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Lazarus turns back. “Olive.”

Her eyes are fixed on the platform. A young woman stares out at the crowd, face pale beneath rouged cheeks. A man beside me raises a paddle and laughs as if he has made a clever joke. My fingers curl, I could kill him. I could kill the auctioneer, I could kill the guards nearest the stage. Kill five, perhaps six, before the room swallowed us and then what? The thought is the worst part. Not that I cannot fight, it is just that fighting blindly would not be enough.

Olive’s hand finds mine beneath the fall of her cloak. “We cannot leave them,” she says.

Lazarus’s face does not change, but something in his eyes breaks. “Not like this.”

Her head snaps toward him. “What does that mean?”

“It means if we act now, we die in this room, and so do they,” he explains.

“I do not care about dying,” she snaps.

“I know,” Lazarus says, voice rough. “That is why I am saying it.”

The auctioneer’s voice rises behind us. My throat closes and the room tilts, for one dreadful second, the platform is gone, and I am small again. Alcott beside me, silent because sound meant punishment. Men discussing what we owed. What we were worth. What use could be made of us.

My hands begin to shake.

Olive turns to me instantly. “Edward.”

“I am fine,” I lie.

Her palm touches my chest, right over my heart. “Stay with me.”

I try to focus on her face. The mask hides too much, I need her eyes. God, I need her eyes.

“We are here,” she says. “We will endure this together. We will stop this together.”

The words are not comfort, they are a rope thrown into dark water. I grip them.

Together.

Yes.

I am not a boy in that room. I am here. Olive is here. Lazarus is here. Alcott—

Where is Alcott?

Panic claws up my throat.

“We need to find my brother,” I say.

Lazarus nods once. “We will.”

We leave the auction hall because staying there will break something none of us can afford to lose. The next corridor is worse. The walls are lined with paintings of saints, martyrs, and mythological women being dragged into heaven or hell by hands that look too much like worship. Music spills from a chamber to the left, accompanied by laughter, moans, breaking glass.

I do not look inside long. Only enough to understand. Masked bodies tangled together in a room made gaudy with gold and wine. Some willing, some not and some too still for any decent man to ignore.

Olive’s breath hitches. Lazarus steps in front of her before she can see more.

“No,” he says quietly.

She looks at him with fury bright in her eyes. “Do not shield me.”

“I am not shielding you. I am keeping you from charging into a room of thirty men with knives under their jackets,” Lazarus seethes between gritted teeth.

“I have killed men with knives under their jackets,” she whispers angrily.