Chapter 6
GRANT
Ididn't go to Dominion Hall.
I should have. That was the whole reason I was here—the address on my phone, the man named Ethan, the tryout or invitation or whatever it was that had pulled me off a Texas highway and dropped me into a Gulfstream like cargo with better seating.
The logical thing, the operational thing, was to finish my coffee, find the address, walk in, and get the briefing.
Instead, I paid my invisible tab in invisible currency, stepped outside, and turned in the wrong direction on purpose.
I wasn't ready. Not for whatever Dominion Hall was, not for whatever they wanted from me, not for the conversation that would inevitably start with questions I didn't have answers to and end with a pitch I'd either accept or refuse and spend the rest of the month second-guessing.
I knew the shape of those conversations.
I'd sat through enough of them in enough windowless rooms to know that the first five minutes decided everything and the remaining hour was theater.
Not yet.
What I needed was air. Movement. The simple, brainless act of walking through a city I didn't know with no objective and no timeline and nobody waiting for me at the other end.
A luxury I hadn't allowed myself in so long that the freedom of it felt almost transgressive, like skipping formation or sleeping through a briefing.
I was a man who operated inside structure the way fish operated inside water—take the structure away and I wasn't free, I was drowning.
But the coffee had been good. The morning had been good. And there was a version of today where I just walked.
So, I walked.
King Street south, then east on a cross street I didn't catch the name of, then down toward the water where the buildings got older and shorter and the air thickened with salt and the faint marshy sweetness I was beginning to associate with this city specifically, the way you associate certain smells with certain people and can never fully separate them afterward.
The sidewalks changed underfoot—brick to stone to concrete and back to brick, each block its own era, its own argument about what a city owed its ground.
I moved at a pace that would've gotten me mocked by my team.
Not tactical. Not purposeful. Just—moving.
Looking at doorways and ironwork and the way the morning light caught in the old glass of windows that had been installed when my great-great-grandparents were children.
A church bell rang somewhere—one deep note, resonant and unhurried, like the city was checking its own pulse and finding it acceptable.
I passed a gallery where a man was hanging paintings in the window.
A law office with a plaque so old the letters had worn thin.
A bar that was closed at this hour but had the kind of front door that suggested it would be worth visiting when it opened.
I catalogued everything the way I catalogued every environment—entry points, sight lines, chokepoints—but underneath the habit, something softer was happening.
Something that didn't have a tactical application.
I was enjoying myself.
The farmers market appeared without warning.
One block I was on a quiet residential street, the next I was standing at the edge of a double row of white canopy tents filling a wide stretch between old buildings—vendors, shoppers, the organized chaos of people buying things directly from the people who'd made or grown them.
Vegetables with dirt still on them. Flowers in tin buckets.
A woman selling soap from a table that smelled like lavender hit me from twenty feet.
This was not my world.
I'd grown up on a ranch. I understood growing things, understood the work behind a crate of tomatoes or a bushel of peppers.
But the market itself—the browsing, the chatting, the slow, pleasant drift from stall to stall while you pretended to consider a jar of artisanal pickles—that was a skill set I'd never developed.
I didn't browse. I identified a target, acquired it, and left.
Shopping, in my experience, was a mission with a soft timeline and insufficient intel.
But I was here. And I had nowhere else to be.
I entered the market the way I entered most unfamiliar environments: perimeter first, interior second, exit routes noted.
The first stall sold candles. I looked at the candles. A woman behind the table smiled at me hopefully. I nodded at her the way I might acknowledge a fellow operator at a checkpoint—brief, professional, devoid of commercial intent—and moved on. She seemed confused.
The second stall sold honey. I picked up a jar, read the label with more attention than it deserved, set it back down.
A man offered me a sample on a toothpick.
I took it because refusing felt ruder than accepting, and stood there chewing a wooden stick covered in wildflower honey while two women browsed around me like I was a rock in a stream.
