Chapter 118: Cris Under the Bright Lights
In the Hiyori’s security room, a pale-faced attendant with prominent cheekbones sat with his chin in his hand, running his usual half-attentive sweep of the room feeds.
Then one of the audio channels erupted.
A sound unlike anything human drove into his ears, the volu of it hitting his eardrums like a physical blow.
He let out a pained grunt, blood running from his nose imdiately, the ringing in his ears swallowing every other sound as though soone had packed his skull full of static.
His body seized.
He reached for the alarm panel, and the few centiters between his hand and the button might as well have been a wall.
He lost consciousness before he reached it.
Across the monitoring system, multiple recording devices overloaded simultaneously, the captured audio collapsing into undifferentiated noise, then nothing.
---
In the booth, Raphael let the translucent wraith-form sink slowly through the floor rather than reasserting physically. He probed downward, searching for the underground level.
Fifteen ters down, and nothing. Either the lower space was buried much deeper than expected, or it existed on a shifted plane that the wraith-state couldn’t locate from this angle.
He ca back up with nothing to show for it.
He looked at the beast-kin girl on the bed. She had both hands pressed over her ears, her face tight with discomfort. The hearing damage was real but limited. It would pass.
Human ears and recording equipnt weren’t equivalent.
The wraith’s shriek had been calibrated past the threshold of what high-sensitivity recording hardware could process without clipping, the more sensitive the device, the worse the effect.
A human ear had natural limits. The recording gear had been built specifically without them.
He crossed to the central panel and scanned through the displayed options.
Services listed with clinical explicitness, prices beside each one, the language used to describe the companions stripped of any pretense that they were people making choices.
The caras were still operational. He selected the most basic available option, Conversation Service, one hundred Colin, tid, and fed his last hundred-Colin note into the slot.
He watched it disappear and felt the forty Colin remaining in his pocket as a specific, physical weight.
He went to the table and sat, leaving a careful gap between himself and the girl.
"What’s your na? How old are you?"
She registered that he’d moved *away* from her rather than toward her. Sothing confused in her expression, then a fraction of relief. Her voice had a slight tremor.
"I’m... Janna. I’m fourteen."
Raphael’s expression settled into sothing heavier.
He’d noticed the baby fat in her cheeks when he ca in and hadn’t wanted to do the arithtic. Fourteen.
An age that should an school and complaints about howork and argunts with parents, not this room.
"You don’t need to be afraid. I’m not going to touch you. I just need you to answer so questions."
He kept his voice as level as he could make it.
"First question. You were brought here against your will, weren’t you? Who took you?"
The reaction was imdiate and violent. Janna’s face went white.
She pushed herself back on the bed, shaking her head rapidly, tears already at the edges of her eyes, her voice dropping to sothing fragile.
"I can’t... I can’t say, I’ll die, it’s real, they’ll kill , please don’t make —!"
The fear in her was specific and absolute in a way that went beyond normal terror. Whatever had been done to enforce that silence, it had worked down to the bone.
He adjusted.
"All right. Different question. Do you know who runs this place?"
That one landed more normally. She steadied herself, breathed, and shook her head.
"I don’t know his na. But I’ve seen him once. He ca with his people to kill soone who wouldn’t cooperate, one of the other... cargo. Left her outside afterward. As a warning. To show us what happens if we talk."
Cargo. The word arrived in the room and stayed.
"The recording equipnt in here is destroyed, I handled it before we started talking. Whatever you say won’t be recorded. No one will know."
Hope moved through her eyes. Then it went away again, and she shook her head.
"Before, maybe. Not now. There’s sothing else now. Sothing they use to keep us from talking. It’s worse. I can’t risk it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—"
Whatever she was carrying, it had taken sothing from her that wasn’t coming back easily. Raphael kept his voice soft.
"Don’t apologize. You haven’t done anything wrong. None of this is on you." He paused. "Can you describe what he looked like? The man who runs this place."
Janna pulled in a shaky breath. The crying had already started, the pressure of the last few minutes finding its way out.
"Very tall. Skin like a dead person, that white. Long thin ears. Two teeth showing in front. Long fingers."
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
"He looks at everyone from below his chin. Like he’s looking down at insects."
Every detail landed exactly where Raphael had expected it to.
The second blank in his reasoning chain filled in cleanly. The nightclub’s owner was the vampire from the black market. No question remained.
He was still turning this over when Janna raised her hand to wipe her eyes and her sleeve slid back.
A line of bruising appeared at the edge of the fabric, deep purple going toward black, the kind of color that ca from a hard impact landing on the sa spot multiple tis.
He crossed the room quickly and reached for her wrist.
"Don’t hit —!"
She scread it before she could stop herself, flinching backward so hard she nearly fell off the bed, the sound of soone whose body had learned to expect specific things from a hand reaching toward it.
"I won’t hurt you."
He said it quietly and held still until the flinch ran its course. Then he looked at her arm properly.
What was under the sleeve was worse than what had shown.
Ten, twelve points of impact distributed across the arm, varying ages and depths, the accumulated record of repeated beatings over a period of ti, blunt force from fists and objects, so older and fading, so recent enough to still be swelling.
And at the wrist itself: a series of thin, healed cuts running across the artery, raised and pink against the skin.
A client had tried to kill her for entertainnt. The fact that she was alive ant they hadn’t finished.
The fact that their only consequence would have been a fine ant they’d weighed the cost and decided it was worth considering.
Raphael’s grip on her wrist tightened without him deciding to do it. Janna made a small sound of pain, and he ca back to himself and released her imdiately.
"I’m sorry. I lost composure."
Janna looked at her wrist. Then she looked at his face.
The tremor in her voice was gone.
"Are you... angry? For ?"
He exhaled slowly and said nothing. He reached up and touched her hair instead, trying to offer sothing simple and calming.
His hand ca away with an oily residue.
He looked more carefully. The hair had gone unwashed for so ti, strands clumped and matted together, carrying a sll that spoke of weeks rather than days.
"Do they not let you bathe?"
Sothing broke open in her voice. The composure she’d been assembling since the question about her na just, gave way.
The words ca out with crying underneath them now, a sound like soone who hasn’t had anywhere safe to put anything in a very long ti.
"Where we sleep, there’s no bathing. Just... a bucket, for necessities. Bathrooms are in the client rooms, but only if a client allows it."
She pressed her lips together for a mont, hard.
"They don’t allow it. They say we’re dirty. They say beasts belong on their knees, for beating. They like hurting us.
They hit us. They don’t want us the other way because they’re afraid of contamination, afraid of disease."
She was biting her lip now, blood coming up at the corner of her mouth, grief locked behind clenched teeth because letting it all out wasn’t safe even here, even now.
The crying ca out around the edges of what she was holding shut.
Raphael reached forward gently and moved her hair aside.
At her neck: a tal device, tight against the skin, shaped like a dog collar. Her na, Janna, engraved on the surface.
His voice dropped.
"Is this what’s preventing you from telling
the truth?"
She couldn’t even nod. She looked at him with red-rimd eyes and tried to communicate the answer without moving.
"That’s what I thought."
He examined the construction. The inside edge, pressed flush against the skin, held the outline of a blade, positioned against the carotid artery and the trachea.
A trigger chanism of so kind. Activation ant death, imdiately, without exception.
"What a vicious design."
He ran through options and discarded them in sequence until one remained. The crescent mark surfaced faintly on his forehead.
He opened the table’s small drawer, found a fruit knife inside, and let the moonlight energy flow from the mark into the blade, a thin, precise thread of it, carefully contained.
He positioned the knife at the collar’s edge.
"Trust ."
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