Christine knew she was breaking rule one.

  Couriers didn’t go back.Once a package was delivered, the route was burned. The job ended. The slate cleared. You didn’t follow up. You didn’t ask questions. You didn’t poke around the corpse of the trail hoping to find meaning.

  You walked away.

  But the SED hadn’t come after the delivery.

  They’d come after her.

  So here she was, boots crunching quietly over broken glass and ivy-cracked stone, retracing her own steps through the edge of Sector 9-B, back to the warehouse vault.

  The door was still closed, its ancient frame untouched. No fresh locks that she could see. No clear evidence of tampering—just a stillness that felt too deliberate.

  That felt worse than a crime scene.

  She crouched near the frame, ran her hand just above the glyph-carved threshold. Nothing sparked. But her skin still tingled. Like something was waiting just behind the silence.

  Christine reached into her coat for the backup key. Not the iron one—this was a rune-etched skeleton glyph, tuned to disruption patterns and old vault echo signatures.

  She pressed it to the lock.

  Click.

  The door opened.

  Inside, the air was stale and cold. Exactly as she’d left it.

  And yet it felt wrong—like something had been here, and left without disturbing the dust.

  She stepped inside—

  —and immediately stopped.

  Because someone else was already there.

  A woman stood near the pedestal, back to the door, one gloved hand resting lightly on its edge.She was tall, sharp-shouldered, dressed in matte black with a faint shimmer around her like heat off pavement. Her presence didn’t shout, but it hummed—tightly wound, contained, dangerous in a way that didn’t need weapons to get its point across.

  Christine’s courier instinct fired immediately: wrong posture for a client, too confident for a scavenger, and definitely not SED. No insignia. No backup.

  And yet... she didn’t feel like prey.

  Christine’s voice came low, even. “That’s private property.”

  The woman didn’t flinch.

  “You’re not supposed to be here either,” she said, her voice carrying a soft Southern-belle lilt beneath the professional edge—like honey wrapped around razor wire.

  Christine took a step closer. “This a contract job?”

  “No.” The woman turned. Her eyes caught the low light—bright, strange, too clear. “More like a... personal audit.”

  Christine narrowed her eyes. “You always audit sealed vaults in the middle of the night?”

  The woman offered the faintest of smiles. “Only when I’m told not to.”

  Christine’s heartbeat kicked once, hard.

  She didn’t know this woman—but she recognized the shape of her. Someone who read fine print for a living. Someone who'd been behind the curtain and decided to come out anyway.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The woman nodded once, polite.

  “You’re the courier.”

  Christine felt the hairs at the back of her neck rise. Not from fear—exactly—but recognition. She had heard of Marigold Vexley before. Not by name. By reputation. The kind of stories couriers swapped over cheap ramen and reinforced coffee in the dead hours. A Contract Enforcer who walked legal tightropes like they were tightropes she'd strung herself. Most just called her the Clause Widow—a nickname earned from the trail of broken oaths and terminated agreements left in her wake.It made sense now. The confidence. The edge. The way she said 'audit' like it came with a scalpel.

  The Legal Division wasn’t just a bureaucracy—it was the spine of Night Haven’s entire system. In a city that ran on ancient agreements, forgotten pacts, and contracts written in blood and starlight, Legal was the only thing keeping the chaos stitched together. They didn’t enforce laws; they enforced promises. And when those promises started to unravel, they sent people like Marigold.

  Mari turned the scorched chit over in her palm, holding it to the charm light again. The rune flickered weakly—more reactive residue than functional glyph.

  “This wasn’t supposed to survive,” she murmured.

  Christine folded her arms, eyes scanning the pedestal. “You said it’s not a courier sigil. But it was attached to a contract?”

  Mari nodded. “A secondary tether. Meant to activate in proximity to a specific artifact. Or recipient.”

  “Failsafe?”

  “Breadcrumb,” Mari said. “A bad one.”

  Christine frowned. “What kind of contract uses Dreamborn runes and buries the metadata?”

  Mari didn’t answer immediately. She tucked the chit into a lead-lined pouch and slipped it into her coat, then met Christine’s eyes.

  “One that violates three sections of the Haven Pact and at least two legacy oaths.”

  Christine’s stomach tightened.

  “So,” she said, voice dry, “that’s a yes.”

  Mari let out a slow breath. “I need to dig. Backchannel a few threads and see who ghosted the contract logs. Might take a day, maybe more.”

  Christine gave a slow nod. “I’ve got someone I need to find too. My handler—he’s gone dark. That’s not like him.”Mari’s brow arched faintly. “You trust him?”

  “More than I trust whoever’s scrubbing vault records.”

  They stood there in mutual silence for a long moment—two people in the eye of a storm they hadn’t seen coming.

  “Good luck, courier,” Mari said at last.

  Christine tipped her head. “You too, Clause Widow.”

  That got a real smile out of Mari—sharp-edged, but honest.

  They parted without another word.