Chapter 187: A BOY IN THE DARK

(RAJ) META'S POV (Age 27):

I didn't look at their faces. I only looked at their hands.

Exhaust fumes and wet cement choked the air in the underground parking garage. Ten of my top street lieutenants stood in a rigid line against the concrete pillars. None of them spoke. They just held their left hands out, palms down, under the harsh glare of the halogen security lights.

I walked the line, checking every left hand for bare skin. Leaving a bleeding cop and a missing nurse on Chaiya territory wasn't a standard turf dispute. It was arson. Someone wanted to watch my entire organization burn to the ground.

I’d already wasted hours grinding through the usual suspects. The Klong Toey dock crews were too blunt—they handled problems with rust-pitted blades, not elaborate stagecraft. The river Triads had the cash to finance a frame-up, but they completely lacked the style. If they wanted my head, they wouldn't play detective games. They'd just pack the undercarriage of my car with military plastic explosives.

Even the ghost we were hunting didn't make sense for this. Dropping our syndicate crest into a bleeding detective's lap isn't misdirection. It's a loud, deliberate insult.

That silver is cast for initiated men only. Whoever dropped it either pried it off a dead soldier, or one of the guys breathing my garage air was a rat.

I hit the end of the line. Ten men. Ten silver rings catching the glare. Sakda stepped out from the bottom of the ramp holding a leather ledger.

"The safe is fully accounted for," Sakda said, his voice carrying over the hum of the garage exhaust. "Every piece of silver cast in the last five years is currently sitting on a living man's finger."

I stared at the heavy silver on the fist of the man closest to me. If the ring Kasem bagged didn't come from my current crew, it came from the past. When I took over, I buried a lot of the old guard to consolidate power. Men who wouldn't bow. But dead men have brothers. They leave behind exiled lieutenants and street soldiers with long memories.

Some ghost from the old days was working right in my blind spot, using the Bangkok cops as a personal firing squad. "Pull the street crews off the local gangs," I told Sakda. I turned my back to the line of men. "Start shaking the graves. Find out which of my father's exiled loyalists are still walking around. The guy leaving our silver in alleys isn't trying to steal a shipping lane. This is revenge."

Sakda gave a sharp nod and walked off. I stood alone in the damp garage. Dealing with ambitious rivals is just part of the job. But a ghost playing the cops against my father’s exiled loyalists? That’s a death sentence. Someone had opened a vein in my syndicate, and I couldn't even see the knife.

I took the service stairs up to the main house. The central AC was freezing, but I felt like I was burning up. I stopped by the heavy glass windows in the study.

Right under the yellow wash of the security lights, a figure stood dead still by the hedges. A slender kid. Someone who had no business breathing inside my walls.

I rubbed my eyes. When I looked back, the yard was dead. Nothing but wet hedges and black space. It was the boy. Thyme. I couldn't even tell if sleep deprivation was messing with my vision or if the ghost was physically trespassing on my property. It didn't matter. He was buried in my skull like a piece of shrapnel, tearing my focus to shreds.

A cold, hard hatred clamped down on my chest. If I didn't put a bullet in him soon, he was going to tear my life apart without firing a single shot.

I turned my back to the glass and headed straight for the library. I shoved the mahogany wall panel aside and punched the combination into the hidden steel safe. I reached in and dragged out the leather book.

The edges were still charred black from the night I tried to set it on fire. It was a filthy relic of a tradition I hated. But it was the only map I had to a kid who didn't exist on any police record. If someone in this city was sheltering him, the visions inside these pages would show me the thread.

And once I grabbed hold of it, I was going to pull until everyone he cared about came completely undone. The heavy leather cover grew warm against my palm. A thick, dark crimson started to bead along the charred spine. Blood. It welled up from the binding, dripping down over my knuckles and spotting the mahogany floor.

A normal man would have dropped it. I just tightened my grip. I made my living in blood; a bleeding book was just another messy transaction. I didn't flinch. I let the hot liquid coat my fingers and flipped the heavy cover open.

The pages were saturated, the wet parchment sticking together. But through the red smear, clumsy, uneven letters began to carve themselves into the paper. Hi I'm Khun Ahan Yimgin, I'm 7 years old, I know how misserable you people had suffer and the more i read this book is the more I'm sure how painful it was to lose someone you love but I'm sure if something had been stolen from you something much better will return.

I let out a hard breath. A seven-year-old trying to give advice on a broken heart. It was completely stupid. But staring at the messy handwriting, my amusement died. The kid wasn't playing a game. He actually believed the words he wrote down.

“Khun Ahan Yimgin,” I muttered, rolling the name over my tongue. The real identity of the ghost actively tearing my syndicate apart. The second I said it out loud, the ink smeared. The blood coating my hands went white-hot, burning straight into my skin.

The mahogany walls of my library violently dissolved. The air instantly turned freezing and thick, choking me with the smell of old mildew and dust. I wasn't standing in my estate anymore. I was trapped in a suffocating, pitch-black space.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Small fists were desperately hammering on heavy wood. I peered down through the heavy dark. It was Thyme. Not the teenager ruining my life, but a tiny kid. Seven years old, pale-faced, and covered in mud and hot tears.

"MOM!" The scream ripped out of his throat, breathless and frantic. He threw his entire body weight against the heavy door. He kept slamming his bare hands into the solid wood, pounding the frame until he left wet, dark smears on the paint. "I'm sorry! Please! Let me out!"

He was begging a woman who had already walked away. The sheer, animal panic in his small body was suffocating. He collapsed against the wood, sliding down to the dirty floor, sobbing into his hands as the absolute blackness of the storage room swallowed him whole.

I watched him shake in the dark. This was the threat keeping me up at night. Not a hired gun or an undercover cop. Just a terrified kid locked in a room, crying over a mother who treated him like garbage.

The damp smell of the closet vanished. The freezing air of my library hit my face. The hot blood on my hands was gone, leaving nothing but dry skin and old leather. I dropped the book onto the desk.

I still wanted him dead. But shooting him now was a waste of perfectly good leverage. I just saw the exact spot where he broke. I knew what he was hungry for. He wasn't a ghost anymore. He was just a stray dog.

In my business, the second you find a man's deepest, bleeding wound, you don't put him out of his misery. You dig your fingers straight into the raw nerve. You put him on a leash.