Every crusade begins with a wound.
For Sergeant Marcus Allen, it wasn't a bullet or a blade—it was the cold silence of two folded flags and the lies written in a police report.
He grew up believing the system was built to protect the innocent.
Then it murdered his parents and told him it was justice.
Now, beneath the uniform and the commendations lies a man not seeking peace… but the truth.
This is where his war begins—not on the streets, but in the shadows behind the badge.
And he will burn every rule to expose the one man who taught him what justice really costs.
———————————————————
2005
The rain had come suddenly—slanting sheets that pattered against the bedroom window like fingernails tapping at the glass.
It was a soft sound, really. Gentle to most ears. But not to Marcus Allen.
To him, it was a ghost.
He sat cross-legged on the windowsill of his small bedroom in Aunt Laverne's two-story brownstone, staring down at the empty Brooklyn street below.
Raindrops coursed down the pane like tears no one dared to shed. His forehead leaned against the cool glass, fogging the view with each exhale.
The street was quiet. No sirens. No shouting. Just the endless rhythm of rainfall striking pavement, rooftops, gutters.
It sounded just like that night.
He was six when it happened, but memory didn't care about age. Memory dug in with claws. It clawed at you in silence.
When your guard was down. When the house was too still. When the rain came.
"I hate the rain."
Marcus's fingers curled into the sleeves of his oversized hoodie—his father's, faded navy with the NYPD emblem cracked and frayed.
He refused to grow out of it. It smelled of dust and old leather and something faintly metallic.
Maybe from the storage box, maybe just from time.
The room was dim. A single lamp hummed in the corner, casting a faint cone of light across his desk cluttered with papers, half-filled notebooks, and a plastic bag containing remnants of a life extinguished too soon.
Aunt Laverne tried. She really did. She made meals. She hugged him, sometimes. She reminded him to drink water, to eat, to shower.
But she was always tired. Twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, sometimes six days a week.
Her hands trembled when she poured her coffee in the morning.
Her voice rasped from overuse. And she had two other mouths to feed—Jaylen and Sasha, younger than him, louder than him. Normal.
"I don't feel normal."
He pulled his knees tighter to his chest, resting his chin on them, eyes heavy-lidded.
The rainfall continued, and with it came the creeping weight in his chest, like cold iron shackled to his ribs.
Across the room, beneath his twin bed, a shoebox sat like a relic.
Marcus glanced toward it, knowing exactly what it contained. He slipped off the windowsill and padded barefoot across the creaky wood floor, each step soft as if he feared waking ghosts.
Kneeling, he pulled the box free and set it on the bed.
He opened it slowly, reverently.
Inside were fragments.
A dog-eared family photo—his mother in her dress blues, badge polished to a mirror; his father beside her, arm around her waist.
He looked like a mountain in uniform—broad-shouldered, solid, indestructible.
"They were supposed to be indestructible."
There were medals—Bronze Star, Meritorious Service, commendations from the NYPD and some military unit Marcus didn't recognize. Each one gleamed like a lie.
Underneath the medals sat the real prize. A battered manila folder, corners curled, the cover stamped in faded red:
"OPERATION LODESTAR: CLASSIFIED (REDACTED)"
Marcus ran his fingers across the text, lips pressed into a line. He didn't understand half of what was inside.
Maybe not even a quarter. The folder smelled faintly of mildew and old smoke.
Its contents were printed in military jargon, typed reports full of acronyms and codes he couldn't decipher.
But he read them anyway.
Night after night.
Words blurred together: "Logistical transfer anomalies… Priority shipment diverted… Suspected arms irregularity… Chain of command discrepancy…"
And again, and again, the same name typed in clean block letters:
"Harold Allen"
"Evelyn Allen"
"My parents found something. Something they weren't supposed to."
But who killed them? Why?
The official report said "robbery gone wrong." That was the lie.
Even at six, Marcus knew it was a lie. Their badges were found intact. Wallets untouched.
The safe unopened. His father had still been holding his sidearm. But it hadn't been fired.
"Who walks into the home of two trained officers and takes them both out without a struggle?"
"Who silences them and walks away clean?"
His fingers trembled as he turned a page in the file. More redacted text. More black bars over names, dates, weapon types.
