Another knock came at noon, which was somewhat insulting.
Ishtar could have sent her people at midnight, quietly, over the back wall.
Instead, she sent them in broad daylight, marching down the center of the street with a cart, a banner, and four Amazons decked in gold.
She wanted every neighbor in the district leaning out their windows to watch the Goddess of Beauty's rival deliver her offer to the sword boy.
Rayleigh opened his own door because his housekeeper had the good sense to be elsewhere.
He recognized the lead Amazon from the alley.
She wore the smug smile of a woman who had just won an argument.
"Yōtōsai," she purred. "My Lady sends her regards, along with a token of her admiration."
She stepped aside.
The girl behind her couldn't have been older than nineteen.
She wore too little for the weather, heavy gold cuffs at her wrists and throat, and her hair had been styled by someone with immense skill but no actual kindness.
She kept her eyes glued to the cobblestones.
Her hands were folded in front of her, shaking violently despite her desperate efforts to hold them still.
Attached to one of her bracelets was a paper tag.
Exactly like the kind used to label cargo crates.
Rayleigh stared at that tag for a long, cold second.
'Ah.'
"Her name is Nira," the Amazon said cheerfully. "She's yours! No debts, no fixed term, no strings attached, and no obligation to my Lady beyond the courtesy of a visit sometime in the future." Her grin widened.
"Lady Ishtar hopes you find her agreeable. She also mentioned that if you don't, there are plenty of others, and you're more than welcome to browse the rest of the stock."
The word landed heavy and ugly between them.
'Stock.'
"Come in," he said. "All of you."
The Amazon blinked, clearly having braced herself for a slammed door.
"...Sorry?"
"You heard me. Come inside. You're making a scene, and my neighbors love to gossip." He turned his back on them, walking into his own hall and leaving the door wide open.
Naturally, they followed him.
...
He seated them in the front room and deliberately didn't offer tea.
Nira stood exactly where the Amazon had placed her—dead center on the rug, hands folded, eyes still fixed on the floorboards.
She hadn't spoken a single word or looked up once.
"Sit down," Rayleigh told her.
Her head lifted a fraction of an inch, but her eyes flicked straight to the Amazon first.
That was the entire story, right there in one glance.
She looked to her owner for permission before she even looked at the chair.
"She's fine standing," the Amazon said dismissively.
"I asked her."
Silence stretched through the room.
Nira swallowed hard.
She looked at the Amazon again, caught a tiny nod of approval, and only then did she perch on the very edge of the nearest chair, looking like a startled bird expecting to be chased away at any second.
Rayleigh leaned back, studying the Amazon instead.
"What's your name?"
"Belka."
"Belka. Do you know what I do for a living?"
"You make swords."
"That's the boring half." Rayleigh tilted his head. "The other half is that I can see what people are made of. I don't mean their character. I mean the literal shape of them, underneath the skin."
He nodded toward Nira without breaking eye contact with Belka. "Would you like to know what I'm looking at right now?"
Belka's grin faltered for a second.
"There's a thread that runs through everyone," Rayleigh continued evenly.
"It's how I tell a living person from a very well-made copy. Hers is thin. It's worn thin, the way a rope frays when it's been dragged across the same rough stone for years."
He finally shifted his gaze to the girl on the chair, forcing his voice to soften—a task that felt much harder than it should have.
"Nira. How old were you when the Ishtar Familia took you?"
Nira's entire body violently flinched.
"Don't answer that," Belka snapped.
"Interesting." Rayleigh's eyes snapped back up. "Why not?"
"Because she is property, and property doesn't chat about its purchase history." Belka spread her hands, her smile returning, though the edges were entirely hardened now.
"Look, sword boy, I don't know what you think this is. This is Orario. Half this city is built on debts people couldn't pay. My Lady buys those debts. She feeds them, dresses them, keeps a roof over them, and in exchange, they work.
