Page 33 of Shadowed

"Just like that."

"Just like that."

I don't believe him. I also don't have a choice, which is a state of affairs I've become fluent in over the past month. I takethe briefing and I follow him to the passage point, and when he stops and extends his arm I put my hand on his forearm the way I always do—the forearm, not the hand, I choose the forearm every time because the forearm is impersonal and professional and the hand would be?—

His forearm is cool through the fabric of his coat. Dense. The way stone is dense—not hard so much as utterly present, a mass of him I can feel in my palm like pressure, and I'm aware all at once of the width of him, the height of him, the way the corridor shrinks around his body. My nipples pull tight against my chemise. I press my fingers down against his forearm and try to look like someone doing a professional task.

"Hold on," he says.

"I know the drill."

His voice does something. Down my spine. Between my thighs. I'm already wet before the dark takes us—I notice it the way you notice a bruise, too late, already there—and then the passage swallows us whole and it's worse.

Three seconds of nothing—no light, no air that I can name, just the mineral cold of his court and his arm under my hand and the dark that is his dark, not the absence of light but a presence, pressing against every inch of my skin, and the scent of him is concentrated in here, stone and cold mineral and the undertow beneath that, darker, richer, something my body has catalogued without my permission and responds to now the way a lock responds to the right key. Immediate. Helpless. The heat between my thighs sharpens to something with a pulse. My nipples ache. Three seconds and I am twenty years older and no less a fool.

One-two-three.

The alley off Lantern Row opens around me and the city wraps around me like an old coat. Fog. Coal smoke. Horse dung. The grey-brown smell of Ashworth in November that used to bemy entire world and now smells flat after weeks of dark stone and shadow-flowers.

I let go of his forearm. I walk.

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I find Pemberton's charity on a side street in Cresthaven. Clean frontage, good neighbourhood, brass plaque that reads SOCIETY FOR THE WELFARE OF DISPLACED OMEGA GIRLS—est. 1868. Respectable. The kind of respectable that costs money, and the money is visible—curtained windows, painted trim, a maid who answers the door in a pressed uniform.

I case the building the way I case any job. Exits, sight lines, patrol patterns, locks. The locks are Chubb—decent, not exceptional. The maid follows a routine. The delivery schedule is predictable. If this were a heist, I'd have it planned in twenty minutes.

But it's not a heist. It's surveillance, and surveillance takes patience, and I give it two days because two days is the minimum I'd spend on a high-value job and I'm not cutting corners on whether or not I'm about to kill an innocent woman.

Day one: the charity operates normally. Girls arrive—young, scared, omega-markers visible in the way they carry themselves, the hunched shoulders, the flinch reflex. Pemberton greets them with a practiced smile and a cup of tea. She's good at professional warmth. The kind that makes you lean in, the kind that makes you trust.

I know professional warmth. I use it on fences when I need a better price. The warmth is real and the calculation behind it is also real and the two are not in conflict. I watch Pemberton pour tea and I think: she's good at this. She's very, very good.

Day two: I find the ledger.

Night work. Chubb lock, forty seconds—I could do it faster but I'm being careful because careful is how you stay alive in buildings that belong to people who might need killing. Theoffice is tidy. The charity ledger is in the desk drawer, unlocked, showing clean accounting—donations in, expenses out, rent and food and clothing for displaced girls.

The second ledger is in a false bottom under the desk. I find it because I find false bottoms—it's the same instinct that finds hidden compartments in desks and false walls in manor houses. My fingertips know when a surface is lying about its depth.

The second ledger shows the real business. Names in a column—girls' names, ages, omega status, estimated value. Buyer contacts in code that isn't hard to break if you've spent a decade reading fenced goods inventories. Payments received. Transport dates. Destinations.

Pemberton identifies the girls. Gains their trust. Confirms omega status through her "welfare assessments." Then sells their locations to Fae trafficking rings who collect them. The girls disappear. The families are told they've been placed in safe houses. The money flows into a separate account that doesn't appear in the charity ledger.

Forty-three girls in eighteen months. Ages twelve to seventeen.

I scan the column twice before the recognition lands. There—the third entry. Maeve Cottrell, sixteen. The same name was on a manifest I stole six weeks ago, third sheet, transit route to a Fae territory I don't recognise. I read further. Cora Bayliss. Susannah Doyle. Three names that were on the merchant's shipping list. Three girls Mrs. Pemberton "placed" two months before the manifest was drawn up. Three girls I sold for rent money on a cold November morning without looking closely because looking closely takes time.

Pemberton feeds the manifest. The manifest moves the girls. Same ring. Different feeders.

I close the ledger. I put it back. I reset the false bottom and the desk drawer and the Chubb lock and I walk out into the November fog and I stand on the pavement and I breathe.

The anger is cold. Not hot—I save hot anger for things that surprise me. This doesn't surprise me. This is the rookeries dressed in Cresthaven lace, the same predation I've seen my entire life wearing a brass plaque and a pressed uniform. I've watched Fae patrols take girls from Coalside while their mothers screamed. I didn't know someone was selling them the addresses.

Now I know. The knowing has a weight to it, cold and solid, settling in my chest like a stone in a pocket.

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I go back the next night.