"What were you two chasing?'
He closed the file gently, almost with guilt. As if he could feel their eyes watching.
There was a knock at the door—soft, tired.
Aunt Laverne's voice followed. "Marcus, honey? You eat?"
He hesitated.
"Yeah."
She waited a second. "You sure?"
He glanced at the untouched plate on his desk—now cold spaghetti and sauce turning orange at the edges.
"I'm not hungry," he muttered.
A pause. "Alright, baby. Just… get some sleep soon, okay? It's late."
"Okay."
She didn't press further. He heard her shuffle down the hallway, her slippers brushing against the carpet.
Then the light switch clicked in the hallway. Darkness returned.
Marcus lay back on the bed, the folder still beside him. He stared up at the cracked ceiling, imagining stars where the plaster peeled.
"The night they died, it rained like this. I remember the sound more than anything. I remember my mom's laugh at the dinner table."
"I remember Dad turning the volume down on the news. I remember the warmth. Then... nothing."
"Then sirens."
"Then plastic tarps and flashing lights and arms holding me back while I screamed."
He hadn't screamed since.
Now, the storm lived inside him.
He turned onto his side and pulled the box close.
The smell of old paper filled his lungs. It was grounding. It was pain. But it was his pain.
Jaylen snored softly from the next room over. Sasha murmured in her sleep.
Aunt Laverne's phone buzzed once, then stopped. Probably the hospital calling again.
Everyone was asleep.
Everyone but him.
Because every time the rain came, he remembered.
And remembering was its own kind of nightmare.
He picked up his father's badge and ran his thumb across the engraving. "Lieutenant Harold Allen. NYPD."
"Dad…" he whispered.
The badge was heavy. Solid. Cold.
"What did you find?"
He looked toward the folder again, eyes heavy with questions too big for a thirteen-year-old to carry.
The window creaked under the wind's push, and Marcus stood to latch it tighter.
But before he did, he looked out again.
The streetlamps glowed orange on wet asphalt.
A lone car passed, windshield wipers flapping. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked, then silence.
He imagined someone watching him from that darkness.
He didn't know why. But sometimes—especially on nights like this—he felt it.
A presence.
Like someone wanted him to stop looking.
But he wouldn't.
Even at thirteen, the obsession had begun to calcify into resolve.
The rain eased to a drizzle, and the silence that followed was louder than thunder.
Marcus sat back down on the windowsill, folder in hand, badge resting in his lap.
He opened the file again.
Maybe tonight, something would make sense.
Maybe tonight, the black bars would peel back in his mind and show him the truth.
He didn't know who Thorne was. Not yet. He didn't know the difference between a chain-of-command memo and a kill order.
But he would.
One day.
He would know everything.
And when that day came…
Someone would pay.
"Justice isn't given. It's taken."
He wasn't sure where he'd first heard that.
But it had become a promise.
And Marcus did not break promises.
———————————————————
The years didn't pass. They bled.
Time didn't heal Marcus Allen. It forged him. Not in comfort, but in pressure—relentless, quiet, shaping him like stone under water.
By fourteen, the silence in his room had become routine. Rain or not, Marcus no longer waited for it to come.
The echoes of the past lived in his bones now.
He rose before the sun, ironed his uniform shirt for school until every crease stood sharp, and walked to the subway with earbuds in but no music playing—just to keep others from talking to him.
At Franklin High School, his name wasn't famous, but it wasn't forgotten either.
"Allen?" teachers would glance at the roster, pause. "Harold and Evelyn's kid?"
He'd nod. Short. Controlled.
There were always whispers in the teacher's lounge, pity hiding behind coffee cups and red pens.
But Marcus didn't want pity. He wanted answers.
He sat alone in the library every lunch period, surrounded by books on law, procedure, and the criminal justice system. He read Terry v. Ohio like it was scripture.
He copied down the Miranda ruling by hand until it was etched into his muscle memory.
He knew the chain of custody rules better than some rookie cops.
He watched trial footage online at night, memorized the way prosecutors built their arguments—fact after fact, layered until the guilty had nowhere to breathe.
He never joined any clubs.
He never went to any parties.
When invited, he gave a flat, "Not interested."
