Two days into the gang, Yvette realized the Hook-Nosed boss operated on another level. A counterfeit scammer sprung from jail via a slick lawyer? No petty thug could swing that—he had allies in high places.

“Play by my rules, and even prison won’t hold you,” he bragged, sharp eyes glinting.

“Only idiots get nabbed,” Yvette retorted, already envisioning his arrest. Let’s see your lawyer talk your way out of Chief Alto’s cells.

After two idle days, the boss finally called her in with Little Beetle. Their mark: a locked study in a vacant manor. The owner? Away. The guard? A soused old codger. Beetle’s job: drug the man’s gin, then keep watch. Yvette’s task: crack the study, swipe a document, leave no trace.

“Easy peasy, Boss!” chirped Beetle. Yvette nodded, silently vowing to botch the job if the papers mattered.

She caught the boss’s gaze lingering—paranoia or a plotted betrayal?

By afternoon, Beetle had a whiskey laced with knockout powder. After downing it, the caretaker snored like a hog. Beetle cuckoo-called the all-clear. Yvette scaled the wall, slipped through a half-shut door, and climbed upstairs, blueprint in hand.

Meanwhile, Beetle ditched his post, jingling coins. “Ten quid in two days… Fancy a pint, eh?”

Upstairs, Yvette jimmied the lock—not with picks, but her Hymn of Mists. Heat bled from the air into subsonic waves, their frequency tuned to rattle the lock’s guts. She left false scratch marks, masking her power’s precision.

The door creaked open. No study awaited—instead, whips, shackles, and a sweaty aristocrat aiming a revolver.

“Pretty birdie—hands up,” he crooned. Realization struck: the boss had pimped her out as a toy.

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Her Hymn surged again, warping heat into a hum that liquefied the man’s vision. Blinking wildly, he fumbled his gun—now hers, barrel kissing his temple.

“Twitch, and I redecorate this room with your skull,” she said sweetly.

The man—a coal-to-jet tycoon lauded in papers—sobbed bribes. Disgusted, Yvette rifled through his Sadean smut, unearthing a photo: business elites, the tycoon… and a smudged figure. The stance, the cane—Mr. Short. But his face? Eaten by shadows, like a corpse’s fading portrait.

Yvette slammed the photograph against his sweaty jowls. "Memory lapse? Let me remedy that. Look at Cory Shortt. Remember now?"

The libertine blanched. "Christ’s sake, put that cursed thing away!"

"Cursed?" She studied the mottled image—shrouded faces like tombstones in fog. Shortt’s obliterated visage confirmed her suspicion. "Why do corpses haunt this frame?"

"When that banker leapt at Ascot..." She conjured obituary names like dark incantations. "James Volpe. Who else danced with your angel?"

"You’re bluffing!" Spittle flew. "No outsider could—"

"I enumerate these names," Yvette cocked her Adams revolver, "to illustrate how thoroughly you’re known. Test me with falsehoods, sir, and we’ll explore pain’s pedagogy."

His triple chin quivered. "Protection. Swear it!"

"God above, must I spell it?" She gestured toward the boarded windows. "Those alley rats saw me enter. Murder you? Why inherit Scotland Yard’s gaze over a pissant like you?"

Defeated, he scrawled his confession under gunpoint—a grotesque memoir of hubris:

Club invitations from tailors’ sons turned City predators. Parlor games with parliamentarians. The ritual: a doll gutted, re-stuffed with roe-deer organs, buried at crossroads. Then the questions... oh, the questions It answered...

Stock tips. Rival’s mistresses. Which mines to invest in. Every answer a chisel strike on our souls. Months between cullings at first. Now weekly. Hungrier.

Volpe? Shortt? We didn’t kill—we curated despair. Bullied until the noose seemed kinder. But these past years... It takes who It wants. Even through ink and parchment now. Even—

The quill clattered. Vertebrae popped like champagne corks. His face lolled backward, lifeless eyes reproaching his twisted spine.

Yvette sniffed cordite, scanning for phantasms. Nothing. Only the expanding dread in her gut—and the photograph in her pocket.

Newly developed in the chemical gloom: her own portrait among the faceless damned.