Noise first — Finn's voice carrying over the square before Zelene even saw him, mid-story, hands cutting through the air the way they always did when he'd found an audience willing to hold still for it. Nym stood beside him, arms loosely crossed, the corner of his mouth twitching against his own will.
The tension in Zelene's shoulders eased half a degree at the sight of them, ordinary and unbothered, before it came rushing back the moment Finn spotted her and the small girl gripping her hand.
"Oh — hey. Who's this?"
He was already crouching by the time he finished the sentence, dropping to Wren's height without a second thought.
"Wren," Zelene said. "She's with us for now."
"I'm Finn. That's Nym — doesn't say much, but he's a good listener. And that one—" he jerked a thumb toward the alley "—looks like he wants to arrest somebody, but he's actually the softest of all of us."
"I heard that," Ray said, stepping out of the shadow he'd claimed for the last hour.
For one brief moment, watching the five of them fold around the girl without effort, something in Zelene's chest loosened.
Then she remembered why they were standing here at all.
"Her mother's gone," she said. "Two days. And she's not the only one." The words came out steadier than she felt saying them. "A man on her street — Old Fen — says there's more than a dozen women missing from this town over the last few months. Nobody's saying the number out loud."
Ray's expression barely shifted, but something behind his eyes sharpened. "I noticed it too. Guards patrolling the square don't move like guild men. People go quiet the second one walks past."
"There's a woman who might talk," Corvin added. "Near the tannery. Midnight. That's the whole of what we have."
Finn exhaled through his teeth. "That's a lot of bad for one evening."
"There's more," Zelene said.
Ray's eyes cut toward her, already wary.
"The only way we find these women — find Della — is if someone gets taken the way the rest of them were."
Silence. Heavy, immediate.
"Who's the bait, then," Finn asked slowly.
"Me."
"No." Ray didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "Absolutely not."
"Ray—"
"You are not doing this." Corvin's voice cracked in from the other side, sharper than she'd heard from him in days. "Walk into the hands of whoever's been taking women off the street for months, on purpose, with no way to call for help once you're gone? I don't agree either."
"I don't have a better option," Zelene said. "Do you?"
"That's not the point," Corvin snapped. "The point is we don't hand you over to strangers because we're impatient."
"I'm not impatient. I'm out of time." She rounded on him, some of her own control slipping now. "There's a girl sitting on that wall who hasn't slept in her own house in two days because she's too scared her mother won't come back to it. You want a better plan? Build one in the next four hours, because that's all we have before midnight."
"Dangerous," Nym said quietly.
Everyone looked at him.
He didn't elaborate at first, just held Zelene's gaze with the particular steadiness he'd learned from eleven years of choosing his words with care. "Whoever's taking these women — they're organized. Guards are probably paid to look away, a dozen gone without a trace. That's not carelessness. If you walk in there alone, you're not one more disappearance. Are you really sure you're doing this?"
"I know," Zelene said. "I know exactly what I'm asking."
"Then let someone go with you," Finn said suddenly.
Everyone turned.
"I mean it," he said, standing up straighter now, all the usual joking drained clean out of his voice. "If they're taking women — women, specifically — then send two. Not one alone in the dark hoping the rest of us catch up in time."
"Finn, that's not—" Corvin started.
"I'll go." Finn cut him off, already working through it out loud, faster than his mouth usually managed anything. "I'm not exactly built like Ray. I could pass. Dress the part, hair down, keep my voice up — nobody's looking that close at a face in the dark, they're looking for a woman alone. If I'm with her, she's not alone. If something happens, there's two of us instead of one, and I'm the one nobody will think twice about underestimating."
For a long moment, nobody said anything at all.
Ray was the first to break it. "You."
"Me."
"You," Ray said again, slower this time, like repeating it might make it make more sense. "You want to put on a dress and walk into a trafficking ring."
"When you say it like that it sounds worse."
"It sounds exactly as bad as it is," Corvin said, though something in his voice had shifted — less outright refusal now, more disbelief scrambling to catch up with an idea it hadn't expected to take seriously. "You. Really."
"Why does everyone keep saying it like that," Finn muttered, though a flush had crept up the back of his neck. "I'm capable of subtlety."
"You," Ray said flatly, "have never once in your life been subtle."
"I can learn. Tonight. Fast."
Zelene looked between them, something loosening in her chest that hadn't been there a minute ago — not relief exactly, not yet, but the first thin thread of it.
"You'd really do that," she said quietly. "For someone you barely know."
Finn looked at her, and for once, the joke didn't come.
"I know what it's like to be someone nobody thought was worth going back for," he said. "I'm not letting you walk into that dark by yourself if I can help it."
Ray dragged a hand down his face, some of the fight draining out of him — not agreement, not yet, but the particular exhaustion of a man who could see, plainly, that he wasn't going to win this argument the way he wanted to.
"If you're doing this," he said finally, low and hard, looking between Finn and Zelene both, "then we do it my way. Every signal, every fallback, every worst case planned before either of you sets one foot near that tannery. No improvising once you're in there."
"Deal," Zelene said.
"I can absolutely improvise if I need to," Finn said.
"That was not an invitation," Ray said.
Corvin exhaled, long and slow, dragging both hands back through his hair like the last hour had aged him several years. "I don't like this."
"Noted," Zelene said gently. "I don't love it either."
Above them, the evening bells finished their last slow toll, fading out over the rooftops — and somewhere past them, past the square, past the quiet, frightened streets, midnight was already coming whether any of them felt ready for it or not.