The other kids thought he was weird. Some said "robot." Some said "cop bootlicker." A few said worse.
One afternoon in sophomore year, Marcus was walking down the hallway, his bag heavy with textbooks, when he heard it—laughter, followed by a loud, mocking voice.
"Yo, isn't that the kid whose pig parents got smoked? Ain't that right, Allen?"
Marcus stopped mid-stride. The world narrowed.
Three boys leaned against the lockers—seniors. Football jackets. One of them, tall, white, cocky, kept going.
"Yeah, man. I heard it wasn't even a real hit. Just some crackhead with a death wish. Guess badge don't mean you bulletproof, huh?"
Marcus didn't speak.
He dropped his bag.
And swung.
Later, in the nurse's office with a swollen lip and blood on his knuckles, Marcus sat silently as Principal Diaz shook his head across from him.
"I should suspend you," he said, tapping his pen against the desk. "Three-day minimum."
Marcus stared ahead.
"But," Diaz sighed, glancing at the nurse's report, "three against one. And you broke his nose clean. Damn near reset the other kid's jaw."
The principal leaned in, eyes sharp.
"You can't go around starting fights every time someone runs their mouth."
"I didn't start it," Marcus said quietly.
Diaz didn't argue.
In junior year, Marcus found his home: the criminal justice electives.
The school offered only a few, taught by Mr. Hart, a retired NYPD detective with a lazy eye and a gravel voice that sounded like broken asphalt. Hart noticed Marcus within a week.
"You got discipline," he said after class one day, watching Marcus pack up his binder. "Most kids write down half-assed notes. You're indexing them. Why?"
Marcus didn't look up. "I want to know how things work."
Hart leaned back against his desk. "You want justice?"
"No," Marcus said, zipping his bag. "I want truth. Justice comes after."
Hart nodded once, then didn't say another word. But from then on, he gave Marcus harder material.
Sent him case files to analyze. Let him sit in on mock interrogations and challenged him during class debates.
By senior year, Marcus had won every mock trial the school hosted.
He dismantled every opposing argument with surgical precision.
One student even cried after Marcus quoted her misinterpretation of precedent back at her, calmly, surgically, like a knife slid between ribs.
He didn't win by shouting.
He won by watching.
Everyone's always saying something, even when their mouths are closed.
The day he turned eighteen, he didn't celebrate.
No cake. No party.
He stood in front of his mirror in his bedroom, the same bedroom where rain still haunted him, and put on a collared shirt.
He adjusted the tie Aunt Laverne helped him clip on. And then he went downstairs to find her waiting with a letter in her hand.
"You got in," she said, teary-eyed but smiling. "John Jay. Full tuition waiver. Honors program."
Marcus looked at the envelope. Then at her.
"Thank you."
"For what?" she said, wiping her face. "I didn't do nothin' but feed you. You did this, baby!"
He almost smiled.
Fall, 2010 – John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York City
Campus life buzzed around him like static. Students spilled out of lecture halls, chattered in café lines, laughed in cliques at the quad.
They wore lanyards with ID cards and headphones plugged in, backpacks slung carelessly on one shoulder.
Marcus walked through it all like a ghost with a schedule.
8 a.m. – Criminal Procedure
10 a.m. – Constitutional Law
Noon – Work shift at Smith Tower as night security
4 p.m. – Internship at the NYPD's Community Outreach office
7 p.m. – Library study session
He kept a notebook on him at all times. Not just for class notes, but observations. Habits. Gaps. Things people overlooked.
Detective Gwen Alston, the Community Outreach lead, took notice early.
"You Allen?" she asked the first day he showed up to the NYPD substation with his badge tucked into a plain black lanyard.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Parents were cops?"
"Yes."
She eyed him for a long second, then handed him a clipboard.
"You'll be shadowing Officer Hernandez. No hero shit. No questions to civilians unless you're told. We clear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The internship wasn't glamorous. It was fliers. Paperwork. Kids' programs.
Sometimes riding along to community events in low-income areas, handing out booklets no one read.
But Marcus watched everything.
He watched how beat cops interacted with locals—where they softened their tone, where they stayed hard.
He watched how the lieutenant asked about missing reports without making it sound like an accusation.
