My stomach lurched. The room shifted, treacherously, beneath my feet.
I gripped the edge of the table to keep my balance.
Steele shifted at my side. Without looking at me, he laid his hand over mine—firm, warm, unmoving. “Steady,” he murmured, so softly only I could hear.
I swallowed and forced my voice steady. “Any bruising?”
He paused, then slid the cloth aside at her wrists, exposing a narrow strip of forearm.
“Linear abrasions,” he said, indicating the marks with two fingers.
Rope. She had been tied.
Cold spread through my veins. “Anywhere else?”
“Here.” He let the sheet fall back into place, then moved to the lower end of the table. With the same deliberate restraint, he folded the cloth back to reveal her thighs—no more than necessary. His touch was light, clinical. “Here.” He touched her thigh lightly. “And there are bruises on her arms as well. Some older than others.”
I shut my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, the girl had not changed. Her suffering lay etched upon her body like a confession carved into stone.
“There are also signs of…” Dr. Barclay swallowed. “Sexual violation.”
Steele said nothing, but the tension in him altered—no longer coiled, but sharpened, as though something inside him had gone cold and precise.
“And then there is this,” Dr. Barclay added quietly.
He adjusted the sheet once more and, with deliberate care, turned the girl onto her side, then onto her front. The movement was gentle, almost reverent. When the cloth was drawn back from her shoulders, the truth revealed itself at once.
Clear, parallel marks crossed her back—angry lines laid there with intention. Too even to be accidental. Too familiar to be mistaken.
The room seemed to contract around us.
My breath caught painfully. “Whipped,” I said, the word tasting bitter.
Steele’s hand tightened where it rested at my side. He did not move closer, did not speak, but I felt the change in him as surely as if the air itself had shifted. His gaze fixed on the marks with a terrible stillness, as though he were seeing not one back, but another—long ago, unhealed, and never forgotten.
“Yes,” Dr. Barclay said. “With a belt or similar implement. Some of the marks are recent. Others are not.”
I could not look away. “She was punished,” I whispered. “As if she were property.”
Steele’s voice, when it came, was very low. “As if she belonged to him.”
Dr. Barclay nodded once. “That would be my assessment.”
He covered her again with care, restoring what dignity he could. But the damage had already been done—not only to her, but to the room itself.
“She never had a chance,” I whispered.
“No,” Dr. Barclay agreed softly. “She did not.”
A silence followed, broken only by the ticking of a clock somewhere in the corridor.
“Does she have a name?” I asked.
“Too soon to know,” the coroner answered. “We will have to search through the missing reports.”
She had been alive at some time in the past. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s friend. And now she was a ledger entry the Yard would be content to ignore.
“Will you keep her here? For a little while?” I asked. “In case she can be identified?”
