The city had learned new kinds of silence.
Not the hush of reverence, nor the soft fall of snow or the dim flicker of candlelight. It was the silence of bolted doors and windows nailed shut. The silence of prayers whispered without conviction. The silence of footsteps quickening when another pair echoed too close behind. It was the silence before a scream.
Carmen moved through it with the ease of someone born in the spaces between heartbeats.
She found the next pawn in an opium den south of Limehouse. He wasn't the sort they usually picked—older, heavier, his hands shaking not from fear but from forgetting what it felt like not to be afraid. His name was Elias. Once he might have been a teacher, or a clerk. It didn't matter. Now he was ash wrapped in skin.
Carmen watched him from across the smoke-choked room, his mouth slack, his fingers twitching against his stained waistcoat. She saw the hollow behind his ribs, the desperate hunger not for food or shelter, but for meaning. Julian leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, a cigarette burning low between two fingers, already seeing what she saw.
Elias would kneel.
Elias would bleed.
Elias would believe it mattered.
Carmen crossed the room without hurry. She crouched before him, tilting her head to meet his bloodshot gaze.
"You look tired," she said.
Elias blinked slowly, the words dragging through the fog clouding his mind.
"I can help," she murmured, and smiled.
When Carmen Vale smiled, people followed—even when they didn't know where the road led.
Especially then.
Vivienne watched from the shadows, hollow-eyed, her notebook abandoned long ago. She had stopped pretending she was recording history. Somewhere deep down, she knew she was only documenting a collapse—her own, the city's, maybe both. She watched Elias stumble after them like a faithful hound, and for one brief, foolish moment, she almost wanted to warn him.
But she didn't.
Even the hounds learned the sharpness of the master's knife eventually.
Hargreave crossed a line that night too.
The boy—seventeen, maybe eighteen—was caught near the river, his hands bloodied, his eyes wide with something too sharp to be simple fear. Hargreave didn't call for backup. He didn't bring him to the station. He dragged the boy into a narrow alley and pressed his forearm against the boy's throat until his breath rattled and his eyes rolled.
"You know who they are," Hargreave whispered, voice raw with sleeplessness.
The boy gasped something that might have been a word, a name.
Hargreave loosened his grip just enough.
"Spiral," the boy coughed.
Then he laughed—a broken, ugly sound that shook Hargreave worse than any blow.
Hargreave hit him. Once. Hard. Enough.
The boy slumped to the ground, unconscious or worse.
Hargreave stood there a long time, hands trembling at his sides, before stumbling back into the dark streets.
The guilt sat thick behind his ribs, suffocating.
He wasn't chasing justice anymore.
He was chasing ghosts.
And ghosts didn't bleed.
Back at the flat, Carmen and Julian cleaned Elias up.
They dressed him. Fed him. Not because they cared, but because a blade must be sharp before it cuts.
They made him beautiful again, or close enough—scrubbed the opium stink from his skin, buttoned a clean coat over his shoulders, laced his boots. They gave him a name to chant and a spiral to carve into the marrow of London's fear.
Elias thought he had been saved.
He thought Carmen's fingers, steadying his chin, were kindness.
He thought Julian's whispered instructions were a blessing.
Vivienne knew better.
She sat silent at the kitchen table, unseen, forgotten. She knew they were sharpening him, preparing him for slaughter. And she wondered, distantly, if they had done the same to her once—and hated how much she still wanted them to keep her a little longer.
That night, in the broken remnants of a hotel south of the river, Elias made his first kill.
A man. A drunk. Someone no one would miss.
He wept after, sobbing against Carmen's shoulder, begging for forgiveness she would never offer.
Carmen held his hand until the sobs quieted, murmuring nothing. Just presence. Just pressure.
Julian cleaned the blade, efficient, detached.
Vivienne watched from the shadows, biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
And she knew—even as Elias crumbled into Carmen's arms, even as the last ragged shred of hope bled out of him—that he would not last long.
Pawns never did.
They were made to be broken.
And Carmen Vale was very, very good at breaking beautiful things.