rerouting them, because that was the work he did, but he couldn't help but think of Andre anyway.

Not strategically. Not the case, not the task force, not the leverage Andre's position gave them or didn't give them or had already cost them. He thought about the way Andre had picked up the phone that first call, the flat two-second pause before he said Marcus's name, the sound of a man who knew what was coming and was going to take the call anyway. He thought about the second call, the warmth Andre hadn't tried to hide, that had come through the line and landed below Marcus's sternum and stayed there for three days after.

He did not call Andre.

He scrolled past the name without stopping on it and found the one he wanted and pressed dial.

It rang four times. Then a voice, male, unhurried, four rings and no fumbling for the phone in the dark.

"Whitfield."

"I need a meeting," Marcus said. "Not a call. In person, forty-eight hours."