Dirty Money

You crack the contract's encryption layer in the back room of a flophouse, sweat cooling on your neck despite the desert heat. The shell company dissolves like smoke under your query tools — three blind transfers, two ghost accounts — until a name surfaces that stops your breath cold: Harlan Voss. Your uncle. The man who sent you to Colvin Station that night with a crew you didn't know and orders you didn't question.

The pieces arrange themselves with horrible clarity. Harlan ordered the massacre. Harlan let you carry the blame. And now Harlan has paid good money to put Eli Cord — the one surviving witness — in the ground before whatever evidence he's holding can surface. This isn't a bounty. It's a burial order with your signature on it.

You sit with that for exactly thirty seconds. Outside, the flats shimmer under a bone-white sun. Harlan's other hunters are already out there — you're not the only name on his payroll, just the most deniable one. You have two choices, and neither one feels clean.