"So here is the plan," Armin said.
His voice was low — the alley swallowed sound well, but old habits. He drew a rough shape in the dirt with his boot. "We divide into two teams. One goes with Fang from the way he usually comes in. The second team enters from the front and creates a distraction. When the slave mark is put on Stella, we finish them."
Stella stared at him.
The alley was quiet except for the distant sound of the city settling into evening — cart wheels on stone somewhere nearby, voices carrying from a window above us.
"You call that a plan?" she said. "We will be outnumbered. And wouldn't they be suspicious? We're walking in carrying swords."
Armin considered this for approximately one second.
"Then how about this," he said. "Felix takes Stella's sword. Ties her hands. Goes in with her as a buyer. Fang and I go in from the back and get his sister."
Stella was quiet for a moment.
"Now that's a plan," she said, with a satisfaction that was slightly alarming given the context. "We move at dusk. Until then — enjoy."
We all looked at each other.
None of us knew what that meant.
The sun dropped slowly. The sky went orange, then the deeper amber that came just before dark — the city's noise shifting with it, the daytime sounds fading and something quieter and less honest taking their place.
When the color finally left the sky, we moved.
Stella and I walked toward the inn.
The streets here were cobblestone, the gaps between the stones dark with old rain and older things. Lanterns hung at intervals — warm, flickering, doing more to create shadows than to remove them. The kind of light that made everything look like it was keeping a secret.
Fang had told us the black market entrance ran through this inn. Code words to the receptionist. Simple enough, if you knew.
The inn's common room smelled of tallow candles and something being cooked that had been cooking for too long. Murmured conversation from the tables. No one looked up when we entered. Everyone here had already decided not to notice things.
At the counter — a woman with a polite smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"How can I help you?"
"We need two rooms," I said. "With the statue of the Priestess of Blind Faith."
She held the smile exactly as it was. Reached beneath the counter. Rang a bell — one clean note that disappeared into the noise of the room.
A man came from somewhere in the back. Broad. Scarred across one cheek in the particular way of old violence that had healed badly. He looked at us without expression.
"Follow me," he said.
We followed him up the stairs — the wood creaking under his weight in a rhythm that suggested he'd walked this route enough times to stop hearing it. He lifted a chandelier from its bracket as we reached the landing and lit it. The flame caught and threw orange light across walls that had nothing on them.
First floor. Dark. Empty. Another set of stairs going down — steep, narrow, the kind that had been built to not be found.
He pulled a rope.
Below us, one by one, candles caught along the descending walls. The light was dim and uneven, making the stairs look longer than they were. Behind us, a section of wall moved — slow and deliberate — sliding across the opening we'd come through. Stone on stone. The sound of it finishing was very final.
We went down.
At the bottom, a line of light under a door.
Then the door, and the light, and the noise — all of it at once.
An underground market, humming with the specific energy of commerce that preferred not to be observed. The ceiling was low and vaulted, supported by columns that had no business being this far underground. Lanterns everywhere — hanging, wall-mounted, sitting on tables — filling the space with a warm, close light that made everything look slightly better than it was.
Everyone wore masks.
The bulky man produced one from somewhere and held it out to me. Black, with silver lines that curved across the surface like water. Small gems at the corners of the eyes — white and red, catching the lantern light.
He went back upstairs without another word.
The crowd moved around us. The noise was layered — the murmur of negotiation, the occasional sound of something in a cage, the clink of coin.
Rich. Every person in this room was rich. The masks didn't hide that — the quality of the clothes beneath them did the opposite. Nobles, maybe. Merchants with money enough to want things they couldn't buy openly.
We moved through it.
An illegal weapon shop — the blades laid out with the careless confidence of people who knew their buyers wouldn't ask questions. An auction house with velvet on the walls and a podium at the front. An assassin's guild with a simple wooden sign that looked almost modest in context.
An assassin's guild.
There was an assassin's guild.
We kept moving.
The slave market was in a tent toward the back — heavier canvas than the rest, the entrance dim. We went in.
The smell hit first. Then the sound — low, constant, the particular quiet of many people keeping as still as possible.
Cages along both walls and down the center. Faces behind the bars: dwarves, elves, demi-humans, dragonoids. A human family in the far corner, the children asleep against their mother. And others — creatures that weren't people but weren't wild either, something broken in the way they sat.
