It’s 7:14 a.m. in Las Vegas, and Daniel Ocean walks out of Clark County Detention Center wearing the same suit he went in with. Wrinkled. The shirt’s missing a button. His tie’s stuffed into his jacket pocket like an afterthought. He lights a cigarette with a match from Caesar’s, lets it hang off his lip, and squints at the sky like it owes him something.

He doesn’t call anyone. He doesn’t have anyone, not right now.His shoes are scuffed, but they still make that confident tap against the pavement like they’ve never known failure. He walks two blocks in silence before ducking into a 24-hour diner that smells like burnt coffee and desperation. He orders black coffee and toast. No one looks at him. He likes it that way.

The waiter calls him “boss” and he thanks him with a nod and a grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

He pulls a small, battered notebook from his jacket—dog-eared, water-stained, the kind you could lose everything in if you dropped it once. He flips past pages of scribbled numbers, locations, old contacts. Notes written in code. Names with crosses next to them—some crossed out in ink, some in red pencil.

He turns to a clean page.

“Start Small.” “Cash only. No crew. Not yet.”

He underlines it once. Twice.

From the corner of his eye, he clocks a guy three booths down counting money from a badly-hidden envelope. Sloppy. Paranoid. Probably new. Daniel watches him for three minutes and already knows how he’d rob him without the guy ever realizing it. But he doesn’t.

Not yet.

The waiter refills his cup. He thanks him again.Then he gets up, leaves a twenty on the table, and walks out with nothing but his notebook, a cigarette behind his ear, and a look that says he’s already planning something.Because Daniel Ocean didn’t serve time just to go straight.

He served time to get sharper.