Ice water flooded Sheena’s veins. He was right. She had been aggregating data, cross-referencing phone logs, visitation records, and financial patterns of her parolees. She thought she was just being thorough. She had stumbled, blindly, onto the periphery of something vast.

Sheena Ryder had spent twenty years building a fortress. Not of stone and mortar, but of spreadsheets, signatures, and silence. As the senior parole officer for District 9, she had seen every sob story, every tearful promise, every desperate lie. She had long since stopped believing in redemption. Her world was black and white: compliance or violation, freedom or cage.

"No," she said, her voice quiet, clear, and cold as the river outside. "You're going to let him go. Then you're going to kill me. Because if you don't, I'm going to spend every last day of my life making sure that tattoo on your neck becomes your autopsy ID."

Three men stood around him. They weren't thugs. They wore clean, dark clothes. Their stillness was professional. The one in the middle, a bald man with a serpent tattoo coiling up his neck, smiled as Sheena’s flashlight beam caught him.

She looked at him. Really looked. Past the bruises, past the file she'd memorized. He gave her the tiniest shake of his head. Don't.