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The seven women looked at me in silence. I got the feeling they didn’t need to.

“Bring them where, Marlowe?” Damian’s mother said. “Say the rest of the sentence, dear.” The look on her face told me she expected me to squirm with the moral dilemma. What she didn’t know was that by this point, I was beyond all that.

“To you. As dinner for your monster,” I said.

She laughed lightly. A silver-haired woman to her left arched a well-groomed eyebrow.

“Damian,” she said, turning that mild, lovely smile on him, “your girlfriend becomes remarkably practical when the lives in question aren’t hers. How generous of you to suspend your principles on her behalf. You must be very much in love.”

Damian gave her nothing, not even a whisper of unease. “Do we really want to discuss the morality of serving women for dinner, Mother? I doubt that’s an argument you’d win.”

His mother swiped an imaginary speck from her lap.

“Let’s not allow this to become unseemly, Damian. You’ve always been such a creature of feeling.”

She shifted her gaze to me and paused. “Vivienne Blaire isn’t a meal, dear. Vivienne Blaire is a colleague we haven’t yet met.”

My brow furrowed. “You want me to recruit her to join you?”

All seven of the women laughed.

“Of course not, dear. You’re no more qualified to do that than a knife is qualified to plan lunch.” She inclined her head. “Does the idea trouble you more or less, I wonder?”

“They’re equally hideous,” I said. “But I didn’t come here to be delicate.”

I tried to imagine answering that way just weeks ago. I couldn’t.

“You’ve certainly made that clear,” she said. “And if we entertain this request, then what? You disappear? You’re asking us to trust four women who’ve already proven inconvenient.”

I opened my mouth, but Damian spoke first. “Trust doesn’t come into it. Marlowe wants out. You want clientele you’d otherwise spend months cultivating, delivered with none of the effort. No one here is interested in making this more uncomfortable than it already is.”

“And what stops her from taking her release and simply… not delivering? Or from deciding, somewhere safe and far away, that she has a conscience after all?”

“You’ve never let distance interfere with your menace.” He let his gaze wash once over the room. “We all know how long the cat’s claws are.”

“I don’t believe you’ve been this disagreeable since you were thirteen, Damian. You’d be wise to remember it didn’t go well for you then.”

I wanted to scratch her perfect face with my fingernails. I took a measured breath instead.

“We’re not here to discuss the scars of my childhood,” Damian said.

They looked at each other for a long, excruciating moment.

“My son’s provocations aside,” she said, shifting her attention to me. “He’s quite right, of course. Vanishing isn’t on the table. But we don’t make arrangements on goodwill, Marlowe. We’ll need something held. Insurance. You understand.”

“Insurance?” I said.

“It’s such an ugly word for it. Think of it as a kindness.” She smiled sweetly. “You have a sister, don’t you? Lauren. Charlotte’s a lovely city. I do hope she stays well.”

I held back the venom on the edge of my tongue, but before I’d found a more restrained reply, she continued:

“And she will. As long as you remember that the people you love are just as easy to reach as you are. That’s all. We won’t need to mention it again. You’ll simply know it, the way you know the weather outside.”

The blood under my skin went cold.

“Are we in agreement?” she said, cheerily.

The idea of my sister being a pawn in this game made me sick to my stomach. But saying “no” would have achieved nothing. She knew where Lauren lived, either way.