Chapter 117: The Sinful Chain of Interests
Raphael pressed his hand flat against the bar’s surface and activated the Profiler. Thought-lines sketched themselves outward, reached for each other, tried to connect.
And tangled instead of resolving.
"Not enough."
He felt the gaps in the reasoning chain clearly. Two blank spaces, and without them the truth stayed out of reach.
The first: how exactly did the enslaved won arrive here, and why had their disappearances passed without a trace?
Zexi City continued its normal life. No news coverage. No public outcry. As if none of them had ever existed.
The second: what was the vampire’s relationship with this club, and why had he chosen it for their eting point?
Both questions required closer investigation. And sitting right in front of him was an opportunity, a trafficked beast-kin woman, alone in a private booth, reachable.
He stood imdiately. He flagged the bartender, left a ten-Colin tip, and asked for the woman to be sent to a first-floor booth to wait for him.
Miguel glanced sideways at him. The contempt in it was undisguised. He made a brief sound and turned back to his drink.
Raphael noted that he’d need this man’s annual mbership to get downstairs. He placed his hand on Miguel’s shoulder and kept his voice low.
"Deacon Miguel. It’s been a while."
He pulled off his black gloves as he said it and set them on the counter in front of Miguel, then patted the shoulder once with deliberate weight.
"See you in a bit."
Miguel looked up at his retreating back. Then down at his palm, at the black gloves sitting there.
He turned them over slowly, fingers reading the material, sothing careful moving behind his eyes.
"...I’m not the only one here for this."
He thought about the second sentence Raphael had said.
He raised his glass, drank, and stayed sitting, the movent toward standing that he’d been preparing quietly reversed. He settled back in and waited.
---
The first floor. A row of private booths ran the corridor’s length, the walls lined with acoustic foam and higher-grade soundproofing materials, security personnel circling at regular intervals, caras covering every angle without exception.
Raphael turned away from the observation and found the designated room. At the door, a pale-faced attendant with prominent cheekbones stepped into his path.
"You’re new. The bartender ntioned it, so I’m here to walk you through the house rules. Once you step through that door, you’ve accepted these terms and are obligated to follow them."
He cleared his throat and opened a booklet.
"First, before engaging with any companion, confirm the selected package via the room’s panel.
Services outside the package are not covered by the companion’s obligations unless you pay for them separately."
He turned a page.
"Second, if you have particular preferences, especially violent or extre preferences, and cause injury or death to a companion, compensation is owed to the nightclub.
The standard amount is equal to twenty-five years of that companion’s full projected earnings."
Raphael’s brow tightened.
Venues like this did attract a certain category of wealthy deviant who wanted to play gas with lives.
But the compensation went to the nightclub. Not to anyone else.
The attendant read on, apparently noticing nothing, running through a long list of restrictions that covered every conceivable variation of custor behavior.
On the surface it looked like a frawork protecting the companions. It wasn’t.
Every clause was designed to extract maximum paynt from the custor while ensuring that every additional service yielded additional revenue, and any service provided outside the package carried a penalty ten tis the original cost.
Two targets to drain: the custor’s wallet, and the companion’s value. That was the nightclub’s actual business model.
Raphael stopped listening. None of it was going to bind him in any case.
Once he’d finished with the vampire, the structure holding all of this together would co apart on its own.
He could choose to act right now, make a scene, turn this whole establishnt into a public incident, burn his na further into the wanted lists than it already was.
He had nothing much left to protect in terms of reputation.
But it wouldn’t work. Not permanently. Remove the Hiyori and another venue would replace it, the Hiyori Flying Fish, the Hiyori Garden, sothing else entirely, hidden more carefully this ti, making the possibility of a clean ending even less likely.
As long as the people driving this were alive and connected, as long as everyone profiting from it remained intact, the fruit would keep producing.
The only real solution was the root. And right now he had to wait for the mont to reach it.
The attendant arrived at the final clauses.
"Now, regarding protection of the client’s interests, if you’re dissatisfied, or if the companion refuses services that fall within your selected package, you have the right to request a replacent or a full refund."
A pause.
"Finally: all booths are equipped with caras. This is to verify that neither party is in violation of the house rules. If you object on privacy grounds, you may leave now."
Caras.
Raphael considered that. Most venues of this type went out of their way to offer privacy as a selling point.
Having caras inside the rooms and announcing them openly wasn’t protection, it was leverage.
Anyone who ca here and did anything worth recording had now given the nightclub sothing to hold over them.
Which explained why a place this openly operating had never been reported. Every client was on that footage.
A mutual ruin arrangent, everyone on the sa cart, and if the cart went over the cliff, it took everyone.
The more people tied to it, the more people with reasons to see any investigation delayed, obstructed, quietly buried at every level where they had any influence.
He nodded, stepped past the attendant, and pushed the door open without acknowledging the man’s expression.
"Not even a tip? Wasted my whole speech on you."
The door closed. The complaint stayed outside.
He looked at the room. Simple furnishings: a table, a bed, and a young woman sitting very upright on the bed’s edge, both hands folded in her lap, shoulders tight, her whole body vibrating at the threshold of visible trembling.
This was the Hiyori’s truth. The nightclub’s contemporary aesthetic and its language of freedom wrapped around sothing that was neither.
Alcohol and music and the choreography of a good ti, and underneath all of it: this room.
The girl was young. Younger than the setting made sense of, her face still carried the softness of soone whose features hadn’t finished arriving.
Beast-kin, with a human face and a pair of dog ears at the top of her head, and a tail that extended past the hem of her dress and curled slightly at the floor.
Raphael didn’t speak to her imdiately. He moved around the room first, locating the caras.
There were many, wall-to-wall coverage, every angle accounted for, two more in the bathroom where the number dropped but didn’t reach zero.
Those were the visible ones. Microcaras could be anywhere.
Covering all of them wasn’t realistic. But disabling the audio was.
The caras could record everything that happened in the room.
What they couldn’t do was capture speech clearly if the audio hardware was disrupted, and that kind of hardware, small enough to be invisible, was sensitive precisely because of its size.
High sensitivity was the only way to guarantee complete capture. That sensitivity was also a vulnerability.
"Cover your ears."
He said it to the girl without explanation, crossed to the bathroom, turned the shower to its maximum temperature, and closed the door.
The steam built quickly, dense and white, filling the space and covering every surface, including whatever lenses might be embedded there.
Then he activated the Rick contract.
The transition was imdiate, the familiar cold settling into his bones and then expanding outward as the physical body dissolved into the wraith state.
Not just the ability to pass through walls or resist physical damage, the wraith form had another function he’d carried since the contract and never used.
Wraith’s Shriek.
A sound beyond what human vocal cords could produce, pitched above the threshold human hardware could record without distorting into static.
It would do nothing to a human ear, but to the recording equipnt hidden in those walls, it would solve the problem entirely.
Reviews
All reviews (0)