In the months that followed, Billy continued his trade across the smaller towns and roads of the region, moving with the practiced invisibility of a man who has learned that the world pays less attention than it seems. He bought and sold and listened. He collected rumors the way other men collected debts—patiently, with an eye toward future use.
The rumors he was listening for all pointed in the same direction: a nobleman living within reach of the imperial capital, a man from one of the seven great families that had governed the continent from the shadows for longer than most histories bothered to record. A family whose relationship with gold was that of men who have had it so long they've forgotten what it's for. Whose sorcerers were said to work with desire the way a weaver works with thread—shaping it, stretching it, using it to bind.
This particular scion had broken from his family some years prior. The reasons were not commonly known. What was known was that he had built a domain of his own at a remote estate, and that he hosted, once a week, an auction—private, exclusive, the kind where the items for sale were not announced in advance and the buyers were not announced at all.
His name was Simon.
Billy spent those months building toward that name like a man walking toward a light he can see but cannot yet reach.
✦ ✦ ✦
Something changed in him during those months. He would not have been able to say exactly when it began, or name the mechanism that drove it. He had always been practical. He had always been capable of a certain detachment. These were, he had told himself for years, professional qualities.
But something had shifted in the practice of them.
It had started with discipline—a training method he'd adapted from techniques used on working animals, a simple magical reinforcement that bypassed reasoning and went directly to the body's responses. Obedience rewarded with ease, disobedience met with a tap of pressure at the base of the skull. Clean. Efficient. He had told himself it was kinder than the alternatives.
But the efficiency had curdled into something else.
He began to notice the pleasure he took in the punishment—a small, specific satisfaction he did not examine at first because examining it would have required him to name it. And once named, it grew. The minor corrections became something more deliberate. The deliberate corrections became routine. The routine became a hobby he did not discuss with anyone, because there was no one to discuss it with, and because he had long since stopped needing external permission for his behavior.
Reward became, simply, the absence of pain. She had stopped needing food as motivation. She obeyed the way objects obey—because that was the nature of what she had become.
Her eyes, when they looked at anything, looked at nothing. She understood what was said to her—he could tell by the way her body responded—but whatever had once been behind those eyes had retreated to somewhere he couldn't see and perhaps didn't exist anymore. She moved when told. She was still when told. She did not speak.
Billy found this convenient. He did not ask himself whether convenience was a sufficient moral framework. He had stopped asking himself that kind of question sometime around the third month, and had not noticed the stopping.
✦ ✦ ✦
The mansion announced itself from half a mile away—not through height or ostentation but through a quality of absolute stillness that the surrounding landscape seemed to have adopted out of deference. The estate sat at the edge of a forest that had learned, apparently, to behave itself.
Billy was admitted without difficulty. He had sent word ahead.
Simon received him in a room lined floor to ceiling with books, maps, and glass vials containing things that did not bear close examination. The candles were the kind that burned without consuming themselves. Simon himself sat in a high-backed chair with the ease of a man who has never had to consider whether he belonged somewhere, because the question has never arisen. He was tall, broad across the shoulders, with gray eyes that processed information the way a scholar processes a primary source—attentively, skeptically, always looking for the flaw.
Billy stood before him and tried to occupy his own body with something resembling confidence.
"I have a girl," he said, "who does not die."
Simon's expression did not move significantly. One eyebrow shifted by a fraction. His voice, when he spoke, was the voice of a man who has heard many claims and has developed a precise instrument for measuring the distance between what people say and what they mean.
"A girl who does not die. Do you understand the weight of that phrase? Do you understand what it would imply, if true?"
"Perhaps not fully, sir. But if you allow me to bring her to you, you can test her yourself. And if anything I've claimed is false—do with me as you see fit."
Silence. The kind of silence that is not empty but full—full of assessment, of calculation, of something working behind those gray eyes that Billy could not follow.
Then, so quietly that it was clearly not meant for Billy at all, Simon said: "Perhaps she is the one. Perhaps the path has begun."