He listened to dispatch calls with the hunger of someone trying to read a city's heartbeat in numbers and noise.
At night, at the high-rise security post, he sat in a swivel chair in a glass booth, watching camera feeds flicker.
The building smelled of antiseptic and pine-scented floor polish.
The security jacket they gave him was too big, the patch on the sleeve a little off-center.
He didn't care.
He read textbooks during slow hours. Watched how people moved through the lobby. Logged every visitor with a note.
*"Middle-aged man in a suit, smells of cologne and stress, nervously checks watch—twice. Why?"
"Young woman, business casual, always smiles, never makes eye contact with front desk. Hides something? Shyness? Fear?"
Girls tried to talk to him sometimes.
"Hey, you're in Crim 101, right? With Professor Brennan?"
He'd nod.
"You wanna grab a coffee sometime?"
"I'm busy."
That answer didn't change.
He wasn't shy.
He was focused.
Clubs? Waste of time.
Frat parties? Loud distractions.
Alcohol? A slow poison that dulled the edge he sharpened daily.
Late at night, he still opened the folder.
"OPERATION LODESTAR"
Still redacted.
Still silent.
But he read it again and again.
Because someday, it would make sense.
Someday, the names behind the black bars would have faces.
And he would be ready.
Because this wasn't just about finding the people who murdered Harold and Evelyn Allen.
It was about learning how they got away with it.
And breaking the system they hid inside.
———————————————————
2014 – NYPD Police Academy Graduation / Marcus Allen, Age 22
The sound of polished boots echoed across the marble floor of One Police Plaza.
Hundreds of cadets stood in crisp formation under the glaring lights of the auditorium, their navy uniforms tailored to exacting NYPD standards
Shoes shined until the stage lights bounced off them like signal flares.
The smell of starch, floor wax, and pressed wool filled the air, mixing with the faint scent of fresh plastic from unopened badge boxes.
Marcus Allen stood dead center in the second row, spine like steel, shoulders square, eyes locked forward—not out of ceremony, but out of habit.
Discipline wasn't a requirement for Marcus. It was his survival mechanism.
"…and now, please join me in welcoming our class valedictorian, Cadet Marcus Allen."
Applause rose like a tide around him. He didn't flinch.
He stepped forward, calm, efficient. The weight of dozens of eyes never reached him. Not really.
He had trained himself to ignore stares, just like he had trained his body to exceed standards—every push-up, every mile, every shooting drill executed with silent, focused aggression. No swagger. No joy.
Just intent.
He reached the podium, scanned the crowd once, briefly. Somewhere out there, Aunt Laverne sat with her youngest asleep on her shoulder and her eldest recording on a cracked iPhone.
She had borrowed a secondhand dress for the occasion, hair braided tight, eyes already glistening.
Marcus met her gaze just once, gave her the smallest nod, then looked away.
He adjusted the mic.
"My name is Marcus Allen," he began, voice low but steady, like gravel pressed beneath a tire. "I didn't become a cop because I wanted to wear a badge or carry a gun. I didn't become a cop because I believe justice always prevails."
He paused.
"I became a cop because sometimes, it doesn't."
The room went quiet. Even the babies stopped fussing.
"I grew up in a home where the law was respected. My parents wore the shield. They believed in the system. They were killed before I understood what that meant."
He didn't blink.
"I've spent every day since trying to earn the right to finish what they started."
He stepped back, nodded once, and returned to his position in formation.
The applause returned. Louder. Sharper. But to Marcus, it might as well have been rain against glass. Distant. Hollow. Familiar.
Hours later, after the ceremony ended and the final photos were taken under the polished seal of the NYPD, Marcus shook the hand of the commissioner—an aging man with a politician's smile and eyes that were far too empty for their own weight.
"Allen," the commissioner said, pinning the silver badge to Marcus's chest. "You're the kind of recruit we need. Smart. Stoic. Focused."
Marcus replied, "Thank you, sir."
"Any precinct you want, it's yours."
"I'll go where I'm assigned, sir."
The man chuckled. "A rare kind of modesty these days. Keep it."
Marcus nodded, shook hands again, and walked off the stage.
——————————————————
Night fell over Brooklyn like a bruise.
