Chapter 658 | This Conversation is For You

Chapter 658: 658 | This Conversation is For You

"I stayed put. At the desk. Filing the raccoon report."

"And then?"

"And then I went for a run, because my girlfriend texted me and asked why my heart rate spiked, and I told her I went for a run."

Dralun’s eyes were brown and flat and patient. He had interrogated people for eleven years. He had interrogated people who could bench-press city buses and people who could set fire to concrete with their thoughts. I was an eighteen-year-old provisional student in borrowed boots who smelled like strawberry lip gloss and guilt.

"You went for a run."

"I went for a run."

"On the rooftops."

"I didn’t say that."

"You didn’t have to." He straightened up and rolled his shoulders, and something in his spine cracked loud enough to make a pigeon on the fire escape take off. "The Eastside has had a shadow on the rooftops for about a year now. Runs fast. Leaves no prints. Shows up at places the Commission doesn’t care about and fixes problems the ranking system doesn’t reward."

I said nothing. The second heartbeat pressed against my ribs, slow and curious.

"Some people think it’s a vigilante. Some people think it’s a ghost. Mrs. Petrosyan thinks it’s her dead husband coming back to check on the cats." Dralun started walking again, and I fell into step beside him because what else was I going to do. "I think it’s a girl who grew up on this block and still can’t let go of it, and I think she has more heart than sense and more sense than training."

"You know who she is."

"I know who everyone is, Belmont. This is my district." He stopped at the corner and looked down at me. "What I don’t know is why an Eastside thief would steal a bag of jewelry from a man she’s been robbing for months and then leave ninety percent of it sitting on his desk like a gift."

The sun came out from behind a cloud. The steel caps of my borrowed boots caught the light and threw it back at us.

"Maybe she had a change of heart."

"She doesn’t have change-of-heart nights. She has productive nights and disaster nights, and last night was neither." Dralun’s tail swung once behind him, slow and heavy. "Last night, somebody talked her into something she wouldn’t have done on her own."

"That sounds like a lot of speculation for a nine-word report."

"The nine-word report was for Steele. This conversation is for you." He put one scaled hand on my shoulder, and the weight of it pressed down through the borrowed boots and into the concrete. "I’m not asking what you did last night, Belmont. I’m telling you what I know, and I’m telling you that if you get that girl killed, I will hold you personally responsible in ways the Commission doesn’t have paperwork for."

I met his eyes. The brown was darker up close, and the intelligence behind it was older than I had been giving him credit for.

"I don’t intend to get anyone killed."

"Nobody ever intends it." He took his hand off my shoulder and stepped back. "Wednesday night. Halverson and Fourth. There’s a bodega on the corner with a green awning that says MIGUEL’S even though Miguel died in 2019 and his daughter runs it now."

I didn’t flinch. My face didn’t move. The Oracle Feed stayed quiet because there was nothing to read except the fact that a dragon had just told me he knew exactly where I was planning to be in two days.

"Jade hairpin. Belonged to a woman named Socorro Vega, who lost it when her daughter pawned it to pay for a phone bill three months ago." Dralun turned and started walking back toward Lin’s. "Kask bought it for forty dollars and put it in his window for eight hundred. The daughter cries about it every time she comes into Lin’s for dumplings."

"How do you know all of this?"

"Because I pay attention, Belmont. Because this is my block, and everybody on it is my responsibility, including the ones who break the law and the ones who help them." He didn’t look back. "If somebody wanted to fix that situation without Kask filing another insurance claim, they would need to be smart about it. Smarter than whoever left gum in a door latch."

I followed him back to Lin’s without saying anything else. The boots were starting to blister at the heel, and I welcomed the pain because it gave me something to focus on besides the fact that my cover had lasted approximately four days before the local dragon figured out everything except the mask.

Grandma Lin looked up when we came through the door. She said something short and sharp in Cantonese, and Dralun answered in the same language, which surprised me enough that I stopped in the doorway.

"She says you walk too loud in those boots and you’ll scare the customers." Dralun grabbed his coffee from the counter where it had been sitting since we left. "I told her you’ll break them in by Wednesday."

He went up the stairs without looking back.

I stood in Lin’s restaurant with steel-capped boots that didn’t fit and a surveillance network I hadn’t asked for, and I understood for the first time that Dralun’s district wasn’t just the buildings and the stoops and the broken parking meters. It was the people. All of them. Including the snake girl with the strawberry lip gloss, and now including me.

The interface chimed.

ADVISORY: The local Hero is aware of a scheduled operation. This awareness could be interpreted as tacit approval, obstruction, or entrapment. Recommend confirming his intent before proceeding.

I closed the notification and went upstairs to file the raccoon report.

The next two days passed in a blur of incident reports and burnt coffee and Ophelia’s ongoing point system, which I was losing badly. Monday afternoon brought a noise complaint on Delancey that turned out to be two elderly sisters arguing about whose turn it was to water the plants. Tuesday morning brought a shoplifter at the bodega on Fourth, a kid maybe thirteen who had stolen a bag of chips and a can of energy drink and who cried when Dralun sat him down on the curb and asked if he was eating enough at home.

I watched Dralun work. I watched him crouch on sidewalks and lean against doorframes and sit on stoops with people who had nothing to offer him except their problems. He never raised his voice. He never made a show of his strength. He just showed up, every time, and he fixed what he could fix and remembered what he couldn’t.

Tuesday night, I sat at my desk and stared at the Halverson Street map I had pulled up on my laptop. The bodega with the green awning was six blocks from Lin’s. The fire escapes on that stretch were old but solid, and the camera coverage was thin because the city had never bothered to upgrade it.

The Faceless Veil would handle the rest.