I spent the evening learning about Castor Drel.
It was not difficult. A man who operated the way he did, visible enough to apply pressure but careful enough to stay outside formal reach, left a trail in the places where careful people talked quietly. Two taverns, one on the western road and one near the tanner's quarter, and by the end of the night I had enough.
Drel ran a supply business that served people who needed things they could not buy through legitimate channels. Not a criminal in the sense that the city wardens cared about, his product was too niche and his clients too careful for the kind of attention that brought formal consequences. But he had three outstanding debts with suppliers who resented him, a partnership dispute with a former associate who had left the arrangement badly, and a market license that had been granted under a name that was not quite his own.
That last one was the useful piece.
I went to bed knowing what I needed to know and was at the market before it opened the following morning.
***
Drel arrived at Sera's stall mid-morning, the same two men at his back as always, the same patient smile of someone who considered time to be running his direction. He was heavyset, well-dressed in a way that was slightly too deliberate, with the manner of a man who had learned that confidence and authority looked similar enough that most people did not check which one they were seeing.
He had not seen me yet.
I was at a stall across the row, apparently examining a display of dried herbs, positioned where I could see him clearly and where he would have to turn to notice me.
I watched him approach Sera's counter.
She saw him coming. Her posture did not change but her hands stilled on what she was working on, a small involuntary pause that she covered immediately. She looked up at him with the flat grey eyes that gave nothing.
"Voss," he said pleasantly. "I was hoping we could finish our conversation from last week."
"We finished it," she said. "My answer has not changed."
"I think you might reconsider if you thought about the practical aspects more carefully." He leaned on the counter with the ease of a man who had done this before and knew how it ended. "A shop with no guild backing and no patron is a fragile thing. One formal complaint about product quality to the market board and a license review could take months. Months during which a stall sits empty."
Sera looked at him without flinching. "Then I will deal with that if it happens."
"It would be much simpler to avoid it entirely."
"I am sure it would." Her voice was perfectly level. "My answer is still no."
Drel's smile did not change but something behind it did, the patience thinning slightly at the edges. He glanced at the two men behind him in a way that was meant to be seen.
That was when I crossed the row.
***
I positioned myself at the counter beside Drel, not between him and Sera, just present, and looked at the jars on the shelf with the mild interest of a man browsing.
"Morning," I said to Sera.
She looked at me. Something moved in her expression that she controlled immediately, but I had seen it. Surprise.
And something else beneath the surprise that she locked down before it had a name.
"Morning," she said.
Drel had turned to look at me. I let him look for a moment before I turned to meet it.
"Castor Drel," I said pleasantly. "I was hoping to run into you."
A beat of recalculation behind his eyes. "I do not believe we have met."
"We have not. My name is Kael Drevyn. I have been in the city about three weeks." I said it the way you say something to someone you expect already knows it. "I understand you operate a supply business out of the western quarter."
"Among other things."
"Among other things," I agreed. "I also understand your market license was granted in the name of a Castor Fenn. Which is interesting because I happen to know the Fenn family and none of them have heard of you."
The smile did not leave his face but it had stopped meaning anything.
"That is an old administrative matter," he said carefully.
"It is an unresolved one," I said. "Which means it is a current one. The market board tends to agree with that reading when it is brought to their attention." I looked at him with the particular patience of someone who does not need to raise their voice. "I am also aware of the dispute with your former associate, a man named Roth, who has been wanting to bring his grievance somewhere formal for some time but has not found the right encouragement. I can provide that encouragement easily."
Silence.
The two men behind Drel were watching me with the careful attention of people reassessing a situation they had thought was simple.
"What do you want," Drel said. His voice had flattened. The pleasantness was gone.
"I want you to leave this stall and not return to it," I said. "I want the visits to stop and the suggestions to stop and any thought of a market board complaint to stop. Permanently. In exchange I will not take what I know to the board this week, and Roth will not find the encouragement he has been looking for."
"And if I decline."
"Then both of those things happen before the end of the day and your license situation becomes significantly more complicated than it is currently." I let that sit. "This is not a negotiation. I am telling you the shape of the thing and giving you the opportunity to make the correct decision cleanly."
Drel looked at me for a long moment.
Then he straightened, adjusted his coat, and looked at Sera with an expression that had nothing in it anymore.
"I will take my business elsewhere," he said.
He turned and left. His two men followed without a word.
I watched them go until they cleared the row. Then I turned back to the stall.
***
Sera was looking at me.
Not the flat professional look. Not the measured assessment she gave everyone. Something more direct than either of those, open in a way that her face rarely was, stripped of the careful nothing she kept as default.
"You knew about that," she said.
"Yes."
"For how long."
"Three days."
"You did not say anything."
"No."
She was quiet for a moment. I could see her working through it, the fact that I had known and waited and then acted without telling her, without asking, without making it into anything that required a response from her.
"I did not ask for help," she said.
"I know."
"I would not have."
"I know that too."
Another silence. Longer. She looked at the counter between us and then back up at me and the expression on her face was doing something I had not seen it do before, working toward something it had not yet decided to let out.
"Why," she said finally. Just that.
I looked at her steadily.
"Because it needed doing," I said. "And because you would have handled it alone and it would have cost you something. And because I did not want it to cost you something if I could stop it."
The grey eyes held mine for a long moment.
She did not say anything else. She turned back to her stall and picked up what she had been working on before Drel arrived and resumed where she had left off with her usual composure fully back in place.
But when I turned to go she spoke.
"Kael."
I stopped.
"Come back this evening," she said. "After the stall closes. I will be here."
She did not look up when she said it. She did not explain it. She simply said it and kept working, as if it were a small and ordinary thing.
It was not a small or ordinary thing.
"I will be here," I said.
I left her to her work and walked back through the market with the noise of the morning all around me and the system quiet and warm in the back of my mind.
Target A: wall down.
She asked you to come back. On her terms. In her space. After closing.