Marcus walked alone through the old neighborhood, his Academy-issued jacket zipped to the chin, his steps methodical but unhurried.
Each block felt like a tripwire—memories ready to detonate beneath him. The corner deli was now a vape shop.
The bus stop where his father once waited on night shifts had a new glass enclosure.
The streetlights buzzed overhead, flickering with the same inconsistent hum they had when he was a child.
When he reached the end of his childhood block, he stopped.
There it stood: 729 Belmont Avenue.
The house had been condemned last fall. Weather-worn plywood sealed the windows. Graffiti stained the side wall like crude hieroglyphs.
A crooked notice read:
"STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND – DEMOLITION PENDING. DO NOT ENTER."
He looked both ways. No cars. No sounds but a distant siren in the direction of East New York and the low rumble of a train passing somewhere underground.
He pulled out a folded MetroCard from his pocket—one of his old ones, unused, expired.
He wedged it into the lock on the back door and jimmied it gently. The door clicked. Swung open with a groan like an old wound.
Inside, the house smelled of rot and dust. Mold crept along the baseboards.
The air tasted metallic, like the ghosts of rusted pipes and memories that refused to decay.
The floorboards protested with every step as Marcus crossed the threshold.
The layout hadn't changed. Not in his mind.
He didn't turn on a light.
There was none to turn on.
He walked past the kitchen, now stripped of its appliances, the wallpaper peeling like flayed skin.
The dining room table was gone, but he still saw it—his father's coffee mug with NYPD SCU etched into the ceramic, his mother's binder with shift rosters and field reports open beside a dinner plate she never touched.
He stopped at the hallway.
At the closet.
His feet knew where to go before his eyes registered it.
It was the same place he had hidden on that night.
The night when the shouting had started. When the glass shattered. When he heard his mother's voice, then silence.
Then two gunshots. Then another. Then nothing.
Marcus reached out and opened the closet door.
It groaned like a confession.
Inside, it smelled of old wood and dry rot. But beneath that—beneath the mildew and dust—was the faintest trace of something else. Something older. Sweat. Gunpowder. Fear.
He stepped inside.
Knelt.
Just like he had, all those years ago, when he was a six-year-old boy in pajamas with rocket ships on the sleeves, clutching a stuffed dog and trying not to breathe too loud.
He sat there.
For a long time.
No sound but the distant echo of the city outside—the honk of a taxi, the roar of a motorcycle, the muted thump of bass from someone's car stereo.
He closed his eyes.
His hands rested on his thighs. Steady. Silent.
Then, in a voice so low it barely passed his lips, he whispered into the dark:
"One day… I'll find out who took you."
His throat tightened. He swallowed it.
"One day."
He reached into his jacket. Pulled out his badge.
Polished. Untouched. NYPD. Shield Number 22145.
He held it up in the closet's darkness, as if presenting it to the memory of his mother and father. As if the badge itself could speak to them.
"I made it..."
The silence answered.
He stayed there for what felt like an hour, maybe more. He didn't check the time. Time didn't matter inside that house.
Eventually, he stood.
Tucked the badge back inside his coat.
And walked out, closing the door behind him.
Not just the door to the closet.
The door to who he used to be.
He didn't flinch.
He just whispered to himself one more time, as the thunder rolled in the distance:
"One day."
———————————————————
"Mac. You coming to the bar or you gonna marry your paperwork again?"
Sergeant Brandon Kline leaned against the doorway of the bullpen, already halfway into his coat, a toothpick bobbing in his mouth like a metronome of impatience.
Behind him, the late shift was winding down—phones quieter, chairs scraping against tile, tired chatter buzzing low in the fluorescent hum.
Marcus didn't look up from his desk. His fingers moved across the keyboard with machine precision, the glow of his monitor casting pale light across his sharp features.
"Happy hour's over," Marcus said, voice dry as concrete. "It's just called drinking now."
Kline chuckled. "That's what makes it fun. You sure? We just rolled up on that 9th Avenue shipment and you're acting like you didn't throw half the crew into the back of the paddy wagon."
"I've got to finish the seizure forms." He paused. "You'll just mess them up."
Kline rolled his eyes. "One day, Mac. One day you're gonna wake up and realize the job's not your girlfriend."
But there was no bite in it. They all respected him too much for that.
