Urgent
He'd worked it out lying next to Suyin, staring at the ceiling while she slept, the pieces he'd been circling for days finally locking together all at once. It hit him so hard he sat straight up in bed.
He needed Reiner. Now.
He grabbed his coat and dug through the pockets for the small mirror-glass device he used to send urgent messages, the kind only a handful of people in this city carried. His hands shook as he worked it. It took four tries before Reiner's sleepy voice finally answered.
"This had better be good," Reiner mumbled.
"I need into the Smilar estate. Tonight. Right now." The Hummingbird kept his voice low, careful not to wake Suyin. "It's urgent, Reiner. More urgent than anything I've ever asked you for."
There was a pause, then a long sigh. "One of your clients again? Fine. I'll send word ahead so the gate doesn't turn you away." Reiner didn't ask what it was about. He never did, not really, not when the Hummingbird's voice carried this particular edge to it. "Go. I'll handle it from my end."
The Hummingbird ended the call and was already pulling his shirt on before he'd fully processed how fast that had actually gone.
Suyin stirred, propping herself up on one elbow, watching him dress with a look that asked more questions than her mouth did. "Where are you going?"
"I have to see the Smilar family. Tonight." He pulled his boots on, hands still not quite steady. "I'll explain later. I promise."
She didn't argue. She never did, not when he looked like this. She simply watched him finish dressing, her dark eyes following him all the way to the door, some quiet worry sitting behind them that she didn't voice out loud.
"Be careful," she said instead.
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"Always am." It wasn't true, and they both knew it wasn't true, but she let him have the lie anyway, and he was gone a moment later, down the stairs and out through the brothel's side door into a night still fully dark, the estate a long way off and no cab in sight at this hour.
So he ran.
He kept a hard pace through street after street, his lungs burning, his coat flapping open behind him, cutting through alleys where he could to shave off distance. He didn't stop to think about how it looked, a grown man in a fine coat sprinting through the noble district before dawn. There wasn't time to care.
He was three streets from the estate gates when he turned a corner and nearly ran straight into them. A line of black vehicles sat idling outside a townhouse he recognized as one of Liu Teng's properties — SUVs, Range Rovers, six of them at least, engines running, headlights cutting hard lines through the dark. Men poured out of the front doors in tight, practiced groups, moving with the kind of grim, focused energy that told him immediately this wasn't a social call. Guns. He saw guns, held low and ready, tucked under coats that weren't quite doing their job of hiding them.
A couple walking home from a late dinner passed by on the opposite pavement, glancing over without much concern. "That's just Liu Teng's men," the woman said to her companion, casual, unbothered. "Keeps this whole street safer than anywhere else in the city, having them around."
The Hummingbird didn't slow down long enough to correct her. He kept moving, angling wide around the vehicles, his heart hammering now for reasons that had nothing to do with the running.
He caught one last glimpse over his shoulder as he passed. Liu Teng himself, stepping into the lead SUV, his long grey hair loose down his back, his face set in an expression the Hummingbird had never once seen on him before. Not anger. Not grief. Something colder than both, something final, the look of a man who had already made his decision and was simply walking now toward the part where he carried it out.
The doors slammed shut in quick succession. The convoy pulled away from the curb, engines snarling low, and turned out onto the main road, heading away from the noble district entirely, down toward the poorer streets, the older streets, the parts of the city where nobody bothered building anything worth looking at twice.
The Hummingbird stood frozen for exactly one second, watching the taillights shrink into the dark.
Then he ran faster than he had all night, because he understood, with a cold certainty settling deep in his stomach, exactly what direction those cars were headed, and exactly who might be waiting for them at the end of that road.