He refocused. His gaze, when it returned to Billy, was precise as a blade.
"Bring her to me in one week. If your claims are substantiated, I will pay whatever price you name."
Billy did not quite manage to keep the elation out of his voice. "As you wish. But—why a week, if I might ask?"
"You may not," Simon said, with the calm finality of a man who has never had to raise his voice to end a conversation. "Do as you're told and ask no questions that don't belong to you."
Billy stepped back. "Of course. Of course, sir. Until then."
He turned to go. Simon's voice followed him with the unhurried ease of something that knows it will be heard.
"If you attempt to run, or to deceive me—I will find you. And what becomes of you afterward will be repeated in taverns for a very long time. Not as a warning. As entertainment."
Billy did not turn around. "You needn't worry," he said, to the door. "I wouldn't dare."
He walked out into the estate's unnaturally quiet grounds and did not let himself breathe freely until the gates were behind him.
✦ ✦ ✦
That night he celebrated. He was not a reflective man, but he was not entirely without imagination—he could see the shape of what was coming, the fortune that waited on the other side of one more week, and the sight of it made him generous with himself in ways he rarely was.
By morning, the generosity had curdled into something else. A practical concern: she was, as she was, perhaps not the most compelling commodity to present to a man like Simon. She had been reduced, over the months, to a thing that sat and obeyed and breathed. That was not a demonstration. That was a body.
He needed to demonstrate what she was.
He went out and purchased a preserving fluid—a magical compound used to maintain the freshness of organic matter indefinitely—and came back with it under his arm and a clarity of purpose that he did not examine too closely, because examining it would have required him to name what he was about to do.
He tied her to the table.
She did not resist. She had stopped resisting some time ago. She watched him with eyes that did not carry any particular expression—not fear, not understanding, not the dull blankness of an animal. Something else. Something he had trained out of her over months of careful work.
He picked up the knife.
"I could use anesthesia," he said, to no one in particular, in the tone of a man running through a list of options. "But it's expensive. And your screaming isn't a consideration. Not because I bear you any ill will. Simply because I don't."
He cut the vocal cords first. Cleanly. She made a sound that was not a scream, and then did not make sounds.
He worked methodically after that, with the focus of someone performing a task that requires concentration. Kidney. Liver. Intestines. Each organ was placed in a jar of the preserving fluid, labeled in his careful merchant's hand. He stitched the cavity closed when he was done, not from any concern for her comfort, but because presentation mattered.
The eyes came next. Then the fingers. The ears. The tongue.
Each piece went into its jar. Each jar was sealed.
When he was done he carried her to the hall—not roughly, not gently, the way one carries something that is now inventory—and scrubbed the floor of the room with obsessive thoroughness, because blood, left unattended, became evidence, and evidence became the kind of problem he had spent his adult life avoiding.
He slept heavily that night, in the way of someone whose body has spent its resources completely.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the morning he ate a light meal and went out to buy a spatial storage—a pocket dimension, a few meters across, the kind of thing that cost what most men made in several years. He paid half his remaining fortune for it without significant hesitation, because the calculation was simple and the result was obvious.
"Either these dimensions are made by magic," he mused to himself as he walked home, the storage container in his coat, "or they've always existed and we only learned to access them. Either way, the price is obscene. But I'll have it back within the week."
He stored the jars in the pocket dimension and went to the black market.
The organs of a creature that regenerated—that could grow back what was lost, that had survived things no living thing should survive—were, to the right buyers, worth more than Billy had made in the previous three years combined. He did not advertise. He did not need to. In markets of this kind, word moved faster than vendors, and the buyers found him.
He spent the next three days in a state of celebration that he allowed himself fully and without reservation, buying what he wanted, eating well, sleeping late. He had earned it, by his own accounting.
And all of that—the organs, the black market, the three days of leisure—was preliminary.
The real accounting was still a week away.
Simon's deal was the fortune. Everything else had been the approach.
✦ ✦ ✦