The trap was never a blueprint. It was a pulse, slow and inevitable, stitched into the city's veins, tightening with every heartbeat.
Carmen Vale moved through London the way smoke fills a house, slipping through the cracks no one bothered to seal. She needed no maps, no ink-scribbled plans. She had something better—hunger, ancient and certain.
The first body surfaced behind a brothel in Shoreditch, dumped like garbage, the throat sewn shut with rough stitches, a spiral hacked into the belly. It wore the illusion of their signature, but none of the precision. Carmen recognized it at once. Adrian's mark—starved and sloppy.
Julian crouched beside the corpse, rain dripping from his boots, blood darkening the cobbles. He pressed two fingers lightly to the ruined chest, his mouth a thin, unimpressed line. "Sloppy," he said, flicking his gaze up through the mist.
Carmen stood outside the blood's reach, hands buried deep in her coat pockets, her breath barely fogging the air. She didn't need to move closer; she could feel the wrongness humming against her ribs. "Let them see it," she said softly.
Julian wiped his hands on the inside of his coat, leaving stains he didn't bother to hide. Across the alley, Vivienne hovered in the crumbling mouth of an abandoned tannery, clutching her notebook like a drowning girl clinging to driftwood. She thought standing near monsters made her one of them. It didn't. It made her disposable.
The second step was silence. Two days without blood, two nights without whispers. The newspapers howled in their absence, conjuring invented ghosts and half-formed nightmares. Panic curdled into obsession. London starved for another message, another body. Carmen counted on it.
By the third night, they chose the place where the Spiral would tighten. A theatre at the end of a dead street, its carcass half-picked by time, rafters clawing the sky, the stage sagging under the weight of rot and abandonment. Inside, the seats had been stripped away, leaving only broken ribs. Glass crunched underfoot. The air reeked of mold and memory.
Julian vanished into the shadows, his knife catching slashes of moonlight. Vivienne tucked herself into the ruins of the orchestra pit, eyes wide and unblinking. Carmen took her place on the stage, black-clad, still as a tombstone, waiting.
She felt him before she heard him—the wrongness of his presence bending the air. The stink of old blood filled her nostrils first. Then the scrape of boots on warped wood. Julian shifted in the dark, a whisper of weight. Vivienne clamped a hand over her mouth.
Adrian Morrow stepped into the fractured light, coat hanging open, rain dripping from the hem, a blade loose in one hand. A smirk twitched across his face, brittle and forced. "You missed me," he said, voice pitching too high.
Carmen didn't blink. She waited.
Adrian prowled closer, bravado leaking out with every step. Six steps. Eight. Close enough for Carmen to see the scar splitting his jaw, still healing wrong. "You thought you killed me," he said, a smile tugging at his mouth but never reaching his eyes.
Still, she said nothing.
He shifted, the knife lifting slightly, uncertainty flickering at the edges of his face. "Say something, Vale," he barked, too loud, too brittle.
Carmen tilted her head and spoke. "I did."
The words sliced the air between them. Adrian lunged—fast, furious, all violence and no strategy. Julian stepped from the shadows, a blade made flesh. He cracked the hilt of his knife against Adrian's skull with brutal efficiency. Adrian crumpled to the boards, heavy and graceless.
Vivienne choked back a sound, her notebook clutched tight.
Carmen moved to stand over Adrian's body. She nudged him onto his back with the tip of her boot, studying what he had become.
Welcome back, she thought, though she said nothing.
There would be time for words soon enough.
For now, it was enough to know he was here, broken and breathing, right where he belonged.
At her feet.