Stat Allocation
The travel from Public coffee spot to Office desk consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The lock clicked behind them with a sound that felt too loud in the narrow hallway. Damian’s apartment occupied the third floor of a walk-up that had seen better decades—peeling wallpaper, a light fixture that buzzed with a dying fluorescent tube, and the faint smell of old grease drifting up from the Chinese takeout place below.
Oliver stood in the center of the small living room, his backpack still strapped over both shoulders, his sneakers planted on the worn beige carpet. His eyes moved across the space with the careful assessment of a child who had learned that adults lied about safe places.
Two windows faced the street. Damian moved to them immediately, checking the locks, angling the blinds so they saw out but no one could see in. A fire escape clung to the brick wall outside the kitchen window—rusty but functional. He counted the steps to the ground floor. Fourteen. Then a fifteen-foot drop to the alley behind the dumpster.
“Is this your house?” Oliver asked.
“Base camp.” Damian pulled his phone from his jacket and texted a single word to Owen’s encrypted number: *Secure channel?*
The response came in ten seconds. *Give me three minutes.*
Damian turned to face the boy. Up close, Oliver had Freya’s eyes—gray-green, watchful—and the same slight furrow between his brows when he was trying to solve a problem. But the jawline was Damian’s. The way he stood, weight balanced on the balls of his feet, hands loose at his sides. That was pure muscle memory from someone who had never been taught to stand that way.
It was instinct. Which meant it was genetic.
“Take off your backpack,” Damian said. “We’re going to stay here for a few hours while I figure out the next move.”
Oliver set the bag down carefully, unzipped it, and pulled out a worn paperback. *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. The spine was cracked, the cover softened from handling. He sat on the floor with his back against the couch and opened the book.
Damian watched him for a moment. No questions about where they were going next. No demands for explanations. The boy had simply assessed the situation, identified that an adult was handling logistics, and allocated his attention to something productive. It was the most adaptive behavior Damian had ever seen in a child.
He crossed to the small desk pushed against the far wall. His laptop was three years old, the casing held together with electrical tape in two places, but the encryption software was current. He opened a browser, triggered a VPN through three nodes, and pulled up the Covington Group’s public holdings.
The screen filled with a sleek corporate website—glass towers, wind farms, smiling employees in hard hats. Philanthropy page. Board of directors. Investor relations. The surface-level armor that covered everything.
Damian didn’t waste time on it. He opened a secondary program, a data-scraper he’d built during his last deployment, and fed it the Covington name. The program would crawl financial records, property registrations, court filings. Whatever lived in the public record, he would find within the hour.
His phone buzzed. Owen’s encrypted line connected.
“You’re alive.” Owen’s voice was flat, professional, but Damian caught the edge beneath it. “Miriam called me. Said you turned up with a kid.”
“My kid.”
A pause. The sound of a keyboard clicking on the other end. “I’m pulling up your file now. You never listed a dependent.”
“Because I didn’t know he existed until two hours ago.”
Owen was silent for six seconds. Damian counted. “The timing is bad,” Owen finally said. “Covington’s people were at the courthouse today. Looking through family court records. I had a buddy in IT who flagged the access request.”
Damian’s hand stilled on the mouse. “They filed a motion.”
“Not yet. They’re fishing. Probably trying to find an angle.” Another pause. “Damian, I need to tell you something you won’t want to hear.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Grant Covington has a private debt portfolio. Off the books. I’ve seen fragments of it—enough to know that he extends credit to people who can’t go to banks. Judges. Cops. A state senator. The interest rate isn’t money. It’s favors.”
Damian leaned back in his chair. The cushion springs creaked. “How deep does it go?”
“Deep enough that when he wants a file sealed, it gets sealed. When he wants a paternity test delayed, it gets lost. When he wants a custody hearing moved to a specific judge’s docket, it lands on that desk within forty-eight hours.”
The scope of it settled over Damian like a weight. He wasn’t fighting a wealthy family. He was fighting a system that wealthy families had learned to weaponize. Every branch of the state apparatus that was supposed to protect Oliver had been compromised at some level.
“I need tactical data,” Damian said. “Physical security at the Covington estate. Personnel rotation. Vehicle registrations. If they come for the boy before I can move, I need to know the vectors.”
“You’re planning to run.”
“I’m planning to survive.”
Owen’s exhale was barely audible. “I’ll send you what I have. But Damian—Cole Covington isn’t his father. He’s worse. Grant buys influence. Cole buys violence. He has a crew that doesn’t show up on any payroll. Ex-military, off-the-books contractors. He uses them for collections.”
“What kind of collections?”
“The kind where the debt is a person.”
Damian looked at Oliver. The boy had turned a page, his eyes tracking the words, his lips moving slightly as he read to himself. He looked small against the couch. Fragile. A character with no defensive stats, no health regeneration, no special abilities that would save him from the enemies that were already loading into the map.
