[right][indent][sup][b]Gyles, Quinn -> Ariella, Alexander[/b][/sup]
[i]The job is on. We have find the little shits who've been pushing that whiplash throughout the city. We've been ordered to fan out and gather information for the time being, but not to take any rash actions. My best bet would be going through the prostitutes, they mess with some of the most fucked up johns sometimes. I ain't telling you what to do, and you can find information you're own way, but I'm gonna hit up the rings. In any case, we'll meet back up in six hours and share anything we've found. We gotta put a lid on this shit quick.[/i][/indent][/right]

[indent][sup][b]Ariella, Alexander -> Lécuyer, Arina; Lécuyer, Christopher[/b][/sup]
[i]trouble in paradise. whiplash leakage, damage limitation - spin?? 
if you know anything talk to mother xx[/i][/indent]

[indent][b][sup]Ariella, Alexander -> Kowalski, Carl; Morello, Anna; Bridges, Peter[/sup][/b]
[i]allow limited whiplash for 48 hours. want to know where it’s coming from.
eat this message after reading <3 or else xx[/i][/indent]

Alexander put his phone down and sighed. He had felt it recently, just walking around the city. It had been cold. Cold and dead still. He lowered his lips over the straw of his iced and very frothy coffee, whose milky beigeness was clearly visible through its transparent, plastic container. On the table in front of him, his phone buzzed again, silent apart from the frantic vibrations driving into the wooden surface. He traced his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, catching flyaway drops of creamy coffee and underlining his thick, neat handlebar moustache.

[indent][right][sup][b]Bridges, Peter -> Ariella, Alexander[/b][/sup]
[i]??[/i][/right][/indent]

[indent][sup][b]Ariella, Alexander -> Bridges, Peter[/b][/sup]
[i]mother knows best xx[/i][/indent]

Alexander rolled his eyes and tousled his hair, and climbed to his feet from the squashy sofa in the entrance hall of the Palace. It was an ironic name for the faux-retro converted ‘70’s warehouse that had, in its time, been a garage, a drug-den, a garage again, an unofficial music venue, a succession of here-today-gone-tomorrow yuppie cafes, before eventually falling into the Syndicate’s hands. It continued to pretend to be a bar, even now under Alexander’s tenure, masking its true nature under the whimsical and exclusionary habits of the similar-looking hipster hangouts in the local area. The organised crime of the new millennium.

He had been resident in the Palace since the Ariellas had acquired it, which they did in much the same way as wolves acquire carcasses. Back then, the helpful, concrete-lined cellar underneath the floor had been of particular use, with Alexander its guardian, but as Alexander had come to receive more and more of his growing family heritage in the past decade, unskilled work had been, rightly, subcontracted to the unskilled. Now, as their predecessors had begun to blaze trails in parts unknown, their old hangouts, favoured by a different generation of men, had come to seem a little old-fashioned, perhaps even a little irrelevant. The Palace now served, in Alexander’s mind, as a renewed and refreshed place to exist, bohemian from the ironic chandeliers to the assorted couches and armchairs strewn across the hard, concrete floor. Alexander had made a point of saving the bar that had been put in in one of the Palace’s previous iterations, and although the pumps were now purely decorative, from a bottle-perspective, he was rather well-stocked.

He rummaged his keys from his pocket and threw the empty plastic coffee cup over his shoulder on the way out, where it lay on the floor among the others. His thumb danced across his phone’s touch-screen as he shimmied out of the door.

[indent][sup][b]Ariella, Alexander -> Quinn, Gyles[/b][/sup]
[i]these things are sent to try us. will have a look xx[/i][/indent]

There was much to do.