Just like any other Familia. It's not complicated, and it's certainly not new. She just gave you one for free—which is more than she's done for anyone in a decade—so maybe you should just say 'thank you' instead of squinting at me like I kicked your dog."
She actually believes it.
That was the most sickening part.
Belka wasn't lying.
She had been inside that pleasure house for so long that the twisted arithmetic had simply become normal math to her.
"Nira," Rayleigh said. "Look at me."
The girl finally raised her head.
Her eyes were massive, deep brown, and swimming with a very specific, hollow kind of terror.
And the terror wasn't directed at him.
"You understand that you are in my house now," he said. "You understand they've told you that you belong to me."
A nod.
"Right." He kept his voice perfectly level. "So here is what happens next. I am going to open my front door. You are going to walk out of it, and you're going to keep walking. Nobody in this room is going to stop you, because if they even twitch toward you, I will break their arms."
He delivered the threat as casually as reading the weather.
"You can go absolutely anywhere you like. Home, if you still have one. The Guild, if you don't. Tell them Yōtōsai sent you, and they will find you a safe bed for the night."
He watched her carefully.
"Go on."
Nira just stared at him.
She didn't move an inch.
Rayleigh had expected fear. He had expected her to glance at Belka for permission again.
He hadn't expected the actual emotion that flickered across her face: pity.
She was pitying him for being so profoundly stupid!
"...Where?" Nira whispered.
It was the first word she had spoken, so frail it barely disturbed the air.
"Sir. Where would I go?"
"Anywhere. That's the entire point."
"They would just bring me back." She stated it with the flat inevitability of someone explaining that water is wet.
"They always bring us back. Marta ran to the Guild once. The Guild just wrote it down in a ledger." She gave a tiny, exhausted shrug.
"She came back three days later and she isn't pretty anymore."
Behind her, Belka laughed.
The sound wasn't overtly cruel, which made it infinitely worse. It was the laugh of an adult amused by a child stating the obvious.
"See?" Belka said. "She knows how it works. Everyone knows how it works. That's exactly why my Lady can parade a girl across the city with a price tag on her wrist at high noon, and nobody says a damn word."
She stood up, stretching lazily.
"Enjoy your gift, Yōtōsai. Or don't. Send her back if you want, she isn't top-tier stock anyway."
Rayleigh sat absolutely still.
'The Guild just wrote it down and nobody says a damn word?'
He had spent the last month deep underground, dragging people out of the dark.
He had frozen a canal, dismantled a thousand-year-old machine, stood over a dying man he couldn't save, and promised a seven-year-old girl her father hadn't been afraid at the end.
He had done all of that for the taken—because they had been stolen away, and the entire city had unanimously agreed that such a horror was worth plunging into a labyrinth to stop.
And yet, up here in the daylight, under flying banners and rolling carts, they had been marching people across the city with tags on their wrists for years.
And Orario had collectively decided that this flavor of horror was perfectly fine.
Same crime but different paperwork.
Something inside his chest pushed right past anger, breaking through the other side into a place that was utterly quiet and freezing cold.
"Belka," he said softly.
"Mm?"
"Tell Ishtar I have received her gift, and I completely understand the message." Rayleigh stood up.
"Tell her I will be visiting the Pleasure Quarter myself. Soon. To look at the stock."
Belka's grin snapped back into place, absolutely delighted. That was exactly the answer she had been sent to extract.
"Now you're talking! I'll let her know you're coming."
He walked them to the door and held it open, as flawlessly courteous as a palace butler.
"Do tell her exactly that. Word for word. It is vital she gets it right."
They left laughing, taking their banner and their cart back down the street the way they had come.
Rayleigh shut the door.
He stood in his own entryway with his hand still resting on the heavy wood.
He didn't move for a long time.
Just behind him, in the front room, a nineteen-year-old girl with a paper tag on her wrist waited in silence for a stranger to tell her what she was meant to be used for.