“I never talk about my work, sir. Not to anyone.” Karel answered in a tone flat enough to sound like professional discretion, not a veiled threat. Even though in his head, the sentence felt like a joke only he understood.
The Don laughed again, more briefly this time, then looked around at his Capos as if challenging them to be as calm as this new Cleaner. “Hear that? That’s what I like about people like him. He doesn’t pretend to be part of the family, and he doesn’t stick his nose into business that isn’t his. Unlike some of you.” His jab landed squarely on the scar-jawed man from earlier, who this time chose to lower his head to the folder in front of him, pretending to be busy.
The tension in the room rose another notch, obvious even to someone who couldn’t read sigil circuitry. Karel filed that detail away too—who had been targeted, who had lowered his head, and who was secretly smiling at the sight of a colleague being humiliated. Internal politics like this, he knew from experience, always made the easiest opening to exploit later.
The meeting broke up in the distinctive manner of a room full of people who didn’t trust one another: everyone stood almost at once, but no one truly wanted to be the first to leave, as if turning one’s back on the table were an open invitation to be stabbed.
Beside him, a young Capo whispered to his companion, “I heard he used to clean crime scenes in Kartel Sangker territory. He came here because they pay better.” The other merely snorted, not really caring. To them, a new Cleaner was just part of the building’s furnishings—present, useful, and best left unnoticed. Exactly what Karel wanted.
Karel moved last, deliberately slowing his pace as he pretended to straighten the folder of documents he was carrying.
His eyes flicked to the Don’s desk—long enough to catch a single document lying half-covered by another folder, brief enough that no one noticed him looking.
In the document’s lower corner, scratched in tiny letters, almost like an accidental doodle, was a symbol.
Karel stopped breathing for a fraction of a second.
He knew that symbol. Not from a book, not from anyone’s story—but from the fragment of a sigil still kept in the small box in his room, the object he had stared at hundreds of times in the dark since that night in Karangbraja. The exact same symbol.
He forced his expression to remain blank, bowed once more toward the Don, who was no longer paying attention to him, and walked out of the room with a stride that looked perfectly ordinary to anyone watching.
Inside, something in his chest pulsed far harder than usual.
He made his way along the glass corridor toward the elevator, passing the tall windows that showed all of Murniarta spread out below like a gigantic circuit board. Every building, every streetlamp, every dark corner where crime hid—all of it looked so small from this height. He paused for a moment in front of one of the windows, letting his own reflection overlap the cityscape behind it.
For years, he had imagined this moment would feel like victory. Finding the first real clue, not just a suspicion or an instinct. But what he felt now was more complicated than that. The cold at his fingertips. His heartbeat refusing to slow. And beneath it all, something almost like fear: that this symbol was only the first door of many, and that behind it might be a truth heavier than he could bear.
The elevator opened. Karel stepped inside, pressed the button for the ground floor, and watched his own reflection in the slowly closing metal doors.
The face looking back at him was calm, as usual.
But behind the dark-amethyst lens hanging from his neck, something had just begun to move. A plan not yet fully formed, but with its direction clear enough: he had to get closer to the Don. Closer to that document.
And for that, he needed a legitimate reason to be in places he should never have been allowed to reach. The perfect starting point, he thought, was already waiting in the west wing—the place the Don himself had just sent him to.