In a fraction of a moment, half of the Lacquered Swan evaporated.

  The detonation punched through brick, timber, and plaster with the indifference of a god swatting a dollhouse. The blast wave hit the dining room horizontally, moving at a speed the human eye could not process—a wall of superheated air and fragmented masonry that turned the opulent interior into a kill box in less than a quarter of a second.

  The fireplace mantle disintegrated. The candelabras became shrapnel. The cream linen tablecloths ignited mid-flight, spinning through the air like burning flags. The grand bay windows on the far side of the restaurant imploded inward—not outward, inward—sucked back by the pressure differential before the overpressure caught up and blasted them out in a storm of razored glass that shredded the burgundy curtains to ribbons.

  Half the ceiling came down.

  It fell in slabs—thick, ornamental plaster and oak crossbeams that had held for a century surrendering in an instant. The massive wrought-iron chandelier, the pride of the establishment, swung once on its chain like a pendulum before the anchor bolt tore free, and it crashed onto the center of the dining room floor with a sound like a church bell striking the earth.

  The noise was not a single event. It was layered—the initial concussive crack of the detonation, followed immediately by the grinding, splintering roar of structural collapse, and beneath it all, a low, subsonic vibration that Thomas felt in his teeth and the marrow of his bones.

  Then silence.

  A single, ringing, impossible silence that lasted two heartbeats.

  Thomas groaned.

  His ears were screaming—a high, needling whine that drowned out everything. Dust filled his lungs, thick and chalky, tasting of powdered stone and something chemical. He was lying on top of Florence, his full weight pressing her into the hardwood, his arms still locked around her head.

  He rolled off.

  The movement was not gentle. It was the controlled, mechanical motion of a man whose body had been trained to function through concussive shock. He grabbed Florence by the collar of her plum dress and dragged her sideways—not standing, not crouching, but flat on his stomach, pulling her across the debris-strewn floor with one hand while the other swept broken glass from their path.

  A section of the bar counter had been blasted free from its moorings and now lay at an angle against the far wall, creating a triangle of dead space behind it. Thomas hauled Florence into the gap, pressing her back against the wall.

  "Don't move," he said. His voice was barely audible through the ringing, but the words were precise, clipped, and left no room for negotiation. "Stay down."

  Florence scrambled against the wall, pulling her knees to her chest. Her eyes were wide, pupils blown, dust caking the plum fabric of her dress. A chunk of plaster was caught in her hair, white against brown, and her hands were trembling so badly that the buttons on her cuffs rattled against each other like tiny, panicked teeth.

  She didn't notice whatever was stuck in her hair. She was staring at the restaurant.

  The Lacquered Swan was gone.

  What remained was a ruin. The left half of the building had been sheared away entirely, exposing the interior to the night sky like a wound. Where the wall and the private dining alcoves had been, there was now a jagged mouth of broken brick and twisted gas pipes, hissing faintly into the dark. The street beyond was visible through the gap—cobblestones, a shattered gas lamp, and the silhouette of buildings across the road, their windows dark and indifferent.

  Inside, the devastation was absolute. Tables were overturned, splintered, or simply missing. Chairs had been reduced to kindling. The oil painting of the stag hunt that had hung on the left wall was burning quietly in a corner, the gilded frame curling in the heat. Bodies lay in the wreckage—some moving, some not. The ma?tre d' was slumped against his podium, his tailcoat torn, his face a mask of blood. A woman in pearls was crawling toward the shattered front door, dragging a leg that bent at an angle legs were not meant to bend.

  Then came the screaming.

  It started low—a single, trembling moan from somewhere beneath a collapsed table—and spread like fire. Within seconds, the ruin was alive with it: the raw, animal sounds of people who had been sitting in candlelight thirty seconds ago and were now buried in rubble with broken bones and perforated eardrums. A man was calling a name, over and over, his voice rising in pitch each time it went unanswered. A child was wailing—a thin, piercing note that cut through the dust like a blade.

  Then another sound cut through it all.

  "Kill them all!"

  The voice was loud, confident, and utterly devoid of hesitation. It carried through the breach in the wall with the practiced projection of a man accustomed to shouting orders over chaos.

  "Every single person in this building! Do not let a single soul leave alive! Check the bodies!"

  Figures poured through the gap. They moved in a loose, practiced formation—not military, but not amateur either. The gait of men who had done violence before and had made peace with it.

  Gunfire.

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  The first shot was a flat, percussive crack that echoed off the exposed brickwork. It was followed by a second. A third. They were not aimed at threats. They were aimed at the wounded.

  Executions.

  A man in a torn evening jacket, crawling toward the door with both hands pressed to a bleeding stomach wound, jerked once and went still. A woman who had been screaming stopped screaming. The shots were methodical, unhurried, and accompanied by the steady crunch of boots on broken glass.

  "Thomas," Florence whispered, her voice small and shaking. "What's happening? What's—"

  Thomas didn't answer.

  He was peering over the edge of the bar counter, his head barely clearing the mahogany lip, his eyes narrowed to slits against the dust.

  He counted.

  Eleven.

  There were eleven of them, spreading through the wreckage like wolves through a sheep pen. They moved in pairs—one scanning, one executing—with the ease of men who had rehearsed this. All of them were armed. Most carried revolvers or repeating rifles, handled with the casual competence of regular use. One—a broad-shouldered figure near the breach—was holding a fire axe, the blade already dark and wet.