Mac—short for Marcus, but also short for "machine," "maced soul," or just "the guy you don't rattle."
That was the name that stuck. He never introduced himself that way. Never needed to.
He didn't answer. Kline took the hint, gave a lazy two-finger salute, and left with a shrug.
The room slowly thinned until Marcus was alone with the blue glow of the precinct after dark.
He clicked "Save," then backed away from the desk and stretched—vertebrae cracking one by one like distant gunshots.
It was past midnight. His shift had technically ended two hours ago.
But Marcus wasn't the kind of man who paid attention to the clock.
He reached down and opened the bottom drawer of his desk—not the one with the pens or the extra cuffs. This drawer had a different lock.
A custom one. The kind he picked up from an old burglary case two years back.
Brass pins, silent mechanism. No one else knew the combination.
He slid the drawer open and stared at the black cloth pouch resting inside. Then closed it again.
Not here.
The walk home was quiet, like the city was holding its breath.
Fulton Street glistened under the sodium-vapor haze, slick from a light drizzle earlier that hadn't quite turned to rain.
The smell of exhaust, stale bread, and pavement hung thick in the air.
A man screamed at a garbage can two blocks away, but it was the kind of noise that came and went in New York—loud, fast, gone.
Marcus now lived on the third floor of a rent-stabilized building in Bed-Stuy—brick exterior, warped stairs, a door with a lock that needed just the right amount of force to turn.
He didn't decorate. No photos on the walls. No memorabilia. Just essentials: a worn leather couch, a television he rarely turned on, a steel-frame bed with military sheets tight enough to snap a quarter off.
And under that bed, the shoebox.
Not just any box. Reinforced bottom. Double-taped edges. Weatherproof lining.
He pulled it out the way a priest might open a reliquary.
Inside, carefully organized with precision bordering on obsessive, were printed documents, photos, sticky notes, microSD cards, USB drives, newspaper clippings, shipping manifests, and receipts.
Every item was tied—some tangentially, some directly—to unsolved arms transfers, black-market deals, cartel movements, or shadow corporations.
None of it was enough to prove anything.
But every shred was a whisper. A direction.
"Four Glock 19s with serials filed off found in a Bronx bust—none matched known factory lots."
"A chartered freighter out of Naples rerouted through Lisbon before disappearing in Staten Island for twenty-four hours—manifests wiped clean."
"A firm called Greystone Dynamics registered in Delaware, dissolved two weeks later, wired funds to a defunct warehouse in Queens."
Marcus stared at the pages, lips pressed into a thin line.
"They're still out there. I don't know who. I don't know how. But someone funded the bullets that killed them. Someone covered it. Buried it. Erased it."
He lifted one of the photos. A grainy surveillance still from a pier raid two years back.
Men in masks unloading crates. One of the crates had a faded logo: VANDEN INDUSTRIAL EXPORTS.
The company no longer existed. Nor did any trace of its board members. Burned.
"This isn't about vengeance. Not exactly. It's about light. Turning over the stone and watching what crawls out."
He replaced the lid slowly, as if sealing away a fragile heart, and pushed the box back under the bed.
He stripped off his shirt, tossed it in the corner, and dropped onto the mattress. The city hummed outside his window. Always.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
"New Message: Lt. Harper – OCB"
"Solid work on that Bathgate op. Report was airtight. I've got something bigger coming. Might pull you in."
He stared at it for a moment.
Then replied:
"Copy. Standing by."
He didn't ask what it was. Didn't care for praise.
Just kept moving.
The next morning, Marcus was back at the precinct before most of the squad had even peeled their faces off their pillows.
He moved through the corridors of the Organized Crime Bureau like a ghost with a badge—no wasted steps, no noise, no idle talk.
He read case files while brushing his teeth. Memorized suspect lists while finishing his coffee.
The OCB was different from other divisions. Less about the street-level junkies, more about the hydra heads behind them—the bankers, brokers, traffickers, and middlemen who lived in penthouses and moved billions behind shell companies.
Marcus hunted these people like a surgeon with a scalpel. Clean. Quiet. Precise.
"Mac," one of the desk sergeants called as he passed, "your last collar, Vasquez? He's flipping. Wants to deal."
