Chapter 119: Inherent Rights
Raphael’s eyes sharpened. He confird the angle, adjusted slightly, and released a controlled breath.
The crescent of moonlight left the blade and traveled the short distance to the collar in silence.
Janna had her eyes shut, teeth clenched, her whole body rigid against its own instincts, the conscious effort of refusing to flinch visible in every muscle.
She felt nothing.
The moonlight entered the collar’s tal directly, not touching the skin beneath. A clean crack, and the device split into two halves.
The alarm chanism, whatever it was triggered by, never fired. Both pieces dropped to the floor.
For the first ti in a long ti, Janna felt her neck.
She breathed freely and made a sound that was almost crying.
Raphael exhaled. Exactly as he’d calculated, forced removal would have triggered the alarm regardless of technique, and explaining the damage afterward would have been its own problem.
But the moonlight blade acted only on the first physical object it contacted. Aim at the collar, and the collar was all it touched. Janna and the alarm chanism were both untouched.
The more he used this ability, the more applications he found for it.
"Keep the collar. Put it back on when you leave the room, they can’t know it’s been removed. I need a little more ti before I can get all of you out. Trust ."
Janna nodded without hesitation. And in the warmth of that eye contact, she began to speak.
"That day... my hood tore on the way ho from school. To hide my ears I took the back alley, to avoid people.
But there was a group of them already waiting, a van parked there, an ambush. They were taking people in the area."
Raphael’s brow ticked slightly. Sothing in this was becoming familiar. He gestured for her to continue.
"They grabbed
before I could do anything. Kept hitting
until I stopped fighting. Then they blindfolded
and drove
here."
She steadied herself.
"When I got here, I found... my brother’s wife. She’d been taken too. She ca looking for
and they caught her."
Her voice broke.
"She was forced to take clients. She got sick. The baby she was carrying... the baby died. She couldn’t survive it. One night she bit her own wrist open. Bled to death."
A breath that wasn’t quite controlled.
"She died because of ."
Raphael listened.
And understood who he was looking at.
In his mory: the beast-kin man at the black market, kneeling on the floor with his forehead against the stone, begging anyone who would listen.
His sister and his wife both taken. He’d said the slave trade had started again. He’d offered everything he owned as paynt for a single lead.
The man at the nightclub entrance, who had slled of stray animal, who had been turned away, he’d probably bought a location from soone in the black market and spent every Colin he had to get it, which left him with nothing to pay the mbership fee.
He’d gotten as far as the door and no further.
Janna. His sister. Who had taken the alley ho because human beings had made her afraid to walk on the street.
Raphael turned the next question over.
"The people who grabbed you, do you know what they were? What they did?"
Janna pressed her mory carefully.
"They called themselves bounty hunters. They said they worked for a great one, a important person.
They were... very respectful about it. And they had illegal substances in the van, they were using them while driving. There were nearly several accidents."
Bounty hunters, calling a vampire their employer.
Raphael turned this over. By any normal logic, a vampire was exactly the kind of target bounty hunters were paid to bring in.
But these ones had been working for one, apparently with genuine deference.
He set it aside for now. He looked at the tir on the panel. Under thirty minutes had passed. Two and a half hours remained.
He stood and walked to the door. He looked back at her once.
"I’m going now. Lock the door behind , go take a bath, sleep. The nightmare ends soon. Those people, every last one of them, none of them are getting away."
Janna watched his back as the door began to close. She gathered every scrap of courage she had.
"Sir! Respected sir! Most truly honorable sir! What should I call you?"
He didn’t turn around.
"Raphael."
The door clicked shut.
Janna looked at the empty room.
"Raphael..." She said it quietly, once. Then she ran for the bathroom.
She was so desperate to be clean.
---
Raphael returned to the bar, settled at the counter, and accepted the ginger beer that ca with the mbership.
The bartender’s expression registered contempt.
Raphael ignored it and pressed his hand flat against the underside of the bar, letting the Profiler extend outward across that blank surface, working through the shape of everything he’d accumulated.
Beast-kin operated under severe constraints in the human federations.
Pooling resources and establishing gathering points in any significant number ant violating the Secrecy Legislation, IFSA and affiliated organizations would notice, and the result would be arrests and deportations.
Yet in the space of thirty minutes in this one nightclub, he’d encountered a receptionist and been assigned a companion, both of them beast-kin.
The number hidden in the dark was almost certainly larger.
That density was not normal. Not in a legitimate business, and not in a gray-market operation either.
He laid the threads out and let them connect.
A slave trade resuming after years of dormancy. Disappearances accumulating across Zexi City.
A desperate beast-kin man with nothing left to pay.
A vampire-run nightclub. Human and beast-kin captives, stripped of everything except their continued breathing.
Two origins. One visible, one not.
On the surface: a slow pattern of disappearances in Zexi City, abductions, trafficking, the kind of event that should have generated public alarm.
Instead the coverage had been suppressed.
Soone with access to official channels had applied pressure to keep it quiet, providing the nightclub with sothing more valuable than muscle: institutional protection.
That person was almost certainly human, embedded in a position that gave them the leverage to do it.
Underneath: beast-kin, with no legal recourse and no public voice, suffering worse and in silence, resorting to black market prayer.
Both streams flowing to the sa destination. The sa nightclub. The sa vampire.
And this sa pattern, an organized collection of humans and beast-kin at scale, under a vampire’s direction, had existed before.
In a castle outside Zexi City. In the era of Count Jestan. Sa structure, sa logic, sa hands-off approach to what happened to the captives, as long as they remained alive and available.
The vampire had sent soone to investigate that castle specifically. That wasn’t coincidence.
That was a connection being examined, sothing being verified or retrieved or understood.
The question was why.
Not money, the math didn’t support it. If profit were the motive, selling captives outright would yield more and carry less exposure risk than warehousing them in a nightclub indefinitely.
Selling off pieces of the operation pieceal would be more profitable still.
Which ant the captives weren’t inventory. They were accumulation. The point wasn’t to trade them, it was to keep them. Alive, present, held.
Raphael stared at the grain of the wood beneath his hand.
The only goal that required this many living bodies, accumulated without sale, held without extraction.
"A sacrifice. A mass sacrifice."
The thought landed and stayed.
Sothing cold moved through him that had nothing to do with the Blood Frenzy.
He had been sitting inside this building, one floor above where this was being prepared, and whatever the scale was, whatever the intended purpose, it was happening now, and it was going to happen again.
This wasn’t about justice or moral principle. He had no particular attachnt to those fraworks in their abstract form.
But he was standing inside this story, and the ending that this story was moving toward was one he was unwilling to watch happen.
The Prophet had described it in his own terms: Raphael’s Superbia, his cardinal sin, would not allow him to watch a conclusion he found unacceptable and do nothing about it.
It would make him rewrite it.
Whether he wanted to or not.
That was his nature now. And he had stopped fighting his nature so ti ago.
This is his inherent right.
He casually ordered a drink from the bartender, watching the ice cubes sway in the glass and listening to the crisp clinking sounds, his thoughts wandering.
Was he a righteous person? Obviously not. During his ti in the Black Gloves, he only did his job without asking why.
The people who died at his hands were both good and evil, and were targeted by IFSA simply because of their different stances.
He took a sip, the slightly bitter liquor slid down his throat, and a cool sensation swept through his body. He closed his eyes and savored it for a mont before slowly putting down the glass.
So things, you do them without a reason.
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