Chapter 97: The Hunt Begins
Liam woke to the same thin gold line of light across the ceiling, and for a moment didn’t move. Just looked at the ceiling
A soft chime broke it.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Reward Issued: $500,000
Nothing else. No confirmation, no closing summary, no option to review. It simply stopped there .He stared at the ceiling a moment longer, waiting for more to follow. Nothing did.
He sat up, dressed, and didn’t check his phone this time. There wasn’t room for that this morning.
He packed the small bag he’d learned to keep ready two changes of clothes, a charger, nothing that would slow him down if he needed to leave a room in under a minute and left before housekeeping’s cart reached his floor.
Across the city, Derek stood at the head of a folding table in the warehouse’s second floor, three men seated in front of him, none of them the ones from the alley. Fresh faces. Cleaner hands.
"Forget Claire," he said, sliding a printed photo across the table Liam, caught mid-conversation outside the café, grabbed off some old delivery footage nobody had thought to scrub. "Our priority is Liam Sterling."
One of the men picked up the photo, studied it without much interest. "Who is he?"
"Doesn’t matter who he is. Matters what he is." Derek’s voice stayed level, "Where he sleeps. Whether he’s got protection, armed or otherwise. Whether anyone with real money is backing him. And the cleanest way to remove him without it becoming a story anyone tells twice."
"Elimination, then. Not a snatch."
"Elimination." Derek didn’t blink saying it. "The boss doesn’t want a third mistake explained to him. He wants a problem that stops existing."
The men exchanged a glance but didn’t argue. Nobody at that table ever argued with Derek about scope. That wasn’t the job.
The first report came back within a few hours, and it wasn’t the one Derek expected.
"He doesn’t have a house," one of the men said, flipping through a thin folder that should have been thicker by now.
"He doesn’t?"
"No fixed address anywhere. No lease under his name, nothing at the county level, nothing on utilities either."
"Where does he sleep, then."
"Hotels. Different ones. He doesn’t repeat the same place twice in a week that we can find, and he pays in advance, cash where he can manage it." The man closed the folder. "No routine we’ve been able to map."
Derek’s expression hardened immediately."He’s already acting like someone expecting to be hunted."
Nobody at the table answered that, because there wasn’t really an answer to give. A guy who used to run a gaming café didn’t need instincts like that.
He didn’t put two trained men on the ground in under a minute, either, and yet here they all were, three grown men with resources and time, chasing a shadow that kept refusing to sit still.
"Widen it," Derek said. "The café. Whoever’s running it day to day now. Someone there will know his patterns even if he doesn’t leave any on paper."
The man they sent was unremarkable on purpose mid-thirties, plain jacket.
He came in out of the rain, shook the water off his shoulders, and paid for an hour on one of the open rigs like anyone else.
He waited for a lull, watched the rhythm of the place a moment the rows of monitor. and let the question drop the way a customer might drop any other small talk.
"Does Liam still come around here?" Ethan glanced up from the front desk, shrugged easily. "Sometimes."
"Know when? Wanted to say hey, haven’t seen him in a while."
"Couldn’t tell you when. He’s not really on a schedule anymore."
Ethan said it without a second thought, already turning to reset a booking on the terminal, already calling out a station number to a customer waiting near the door.
The man logged off his rig at an unhurried pace, and walked back out into the rain.
Ethan frowned after the door swung shut behind him.
Strange question, coming from someone he didn’t recognize as a regular most regulars who asked about Liam at least knew enough to ask about the café itself, not just him.
He shrugged it off a second later and went back to work, the thought already sliding toward the back of his mind.
Rowena called instead of texting, which told Liam something before she’d said a word.
"Someone’s asking about you," she said,
"Asking what."
From what I can tell. You. Just you. Where you are. Who’s around you."
Liam sat with that for a second, the hotel room suddenly a little smaller than it had been a minute ago. Rain streaked the window behind the curtain, blurring the street below into smears of gray and headlight.This is a problem.
Rowena agreed. Yea a big one at that."You know who."
"Not yet. "Watch every direction, Liam. Not just the one you think it’s coming from."
She ended the call before he could ask anything else, the same way she always did when there was nothing more useful left to say.
He sat holding the phone a while after, listening to the rain instead of the silence.The report reached Derek two days later.
"Boss. We finally caught him checking into a hotel this morning. He’s still there."
Derek took the slip of paper, read the address once, said nothing for a long moment. Two days, three watchers, a dozen hotels crossed off before this one turned up anything and even now...
"Good."
He set it down, folded his hands, and looked at the three men waiting for the rest of it.
"No guns," he said. "No witnesses. No mistakes."
He looked once more at the photo still sitting on the table Liam mid-sentence, unaware, ordinary. An easy face to underestimate. Derek, of all people, knew better than that by now.
"By tomorrow, Liam Sterling dies in an accident." Outside the warehouse, rain kept falling, thin and steady against the roof.