  Their clothing was mismatched. Some wore the roughspun wool and heavy boots of working men—dockworkers, factory hands, the kind of faces that disappeared into any crowd in the Iron Ward. Others were more refined—waistcoats, polished shoes, the attire of clerks or minor professionals. One was wearing what appeared to be a priest's cassock, the midnight blue fabric dusted white with plaster.

  But one thing was uniform across all eleven.

  Burlap sacks, pulled tight over their heads, the fabric cinched at the neck. The eyeholes were crudely cut, jagged ovals that revealed nothing but shadow. And on the center of each forehead, painted in thick, crude strokes of white pigment, was a single symbol.

  A stylized globe, bisected by a vertical line.

  Thomas watched one of them—a man in dock boots with a rifle slung over his shoulder—walk up to a waiter who was trying to crawl behind an overturned table. The waiter was young, barely older than Florence, his white shirt soaked red on one side. He raised a trembling hand.

  The cultist whipped the rifle from his shoulder, catching the grip in a fluid, practiced arc. He didn't bother to shoulder it. The muzzle flashed from the hip, and the waiter’s head snapped back with a wet, thick crunch, spraying bone across the floorboards.

  Thomas pulled back behind cover. His jaw was clenched so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek. Something behind his eyes had changed—a fundamental reorganization of priorities that happened in the span of a single breath.

  "Great Earth," he muttered, the name leaving his lips like a curse.

  He looked back at Florence. She was pressed against the wall, her hands clamped over her mouth, her body shaking. She had heard the shots. She had heard the screams cut short.

  Anger flared in Thomas's chest—hot, clean, and utterly selfish. This was supposed to be a good night. This was supposed to be the night he'd been saving for, planning for, looking forward to for months. Listening to Florence complain about the prices. Watching her try marrow for the first time. Walking her back to Mrs. Gable's under the gas lamps, talking about nothing, making up for lost time. That was the evening.

  Instead, his evening had been ruined by manic cultists blowing holes in restaurants and executing waiters. On his day off.

  Thomas needed to do something.

  He grabbed Florence by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. His grip was firm but not painful—the hands of a man who knew exactly how much pressure to apply.

  "Florence. Look at me."

  Her eyes found his. They were glassy with shock.

  "Promise me you will sit tight," Thomas said. His voice was low, steady, and stripped of every ounce of warmth it had carried five minutes ago. "You will not move. No matter what you hear, no matter what happens, you will stay behind this cover. Do you understand?"

  Florence nodded. A jerky, mechanical motion.

  "Say it."

  "I understand," Florence whispered.

  "Good."

  The transition was instantaneous.

  One moment, Thomas Bannerman was a man holding his sister's shoulders with gentle hands and worried eyes. The next, he was something else entirely. The warmth vacated his face as completely as if it had been drained through a valve. His posture shifted—spine straightening, shoulders squaring, his center of gravity dropping two inches into a combat-ready stance. His eyes went flat and cold, the pupils contracting to black points in dark grey irises that suddenly looked less like a brother's eyes and more like a predator's.

  He reached under his left arm and drew the heavy service revolver from the shoulder holster beneath his trench coat. It was a brutal piece of engineering—matte steel, six-round cylinder, the barrel thick enough to double as a club. He thumbed the hammer back with a click that was, in the context of the screaming and gunfire, almost intimate.

  Thomas vaulted over the bar counter.

  He landed in a crouch, scanned right, locked on.

  A cultist—burlap sack, dock boots, rifle in hand—was standing over a woman and a child. The woman was shielding the girl with her body, both of them pressed into the corner where the wall met the floor. The cultist was raising his rifle, the barrel dipping toward the back of the woman's skull.

  Thomas fired.

  The shot was clean. It entered the burlap sack an inch above the left eyehole and exited through the back in a mist of red. The cultist's head snapped sideways, his body following a half-second later, collapsing onto the debris in a boneless heap. The rifle clattered against stone.

  The woman screamed, scrambling backward, dragging the child with her, leaving a smear of someone else's blood across the floor.

  The remaining cultists froze.

  It lasted exactly one second—the collective, involuntary pause of men who had expected sheep and encountered a wolf. Ten burlap hoods turned toward the sound.

  Thomas did not wait for them to process it.

  He shifted his aim three degrees left and squeezed the trigger again.

  A second cultist—the one in the priest's cassock—dropped. The round caught him center mass, punching through the sternum. He folded at the waist like a man bowing to an audience and hit the floor face-first.

  "D.A.A. SCUM!" one of them screamed—the one with the axe, his voice muffled and ragged through the burlap. He had spotted the silver eye on Thomas's collar, glinting in the firelight of the burning painting. "It's a bloody Inspector! Split! Split! Kaine, Doyle, Mercer—handle him! The rest of you, finish the job! No one leaves this building!"

  The pack divided with a fluidity that spoke of drilling. Eight cultists peeled toward the remaining survivors—the wounded, the trapped, the cowering. Three turned on Thomas with weapons raised.

  Thomas was already moving.

  "What the hell is wrong with these people," he muttered through gritted teeth, his boots finding purchase on the rubble as he broke into a sprint.