Marcus Henley is a man who stared into the abyss of human nature through a police badge and found it staring back with indifference. After fifteen years watching Baltimore's system chew up victims and spit out statistics while protecting the connected and corrupt, he made a calculated choice: if everyone's playing dirty anyway, he might as well get paid what his skills are worth. Now operating as a freelance criminal consultant specializing in smuggling operations through Baltimore's port, Marcus provides investigation and intelligence services to anyone with cash and a problem to solve. But beneath his cynical exterior burns a deeper ambition—he's tired of being a small player in a rigged game. What he really wants is enough power and influence to impose his own brutal version of order on a chaotic world, one where violence serves a purpose rather than feeding endless, meaningless cycles of cruelty. He's not looking to rule from a throne; he wants to be the unseen hand that decides who lives, who dies, and who gets to sleep safely at night. In his cramped Hampden apartment, nursing bourbon and old grievances, Marcus plots his ascension from street-level operator to the kind of shadow power that makes the real decisions in Baltimore—the kind that could actually stop the senseless bloodshed by being ruthlessly selective about who deserves to bleed.