Mercer's blood is still drying on my hands when we leave Paris.

  I washed them twice at the safe house, scrubbing until my skin was raw, but I can still feel it—the warmth fading to cold, the way it went tacky between my fingers as the life drained out of him. Five dead. Five names crossed off the list. The kills should feel like victory, but they don't—they feel like what they are, violence answered with violence, the void inside me growing with each life I take.

  The city is still sleeping when we slip through its streets, our footsteps muffled by the predawn silence that settles over even the most restless places. Gas lamps still burn, casting pools of yellow light that do little to penetrate the gloom between them. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolls the hour—four chimes that echo off stone facades and cobblestones, counting down the final moments before the city wakes. I've killed a man in this city. Left another body for the congregation to find, another message written in blood and broken faith. And now we're running, because staying means more deaths—ours, this time, if the hunters catch up.

  Our safe house is empty by midnight—clothes packed, notes burned, every trace of our presence scrubbed away like it was never there. Mei is thorough about these things, methodical in ways that speak of long practice. She moves through the rooms with a rag and a bottle of something chemical-smelling, wiping down surfaces I didn't even think to touch.

  "The congregation has resources," she says when I ask. "Fingerprints, hair samples, anything that could identify us. They've used such things before."

  I reflect on Mercer cooling in that Montmartre alley, his blood seeping between the cobblestones. By now someone has found him. By now the congregation knows another of their own is dead, killed the same way as the others—blade beneath the ribs, clean and precise.

  The kills aren't filling the void.

  Five dead now. Five names crossed off the list that burns in my pocket, inked in my own handwriting, carried everywhere like a talisman or a curse. Marcus Webb, Helena Cross, Jonathan Blackwood, Thomas Garrett, Victor Mercer. Each one deserved what they got—I tell myself that every night before sleep claims me, every morning when I wake reaching for my blade. Each one helped drown children, helped feed them to the thing in the deep, helped maintain the machinery of horror that nearly consumed me.

  But the void where my heart used to be doesn't get any smaller. If anything, it grows deeper with each kill. As if vengeance is just another kind of drowning.

  Mei warned me. I believed her. But standing in that alley, watching the light fade from Mercer's kind eyes, I'd still hoped for something. Some shift in the weight I carry. Some sign that the scales are moving, that the blood I'm spilling actually matters.

  Instead there's just this—the cold efficiency of cleanup, the careful destruction of evidence, the next name on the list already forming in my mind.

  "Where do we go now?"

  Mei pauses in her work, studying me with those flat, assessing eyes. "That depends. Are you ready to keep moving, or do you need time?"

  "Time for what?"

  "Processing. The second kill is often harder than the first, even when it goes cleanly." She sets down her rag, crosses to where I'm standing by the window. "You're carrying something. I can see it in your shoulders."

  I want to deny it. Want to be the weapon she's trained me to be—sharp, efficient, without hesitation or doubt. But Mei has earned my honesty, if nothing else.

  "He believed he was helping them," I murmur. "The children. He genuinely thought his kindness made a difference."

  "I understand."

  "How do you live with that? Knowing they don't understand what they've done?"

  Mei is quiet for a long moment. Outside, the first gray light of dawn is touching the rooftops, turning Paris from a city of shadows into something that might almost be beautiful.

  "You don't live with it." Her voice drops. "You carry it. The weight of every kill, every face, every justification they offered while they begged for their lives. You carry it until it becomes part of you, and then you keep carrying it anyway."

  "That sounds exhausting."

  "It is." She almost smiles. "But the alternative is stopping. And stopping means they win."

  "Has anyone ever told you that your motivational speeches need work?"

  "Frequently. They're usually dead within the week." She pauses. "That came out wrong. They were targets, not people I motivated to death."

  "That's not actually better, Mei."

  "I know. I've never been good at this part."

  It's the closest thing to humor I've heard from her in months. I file it away—evidence that somewhere beneath the flat eyes and the methodical violence, there's still a person. Still someone who can almost laugh at the absurdity of what we do.

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  She returns to her work. I watch the city wake—carts beginning to rattle on cobblestones, the first vendors setting up their stalls, the eternal rhythm of life continuing regardless of what horrors happened in its alleys last night.

  Thirteen names remain, thirteen debts unpaid. I turn away from the window and start packing.

  The train south departs from Gare d'Orléans at six in the morning.

  Mei has procured new papers—I'm now Marie Dubois, a teacher traveling to Bordeaux to visit a sick aunt. The documents are convincing enough to pass casual inspection, though I suspect they wouldn't survive serious scrutiny. We won't be staying anywhere long enough for that to matter.

  The carriage is nearly empty this early, just a few businessmen reading newspapers and a young mother trying to quiet a fussing infant. I settle into a seat by the window and watch Paris slide past—the grand boulevards, the bridges over the Seine, the slow transition from city to countryside as the buildings thin and the fields begin.

  Mei sits across from me, her face hidden behind a newspaper. To any observer, we're strangers sharing a carriage, unrelated, unconnected. Just two women traveling for their own private reasons.