The third stall sold hot sauce. I was better here—hot sauce was something I understood, something with application. I read three labels, compared Scoville ratings, and was about to commit to a purchase when a woman reached past me and nearly took the same bottle.
I let her have it. She was quicker, and in my world, the faster draw wins.
The stall that stopped me was near the back, tucked between a woman selling woven baskets and a kid with a table full of handmade dog collars.
An old man sat behind a low display table covered in leather.
Not raw leather—finished pieces. Belts, wallets, a few small bags. But what caught my eye were the boots.
Three pairs, displayed on wooden forms, each one different and each one unmistakably handmade.
The stitching was tight, even, the kind that came from decades of muscle memory.
The leather was supple but dense—the quality you couldn't fake, couldn't rush, that only existed when the tanner and the craftsman both knew what they were doing and took the time to prove it.
The soles were stacked leather, pegged, not glued.
The toes were rounded, not pointed, shaped for work and wear, not costume.
They were beautiful. The way a good saddle is beautiful. The way a well-balanced blade is beautiful. Function elevated to something worth looking at by the sheer accumulation of care.
I crouched down to look at a pair of chestnuts. Ran my thumb along the shaft. The leather gave exactly the way it should—firm but alive, the grain visible but smooth, the color deep and even. These weren't boots you bought at a western store. These were boots a man put his name on.
"You know what you're looking at," the old man said. Not a question.
I looked up. He was seventy if he was a day—silver hair under a flat cap, hands weathered brown and speckled with old scars, the kind of hands that had been making things for longer than I'd been alive.
His eyes were blue and clear and sharp, the eyes of a man who'd spent a lifetime reading people through the quality of their attention.
"My grandfather had boots like these," I said. "Made by a man in Montana who used the same stitch pattern."
"Saddle stitch," the old man said. "Double-needled. Nobody does it anymore because it takes three times as long as a machine line."
"Which is why nobody else's boots last forty years."
He smiled. Slow, satisfied. The smile of a craftsman who'd just found someone who spoke his language.
"What size?"
"Thirteen."
He looked down at his display, then back at me. "Don't have your size here. But I can make a pair. Take some measurements, you pick the leather, I'll have them done in two days."
"How much for the deposit?"
He waved his hand—a dismissive gesture, easy and final. "I've been doing this long enough to sniff out a con man. You're no con man." He reached into a small metal box behind the table and produced a business card, handwritten, slightly bent at the corner. "Call me then. They'll be waiting."
I took the card. Looked at it. Looked at him.
"Thank you," I said. And meant it in a way that went beyond the boots.
He nodded once—the nod of a man who understood that sometimes a transaction was also a conversation—and went back to his leather.
I tucked the card into my back pocket and stood, feeling something I hadn't felt in a while. Settled. The satisfaction of an exchange between two people who respected the same things and didn't need to explain why.
I glanced at my watch. 9:43.
Best to get going. The walk back to the hotel, then the address on my phone, then Dominion Hall and whatever waited inside it. The morning had been an indulgence. The indulgence was over.
I started toward the edge of the market.
Then the bread found me.
Not the bread itself—the smell. Sourdough, fresh, with that tang underneath the crust-smell that said someone had been feeding a starter for years, maybe decades, and the bacteria had developed the kind of complexity that couldn't be rushed or replicated.
I knew that smell. It was fermentation, and fermentation was one of the few sciences I'd learned not in a classroom but in a kitchen, watching my mother shape loaves on Saturday mornings while the ranch dogs waited by the back door for the scraps that never came because she didn't believe in wasting a crumb.
The stall was three tents from the exit.
A simple setup—a table, a wooden sign, a man behind it with flour on his apron and the relaxed authority of someone who'd mastered one thing and was content to keep doing it forever.
A line had stretched from the table all morning, judging by the depleted display—most of the baskets were empty, the shelves picked clean by people who knew what they were after and had shown up early to get it.