The blood.
All of it, pinned to the plaster, connected by red string, telling a story I was still learning to read.
19
The Bloodletting
The warehouse loomed against the night sky like a corpse.
I'd been watching it for hours—or maybe minutes, or maybe days, time had stopped meaning anything except the space between heartbeats. The building was old, a relic from when this part of the city still manufactured things, still produced goods, still hummed with the industry that had long since moved elsewhere. Now it was empty. Dark. Waiting.
Waiting for me.
I'd found the address in the dispatcher's phone, buried in a thread about "special shipments" and "VIP clients." The man inside was a broker—someone who connected buyers with sellers, who facilitated transactions, who took a cut of every woman sold through Mercy Logistics.
His name was Viktor.
Or maybe Yuri.
Or maybe something else entirely.
I couldn't remember. The name kept slipping, changing, rearranging itself into different letters. I'd stopped trying to hold onto it. Names didn't matter. Faces didn't matter. Only the information mattered—what he knew, where Gabriel was, how to find him.
"You're ready."
Gabriel's voice.
Or maybe my own.
Or maybe something I'd read once, in a file I shouldn't have opened.
I pushed the thought away and moved.
The warehouse door was rusted, the lock ancient, and it yielded to my tools in seconds. The hinges groaned as I pushed it open, a sound like something waking from a long sleep. I slipped inside, and the darkness swallowed me whole.
The interior was vast.
Catwalks stretched across the ceiling, their railings lined with dust. Crates were stacked against the walls, their contents long since removed or looted. The floor was concrete, cracked, stained with oil and something darker.
I could smell him.
Blood.
Sweat.
Fear.
He was here.
He knew I was coming.
He was waiting.
I walked toward the back of the warehouse, my footsteps silent on the concrete, my knife in my hand. The blade was cool against my palm, familiar in a way that made my chest ache. Gabriel had given me this knife. Gabriel's hands had placed it in mine. Gabriel's voice had told me how to use it, where to cut, how deep to go.
"A good girl knows how to end things cleanly."
I wondered if he'd meant me.
