Santiago's voice cut through the room low and unhurried and entirely unimpressed.
"How dare you offer me peanuts."
No one answered, and no one needed to.
The door opened again. The hinges gave a thin rasping sound that carried further than it should have in the thick silence of the room, and five men entered with the unhurried, precise movements of people performing something familiar. Their leather soles brushed against the polished tile in quiet increments as they spread along the walls and took their positions without a word exchanged between them, without looking at one another, without requiring any instruction at all. This was routine to them in the way that anything repeated enough times stops requiring thought, the body simply knows where to go and goes there.