  When the other passengers have drifted into sleep or deeper absorption in their reading, she folds her newspaper and speaks quietly.

  "There's someone I want you to meet."

  I wait.

  "A defector. Living under a false name in a village near Bordeaux. She ran from the congregation six years ago—burned their brand off her own wrist, changed her identity, disappeared so completely that even their hunters couldn't find her."

  "But you found her."

  "I'm better at looking than they are." Mei's voice is matter-of-fact, but I hear something beneath it—professional pride, or perhaps just the satisfaction of a hunter who has tracked difficult prey. "Her name now is Renée Marchant. She works as a governess for a family in a village called Saint-?‰milion-sur-Mer."

  "And her real name?"

  "Corrine Vane."

  The name doesn't mean anything to me, but something in Mei's tone suggests it should. I file it away for later.

  "Why are we looking for a defector? I thought the list was the priority."

  "List is important. Information more so." Mei leans forward. "Centuries of networks. Kill them one by one—still won't destroy them. Need to understand how they work."

  "And this Corrine Vane can tell us that?"

  "She might. She was inside for years—not as a low-level functionary like Mercer, but as something more significant. She knows names, locations, methods. The kind of intelligence that could cut years off our work."

  I think about the list. Thirteen names, each one a monster who helped make me what I am. The arithmetic of vengeance—simple, clear, one death at a time until the equation is balanced.

  But Mei is right. This congregation is bigger than thirteen names. Killing everyone on my list won't stop the rituals, won't protect the children who are even now being selected for sacrifice. If we want to actually destroy them, we need more than a list.

  We need to understand our enemy.

  "What if she won't help us?"

  "Then we determine whether she's a threat and act accordingly." Mei's voice goes flat in that way it does when she's discussing violence. "Six years is a long time to stay hidden. Either she's very good at disappearing, or someone is helping her stay invisible. Either way, we need to know."

  "You think she might still be connected to them? Working as a spy?"

  "I think trust is dangerous and verification is essential." She meets my eyes. "You know this, Eleanor. You learned it the hard way."

  I did. My father taught me that lesson in the worst possible way—trusted for sixteen years, betrayed in a single night. Now I trust Mei because she's earned it, because she's spent months teaching me, protecting me, helping me become what I need to be.

  But I don't trust easily anymore. The congregation made sure of that.

  "Alright." My voice barely works. "We find the defector. We determine if she can help us. And then?"

  "Then we decide." Mei unfolds her newspaper. "One step. One kill, one piece of intelligence—until we can actually hurt them."

  I turn to the window. The countryside rolls past—fields and farms and small villages, the quiet life of people who have no idea what lurks in the shadows of their world. People who will never see the marks carved into sacrificial children, never hear the chanting that calls to things in the deep.

  Lucky people, innocent people—once, I was one of them.

  We change trains in Bordeaux, then hire a carriage for the final leg of the journey. The driver is a taciturn man who smells of tobacco and horses, more interested in his own thoughts than in conversation with his passengers. I'm grateful for the silence.

  Our road winds through hills covered in vineyards, the vines skeletal and brown in the November cold. Here and there, chateaux rise from the terrain—old money, old families, the kind of wealth that measures itself in centuries rather than years. The congregation probably has members among them. They always do, among the powerful.

  The village emerges from a fold in the hills like something that wants to stay hidden. Stone walls, a silent church, cottages clustered around a square where nothing moves except blown leaves. It feels less like a place people chose to live than a place people came to disappear.

  The marks ache beneath my ribs. They don't like this place—or perhaps they're responding to something else, some presence I can't yet identify.

  "The governess lives with the Beaumont family," Mei says as we climb down from the carriage. "Third house from the church. She's been there two years."

  "And before that?"

  "Running—always running. Four years moving village to village, identity to identity." Respect colors Mei's voice despite her professional caution. "She's good at disappearing. The congregation hasn't found her yet."

  "But you did."

  "I'm better at looking than they are." She pays the driver, who wastes no time rattling away down the road. "And I have different resources."

  We walk into the village. An old woman watches from a doorway, clutching her broom like a weapon. These people know strangers mean trouble. They've learned it through loss, through experience, through the bone-deep paranoia of people who have nothing left except each other.

  The Beaumont house is larger than the others—two stories, stone walls, a garden dormant beneath rotting leaves. The windows are dark, curtains drawn against prying eyes.

  Mei stops at the gate.

  "Let me do the talking. She won't trust you."

  "She won't trust you either."

  "No. But she'll recognize what I am." Mei opens the gate. "That might be enough to get us through the door."

  I follow her up the path.

  Thirteen names remain on my list. But this woman—this Corrine Vane who burned the brand from her own flesh—might be the key to destroying more than names.

  She might be the key to destroying everything.

  Mei knocks.

  When the door opens, the woman who stands there has eyes that have seen the same darkness I carry.

  "You're earlier than I expected," Corrine Vane says. "Come in. We have much to discuss."

  Behind us, the old woman with the broom hurries inside her cottage. Through the window, I see her reaching for something on the shelf—a lamp. A signal.

  Someone in this village is watching. And now they know we're here.