Marcus didn't slow. "Tell him I'm not in the business of deals."
The sergeant blinked. "That's... literally our job."
"No," Marcus said, sliding a folder into his arm like a blade, "our job is truth. Deals come later."
He walked away.
In the weapons evidence lockup, the air was cooler. Dryer. Metallic.
Marcus stood in front of a table where several seized rifles were laid out, tags fluttering from their stocks. AK-103s, imported illegally and retrofitted with polymer grips.
Not street garbage—these were high-tier military models. Black-market stuff. Global origins.
Marcus examined one, eyes narrowing as he ran a gloved thumb across the receiver.
Then he spotted it—a faint marking inside the internal bolt assembly. Barely visible. A series of micro-etchings.
Not Russian.
Not Chinese.
Private.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper—an inventory log from a Florida shipping yard.
Cross-referenced the serials. Not a single match.
Not even close.
"Same pattern as the handguns in '17. Nothing traceable. No registry. No paper trail. Someone's laundering weapons clean—at the manufacturing level."
He wrote a note to himself and slipped it into his pocket:
"Check: VEXCORP / BAE SHIPMENTS / DENVER WAREHOUSE (JULY)."
He stood there in silence, the smell of oil and cold steel in his nose, the feel of it resting beneath his skin like a scar.
Later that night, he stood in the shower of his apartment, the water running hot, steam curling around his jaw.
His knuckles were bruised from a takedown earlier in the day—a meth lab connected to an Albanian crew with potential arms ties. He hadn't waited for backup. He didn't care.
He leaned his head against the tile and closed his eyes.
"I've become what I needed."
"I don't need a partner. I don't need anyone getting close enough to slow me down. I'm not chasing ghosts—I'm tracing their footsteps."
"They're clever. Careful. But they slipped once. They killed the wrong people."
"They left behind a son who doesn't forget."
Marcus turned off the water and stepped out, steam rising around him like battlefield smoke.
He dried off, walked to the bed, and opened the shoebox again.
He placed a new photo inside—taken from his body cam. A blurry face. A conversation just out of frame. Nothing concrete. Not yet.
But one day.
———————————————————
(Present Day – Red Hook, Brooklyn)
Marcus was thirty-three now.
A badge on his chest, scars on his knuckles, and a storm behind his eyes.
The world had changed in the years since he first stepped onto the beat—new precincts, new tech, new gangs—but one thing hadn't: the silence that followed him.
That silence had a name once. Grief. Now, it was sharper. Hungrier.
Now, it was the drive to unearth a truth buried deep beneath lies, reports, and bodies.
The windshield wipers squealed as they fought the downpour, failing to clear the relentless veil of rain.
His unmarked Crown Vic pulled up to the edge of the warehouse district in Red Hook—where the East River glared like black oil beneath storm clouds.
Blue and red strobes painted the wet street in stuttering pulses. Yellow police tape flapped in the wind like a warning sign from fate.
He killed the engine and stepped out into the night.
The air was thick with the metallic sting of ozone and the sour tinge of saltwater and rust.
Rain struck the brim of his jacket hood and streamed down the back of his neck. It was cold, but he didn't shiver. Didn't blink.
His boots splashed through puddles as he crossed into the chaos of the scene.
An officer in a poncho nodded as Marcus ducked under the tape.
"Evening, Sergeant Allen," the officer said, voice muffled by the rain.
Marcus didn't answer right away. His eyes were scanning—always scanning. The warehouse loomed ahead like a dead thing.
One of the old steel-frame relics from Brooklyn's industrial past, long abandoned and now repurposed by the wrong kind of enterprise.
"What've we got?" he finally asked, low and focused.
The officer looked grim. "One vic. Young girl. Possibly trafficked. Gunshot wound. Execution-style. We found crates—military-grade gear, unregistered. Serial numbers filed off... mostly."
Marcus nodded and moved inside.
Inside, the warehouse was a cathedral of shadows. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed overhead, flickering like dying fireflies.
The floor was wet and slick, smelling of oil, wet concrete, and blood. The chatter of radios and the shutter clicks of forensic cameras broke the silence in bursts.
He passed a team cataloging crates—stacked three high, sealed with rusted chains, now cracked open to reveal horrors born from war zones. AK-103s. RPG-7s.
