How to Get Girls, Get Rich, and Rule the World (Even If You're Ugly)-Chapter 51: How to Decode a Hoard of Forbidden Things (1)

We turned left, crossing a street with crooked lampposts that flickered like the light was afraid of itself. The neighborhood around us changed fast — the pavement got worse, the houses stood closer together, the windows shut without visible hands.

Antoril breathed differently here. Like the air itself refused to move.

"The Andros chapel is past the old market," I murmured. "After that, it’s just the ruins sector. No one goes there by accident."

"This woman doesn’t show up by accident either."

She quickened her pace.

The city changed its tone.

With every corner, Antoril looked different. Smaller. More closed off. Like it was hunching its shoulders, trying to hide what was coming next.

The street we crossed split into three narrow alleys, each more crooked than the last. Two led into absolute darkness. The third looked too well-lit, like a stage set by the wrong hands.

Thalia hesitated.

"This isn’t the way?" she asked, trying to read an invisible map in the air.

"Antoril wasn’t made to be read," I murmured. "It was made to deceive."

She looked around, irritated at the lack of signs, at the absence of urban logic. But to me, it was familiar.

Because cities speak.

And some scream between the lines.

"It all looks the same," she complained. "Dirty stone, crooked doors, quiet people."

"No, it doesn’t."

She shot me a quick glance, as if expecting a breakdown with concrete, verifiable arguments. But the truth is, it doesn’t always work like that — at least not when you’ve learned to survive by reading a city like a hidden source code.

"What do you mean?"

I stopped at the intersection. It wasn’t the casual kind of stop. It was the strategic kind — where the body halts, but the mind kicks into high gear.

I looked at the alleys, each one a filthy opening on the side of a city that seemed hastily stacked together, like a barricade made of abandoned homes and unresolved stories.

To the right, the smell was of old fish. Strong. Too strong. That meant discard, buildup, abandonment. No one traffics secrets where the stench of rot is louder than the sound of their own voice.

To the left, the smell was different. There was something there. It wasn’t just damp charcoal. It had a distinct trace of sulfur, mixed with freshly stretched leather — the kind of scent that doesn’t happen by accident.

It was a smell born of recent work. Of someone passing through. Or returning. Or making deals.

It wasn’t a smell. It was a record. A kind of signature. And I knew how to read those.

"It’s this way," I said, pointing to the left.

"But that alley’s dark."

"Yeah. But not dark enough."

And it wasn’t. The kind of darkness that scares me isn’t the one that blinds — it’s the one that hides too much silence. Dangerous places aren’t necessarily the darkest ones, but the quietest.

The ones where not even rats dare, where even the echo hesitates. But that alley... it had layers. It breathed unevenly. The sound died, but didn’t vanish.

It was muffled by something — and that, curiously, meant movement.

She raised an eyebrow, sarcastic.

"Do you come up with those cryptic phrases on purpose, or do they just come with the package?"

I smiled. A toothless smile, just at the corner of my mouth.

"They come with the backstory."

And it really did. It came from years where I had to learn how to tell the difference between an alley used by drunks and an alley used by human couriers.

It came from days that dragged on too long, where the smallest detail could mean the difference between walking out the front door or becoming just another number on a missing persons report.

I remembered, for instance, a stifling night when I had to cross five blocks through a favela controlled by one of the smaller branches of the local drug trade.

The business was mine — or rather, had been bought by me, in an informal auction of bankrupt companies where contracts didn’t come on paper, but as whispered promises over discreet dinners.

I’d acquired a small electronics parts distribution system — an elegant façade for what, in practice, functioned as a hub for encrypted information.

Everything ran silently, until one specific chip showed up on the wrong spreadsheet. And I, being the "cleanest" of the group, got chosen to deliver the piece personally to one of the contacts inside the community.

I climbed through the dark alleys with my eyes scanning the ground, the windows, the rooftops — everything. Too many people not looking enough. Kids playing where they shouldn’t. Dogs too skinny to bark. That was territory. Not a neighborhood.

And the cracked, dirty asphalt was just part of the scenery in that place. But then something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen — I turned onto a side street, three corners from the warehouse where I was supposed to make the drop, and noticed something that didn’t fit: the sidewalk was too clean.

It wasn’t rain-cleaned. Or cleaned as a routine. It was the kind of clean made with a bucket, a squeegee, and intention. No dust. No cigarette butts. No plastic bags caught in corners.

Even the usual plastic bottles pressed against the walls were gone. The warehouse gate was slightly ajar, like an invitation. Light was on, but not fluorescent — the warm glow of a space that had been staged.

And it was in that detail — the almost polite shine of the bulb, the cement newer than it should be, the unsettling tidiness of it all — that I knew.

They were waiting for me.

Not with raised weapons. But with the calm of people who had already decided that someone wasn’t going home tonight. Maybe just to scare me. Maybe to collect. Maybe just to make sure the piece vanished along with the messenger.

I didn’t go in.

I turned around slowly. Walked like I’d forgotten something in the car. Went back down the same alley I’d come from, eyes low, steps measured. And only when I reached the cracked asphalt of the main street again — with motorcycles growling and music leaking from houses — did I actually breathe.

I walked out alive because I noticed what no one else would’ve noticed.

Because that night, like so many others, the city warned me before the shot.

And I listened.

That day I learned every city speaks. Sometimes they scream.

But only to those who’ve learned to hear where there’s no sound. freёweɓnovel.com

We followed the path I’d chosen. Our feet sank into old sludge. The walls dripped moldy breath.

And that’s when my mind came back.