My eyes went to the alpha wolf.
He was awake. Alert. He lunged the moment he saw me — fast, genuine, the full weight of him hitting the cage bars.
The current hit him before he reached them.
He dropped.
One of the traders materialized beside the cage — unremarkable looking, the kind of face that was easy to overlook. A guard stood to his left. I registered, a moment later, another behind us.
The trader looked us over. His eyes moved the way certain people's eyes move — assessing, categorizing, already calculating.
"What's a kid like you doing here?" he said. The contempt was casual, practiced. "Annoying."
My sword was at his throat before the word finished.
A thin line of red appeared. He went completely still — the color leaving his face in the time it takes to exhale.
I held his gaze.
"Next time you think low of me," I said, "my sword won't stop."
I sheathed it.
His knee buckled. He grabbed the edge of the cage to stay upright, and then turned on his guards with the specific fury of a man redirecting his fear.
"What are you watching?! Catch them! We'll sell them in today's auction!"
Silence.
He looked left. Right.
I watched him notice.
"Who are you talking to?" I said. "There's no one."
He turned.
Both guards were on the ground. One had foam at the corner of his mouth. The other had blood pooling slowly beneath his neck. Between them, sitting on the larger one with the particular ease of someone who had found adequate seating — Stella. Hands still tied. Looking mildly bored.
She turned her head to one side and spat.
A small piece of something landed on the ground.
Flesh.
The trader looked at his hand. He'd put it down without thinking — into the spreading pool from the second guard.
He looked at the blood on his palm.
He looked at Stella.
Even I couldn't fully account for what I was looking at. Two armed guards. Both down. Her hands bound behind her back. I hadn't seen her move. I wasn't sure anyone had.
What a monster, I thought, with something that was equal parts discomfort and respect.
The trader wet himself.
The smell reached us a moment later.
"What do you want?" he said. His voice had lost every quality it had started the conversation with. "Please. What do you want from me?"
"Put a slave mark on her," I said.
He looked at Stella again.
And passed out.
When he woke, his hands were shaking. He prepared the ink with the focused care of a man who has decided that doing his job correctly is currently his best option.
"One drop of her blood," he said. "On the ink."
Stella pressed her finger to it. One drop.
He slid it toward me.
"Yours too."
I looked at him. "Why mine?"
"A slave contract requires a blood pact." His voice was very small. "You want her as a slave. That's how it works."
I looked at Stella.
"Felix," she said. "Do it."
I pressed my finger to the ink.
The mark formed — I felt it settle, the way things settle when they've found where they're supposed to be. On Stella's skin, the curse mark's threads went still. Not gone. Suppressed. The dark movement toward her heart slowed to nothing.
We turned to leave.
I stopped.
Stella looked back at me. "What happened?"
"He didn't take money from us." I turned around. The trader was still sitting where we'd left him, not quite recovered enough to remember he had a business to run. "Grandfather gave us money for the mark. Since he didn't ask for it—"
I looked at the trader.
"Where's your warehouse?" I said. "Where do you keep the others?"
He told me without hesitation. Behind the tent, a hundred meters. Left. Fifty meters. Right. End of the path.
We didn't wait.
The warehouse door was already open when we reached it.
Armin and Fang stood at the front.
They looked at us. The look said everything before either of them spoke.
Fang's jaw was tight. His fist closed slowly at his side. He wasn't looking up.
"We got bad news," Armin said.
The alley behind the warehouse was very quiet.
"His sister is going to be in the auction." He said it evenly, the way he said difficult things. "They moved her to the auction house. She's already listed."
Stella put her hand over her mouth.
The silence stretched.
"Armin," I said. "How much do you have?"
"Fifty gold coins." He said it like he already knew it wasn't enough.
"I have five hundred," Stella said.
Armin and Fang both turned to look at her.
"Five hundred?" Armin said. "Where did you—"
"Grandfather gave it to me."
Nobody spoke for a moment. Fang finally looked up — and the thing in his expression wasn't hope exactly. More like a man deciding whether he could afford to have it.
"We have to go to the auction," I said. "It starts soon."
When we reached the auction house—