Belts of ammunition wound like serpents. Military hardware that had no business being here, in a forgotten warehouse across from the skyline of Manhattan.
But none of that was what stopped Marcus in his tracks.
The girl was.
She lay face-up, mouth slightly parted, eyes wide in shock. No older than fifteen. Her face was frozen in that brutal final moment—fear and pain etched into her cheeks like cracks in porcelain.
A bullet hole in the center of her chest. Her hands were bruised, wrists raw. A survivor of one hell, only to meet another.
Marcus knelt beside her, rainwater dripping from his coat. He didn't speak.
Just watched her for a long moment. Long enough for the air to grow colder around him.
"This city keeps offering up ghosts," he thought.
He reached out and gently pulled the edge of a tarp over her face. Respectful. Quiet.
A younger detective approached. Hispanic, late twenties, still new enough to flinch at sights like this.
He handed Marcus a clipboard, biting back a wince.
"We logged all the crates," he said. "Couple serial numbers were still intact on the inner linings. Could be useful. We're thinking Eastern Europe pipeline. Old Soviet surplus. Same stuff popping up in cartel seizures out west."
Marcus took the clipboard without a word, flipping to the last page.
There were numbers printed in clean block type. Four of them. Faded, scratched—but legible.
And then… everything slowed.
The clipboard nearly slipped from his hand.
"No. No. That can't be right..."
He blinked and stared again.
3A7-14K
9B2-61F
T41-392
N95-227
He didn't need to check the notebook under his bed. He didn't need to dig into the shoebox he kept sealed shut with a rubber band and duct tape.
These numbers had been etched into his memory years ago—obsessively, relentlessly.
He'd written them down from the last page of his father's journal. The same four numbers. The same untraceable weapons.
His voice was a whisper, almost broken.
"…My dad… he wrote these down…"
The young detective tilted his head. "Sir?"
Marcus's grip tightened on the clipboard. His jaw clenched.
That buzzing from the lights overhead grew louder, drilling into his skull like a countdown.
"They're not random," he muttered. "These numbers. These crates. They're not just some street-sell batch."
He turned and walked briskly toward the nearest crate, ignoring the rookie's confused expression.
He shoved the clipboard into his coat and yanked one of the crates further open. Inside, nestled in foam, was a launcher—fresh grease, never fired.
Clean. Untouched. Like a memory left in a glass box.
He stared into it, breathing slow.
"All these years… I thought they were caught in something random. A robbery gone wrong. Bad timing."
But this... this was proof.
They were killed for something.
He stood there, frozen, as a crash of thunder shook the walls.
Rain hammered the tin roof. Voices buzzed around him—investigators, forensic staff, detectives—but none of them registered. Just static behind his thoughts.
His father had been working something bigger. Something that reached through time and shadows.
Those numbers were a breadcrumb trail, and this warehouse was the next step.
He felt it now—not just suspicion. Not just grief.
Certainty.
"They killed them… because of this," Marcus said aloud, not even realizing he'd spoken.
The younger detective had followed, cautious. "Sir? Who?"
Marcus turned to him. "I don't know yet. But I will."
He walked out of the warehouse and into the rain.
The storm was heavier now. Wind howled through the alleyways.
Lightning flashed behind the clouds, illuminating the skeletal dock cranes in the distance like watchful giants.
He stopped at the edge of the street, under a busted streetlamp. The bulb flickered, casting brief pulses of pale yellow light over his face.
His mind was spiraling—but sharp. Memories he buried surged back: the shoebox, the shredded reports, the locked drawer in his father's desk, the audio tape with the voices he could never identify.
Names he couldn't pin down. Shadows that had no faces. Until now.
No, he didn't know them yet. But he would. He had to.
He could feel it in his bones, in the pressure behind his eyes, in the way the night wrapped around him like an old enemy returning for round two.
Marcus looked up into the rain. It burned cold against his cheeks. The thunder cracked again—closer this time.
His voice was low, a vow, a curse.
"I don't care how far I have to go. I don't care who they are… federal, syndicate, ghosts in the system. I will find them. I will name them. And when I do…"
He paused, jaw tight.
"…they'll answer for it."