“Send me everything,” Damian said. “I’ll be in touch.”
He ended the call and opened a new browser tab. Opened his bank account. Stared at the number for a long moment. Four thousand, two hundred and thirteen dollars. His severance from the security contracting firm had lasted longer than he’d expected, but the math was simple. That amount covered rent for two more months, food for three, and transportation costs for one contingency plan.
But not enough for the plan he was building in his head.
He needed new identities. Two sets—one for short-term cover, one for long-term disappearance. He needed a vehicle that couldn’t be tracked through license plate readers. He needed cash, enough to operate outside the banking system for at least six months. He needed a destination where Covington’s influence didn’t reach.
He began a mental list. Resource allocation. Priorities. Timelines.
**PHASE ONE: Immediate (0-48 hours)**
– Secure alternate housing: motel outside city limits, cash payment, no registration
– Purchase prepaid phones: three units, different carriers
– Obtain physical cash: $2,500 from ATM network, multiple locations, small withdrawals
– Document Oliver’s existing records: birth certificate, medical history, school enrollment
**PHASE TWO: Transition (48-72 hours)**
– Acquire forged documents: driver’s license, social security card, birth certificate for both
– Establish new email accounts: protonmail, encrypted, no personal identifiers
– Liquidate assets: furniture, electronics, anything that can be sold for cash
– Scout exit routes: bus stations, train schedules, regional airport
**PHASE THREE: Extraction (72-96 hours)**
– Execute departure: no traceable bookings, no credit cards, no pattern
– Cut digital footprint: deactivate social media, close accounts, remove contact lists
– Reach secure location: designated safe house outside Covington’s operational radius
He ran the timeline again. Tight. Aggressive. Every hour that passed increased the probability of Cole Covington acting before Damian could move. The lawyer’s letter would arrive tomorrow. Maybe tonight. It would be civil, professional, laced with the implied threat of endless litigation that would drain Damian’s resources and tie him to a jurisdiction where Covington held all the cards.
That was the polite approach.
The impolite approach would arrive in a black sedan with no plates and men who never identified themselves.
Damian turned from the desk and sat on the floor across from Oliver. The boy looked up from his book, his thumb holding his place in the middle of a chapter.
“I’m going to tell you some things,” Damian said. “I need you to listen and remember. Can you do that?”
Oliver closed the book but kept his finger inside. “Yes.”
“The people who were watching us today. They work for a man named Cole Covington. He and his father want to take you away from your mother and put you somewhere I can’t find you. They have a lot of money and a lot of people who do what they’re told.”
Oliver’s expression didn’t change. “Why?”
“Because they think they own things. People. Choices.” Damian chose his words carefully. “Your mother had a debt to them. Not money. Something older. She walked away from it before you were born, and they’ve been waiting for a way to collect.”
“What did she owe them?”
Damian looked at the boy’s face and saw Freya in every line. The same stubborn set to the mouth. The same intelligence in the eyes, already working through the problem, looking for the solution that the adults were too slow to find.
“She owed them a secret,” Damian said. “And you’re the proof that she kept it.”
Oliver processed this. His thumb slid out of the book and he set it on the carpet. “So we have to leave.”
“Yes.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to figure it out.” Damian held the boy’s gaze. “Until then, you do exactly what I say, exactly when I say it. If I tell you to hide, you hide and don’t come out until I come get you. If I tell you to run, you run and don’t stop until you’re somewhere safe. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Repeat it back to me.”
Oliver’s voice was steady. “Hide until you come get me. Run until I’m safe.”
Damian nodded. The boy had passed the first test of any party member: he understood orders without needing them explained. In a game, that meant high intelligence and wisdom stats. In real life, it meant the difference between survival and a body bag.
His laptop chimed. The data-scraper had finished its initial sweep.
Damian rose and moved to the desk. The results populated the screen in a cascade of spreadsheets and document links. Property holdings. Tax filings. A list of subsidiaries that branched like a root system, buried beneath shell companies and holding corporations. The Covington Group wasn’t just wealthy—it was structured to be untouchable. Any legal attack would get lost in the layers. Any investigation would drown in the complexity.
But the scraper had found something else. A payment schedule. Quarterly transfers to an account registered in the Cayman Islands. The recipient field was blank, but the memo line contained a single word: *Interest.*
Owen had mentioned the debt portfolio. This was a fragment of it. A thread that, if pulled, might unravel the entire structure.
Damian saved the files to an encrypted drive and closed the laptop. He had a direction now. Not a destination, but a path.
His phone vibrated. An unknown number. He let it go to voicemail.
The message was eight seconds long.
He played it on speaker.
Cole Covington’s voice was smooth, amused, the tone of a man who had never been told no by anyone who mattered. “Bring the boy, or we take him the hard way. Your choice, Ashby.”