Corroded

faint shape from where it had rolled to a standstill beside a stepping stone. “This?”

I snatched it from her fingers, shoved it into my pocket hard enough that my coat slid askew. “What do you want?”

Her eyes, when they met mine, were infinitely bleak. “Oh, Cherry.” It was a breath, a whisper of sorrow I would not deign to hear.

“Shush!” I found myself clutching at my coat, over the pocket. But I did not let go. My heart seemed unable to slow. “What are you doing? You near gave me a fright!”

“There’s been an assault.” She kept her hands to herself, this time—much more the thing I expected of her. They twisted together at her waist, and I realized that she wore a bit of frothy attire reminiscent of a swan. White upon white, with black paint over her eyes and dragged to her temples in artful design. Her long legs were bare from the knee down, which must be chilly, but she showed no signs of cold.

Fear turned her exotic features gaunt. Fear, and anger, and no small amount of terrible sorrow.

I hesitated, torn between the urge to comfort and the desire to escape. What would be more welcome?

What would earn me a moment’s freedom?

I waited too long to decide. She took a deep breath and deliberately uncurled her hands, straightening her feathered shoulders. “You can’t go where they’ll see you,” she told me. “They’re looking for you all over.”

A respectable attempt at brisk, but her voice shook.

At least I saw no obvious marring from her time in Osoba’s entertainments.

I frowned. “Aren’t you cold? Let’s get to a fire basket, and—”

“Listen to me.” Zylphia then broke her own rules—a habit she was starting to develop—and once more seized my arm. She dragged me, protesting, under the pavilion, and I lost all sense of her features. The darkness swallowed us, leaving me invisible and her swathed in the faintest bit of pale sheen. “There’s been an attack on a sweet.”

“What has this to do with me?” I asked, sympathetic but confused. “I’ve been gone.”

“It’s Lily,” Zylphia said, and her voice broke on the sweet’s name. “The bastard cut Lily.”

“Wait.” I took a deep breath, feeling the cold bite into my lungs. The shock of it, the cleansing freshness of it, helped clear away my confusion. “Start again. What exactly happened?” I’d done this dance with Zylphia before. The night she hired me to collect the sweet tooth, she’d been so upset that I’d been forced to calm her to make sense of the facts.

It was unbearable, this sense of familiarity. I knew. Somehow, I simply knew what would come next—and I was as powerless to stop it here as I’d been those few months ago.

Zylphia mirrored my breath. Then, quietly, she started over. “Black Lily was to be in the private gardens tonight. When we realized she wasn’t there, we looked before the whips found out, but she wasn’t anywhere. When we told Ikenna, he put out the footmen for searching.”

I didn’t know for sure what happened to Menagerie folk who failed to attend their duties, but given my own experiences, I had at least an inkling. “I imagine he didn’t take kindly to it.”

“Lily is reliable,” she replied sharply. “We all know it, even the whips.”

“All right, all right,” I soothed, though impatience snapped a jarring note through my forced calm. “What next?”

Her figure shifted in the shadows. “Suddenly, we hear a scream, and there’s Lily in the gardens. The private ones, in the maze. She’s...trussed and...blood all over...”

Zylphia collapsed from within, nothing so outward as to swoon, but I saw it, heard it, in the struggle to speak.

I reached out, touched her arm briefly. But only briefly. I simply could not tell whether she welcomed it or would refuse, and her own uncertain approach to it did not leave me feeling particularly confident. “Go on, Zylla. Take your time.”

The gist was already had. A man had attacked Black Lily on her turn about the garden. A terrible thing, but why would it be pinned on me?

“The bastard cut her, cherie.” Now I heard the burn of fury, strengthening her resolve. “Bound her so she could not fight, cut her across the face, forehead to throat, then dropped her like she was less than nothing.”

That was terrible, certainly.

“She lives?” I asked.

“She lives, but she’ll not ever be a sweet again.” Her voice hardened. “We’ll find work for her here long as the Veil allows, but she’s ruined, Cherry. No man will ever take her like that, save maybe the Ferrymen.”

I flinched. Not a position worth gloating about, that one. “Did you find any clue? Anything as to the nature of the assailant’s identity?”

“If it wasn’t the sweet tooth,” she said fiercely, “then someone else is making a point of it to hurt us, take us like the tooth before. We’re no common doxies and we aren’t for the likes of him!”

A point. My rival had already been inside the gardens once, as evidenced by the cameo he’d left. His calling card was violence, terror and blood.

But he wasn’t the only. Jack the Ripper had made it his business to go after women who peddled their flesh for coin. “Are you sure it’s him and not the Chapel’s Jack?”

“We aren’t to ask.”

My head cocked. “Your pardon?”

Zylphia blew out an angry breath. “The lion prince has made his declaration,” she spat. “All measures against the sweet tooth and the Ripper are to stop. No collections, no investigations. Whatever has riled this man, whichever man, he wants a stop to it.”

“The hell he does,” I all but snarled. Ikenna Osoba was rapidly turning into a thorn in my side.

I would be all too happy to become the shard of glass in his regal paw.

Zylphia surprised me. “You have to leave it alone,” she whispered.

I blinked for a moment, caught off guard. “What?” Then, as the meaning sunk in, I took a step back. “You can’t be serious!”

She threw up her hands. “A whip has spoken! What are we to do? We risk punishment if you don’t leave it alone.”

My lip curled. I turned away. “Where is Hawke?”

“Cherry, don’t—”

“Where is he?”

There was silence. A held breath.

Very slowly, I turned back. My fingers spasmed hard enough that they cramped, but I took the pain and tucked it aside. Settled it against the warm glow of my rage and bound it tightly to my heart. Guilt that I could not free Zylphia from Osoba’s threats, anger that the whip would dare, grief for all the burdens I carried, hunger for a vengeance that would be mine—I set them aside before they consumed me. There would be time for that soon.

With near superhuman effort, I pulled an icy veneer of calm over it all.

“Where,” I asked softly, “is Hawke?” If Osoba would not see reason, then I would force his hand.

If neither would listen, then I had no choice: I would risk Zylphia’s punishment to put an end to everything.

The recognition of this, my determination to ignore her promised suffering, broke something within me. It was as if my feeling—my ability to process emotion and empathy—had been pushed too far.

The world went quiet around me.

Zylphia let out her held breath on a low groan. “Last I was with him was in his quarters,” she finally said, and the crack that revelation put in my heart no longer hurt. I could not let it; dared not break free of the ice that had encased me. If she had provided the man comfort as sweets were taught to do, it could not touch me.

“I see,” I replied, desperately calm. “Thank you.”

“Wait, there’s something you should—”

I gave her my back. “It does not matter,” I said, finality in every syllable.

Leaving her to shadow, I stepped out from under the pavilion. The lantern light glided over me, picked out