Vivienne didn't sleep after Elias died.
She didn't try.
The flat was too full of ghosts now, though none wore chains. They wore blood. They wore silence. They wore Carmen's scent lingering on the sheets and Julian's laughter buried under the floorboards with the bodies.
She sat at the kitchen table, a half-empty bottle of whiskey clutched between her hands. She stared at the blank page in front of her until the words started bleeding through her vision—not words she chose, but words Carmen had planted like seeds that grew thorns.
Vivienne wanted to write something real. Something true.
But the truth had been smothered long ago, somewhere between the first body, the first kiss, and the first realization she would never leave the spiral alive.
Upstairs, Carmen and Julian were already planning the next moves.
Elias was gone.
It was as if he had never existed.
That was the real violence—not the blade, not the blood.
The forgetting.
Vivienne didn't cry.
She was past crying.
She just sat there as the world inside her cracked and split, quietly, like porcelain dropped from a great height.
By noon, they had a new pawn.
It was almost effortless.
The girl's name was Mara, though it barely mattered.
Seventeen. Orphaned. Living in the crumbling back alleys of Soho where the rats grew fatter than the children.
She was perfect.
Julian found her breaking into an abandoned bakery, her skinny fingers covered in soot and flour, her eyes wild with a hunger no bread could fix.
Carmen approached her like she approached all wounded things—no sudden moves, no raised voice. Just a hand extended. A knife hidden behind the wrist if needed.
"You're tired of being nothing," Carmen said, not a question, just fact.
Mara stared, every bone in her body pulled taut with fear and hope.
Then, without speaking, she took Carmen's hand.
Julian smiled, small and satisfied.
Vivienne watched from the doorway, something sour rising in her throat.
Mara didn't know what she had just agreed to.
But she would.
They all learned eventually.
Hargreave learned too.
Just slower.
The boy from the alley was dead.
Not from Hargreave's hands—not directly—but close enough that the guilt coiled behind his ribs like a parasite.
He drank more now.
Slept less.
His hands shook when he tried to tie the red threads across the map. The spiral was there—he could feel it, smell it—but he couldn't see the center. He couldn't find the hand that held the knife.
They were ghosts.
Smiling, breathing, killing ghosts.
And somewhere deep in the marrow of his failing bones, Hargreave knew: if he didn't catch them soon, he never would.
Worse, a colder truth had begun whispering behind his teeth.
He didn't want to catch them anymore.
He wanted to understand them.
And that, he realized late one night as he stared into a cracked pub mirror, was worse than any spiral carved into flesh.
That was the real infection.
Mara made her first kill faster than Elias had.
Carmen was almost proud.
She and Julian watched from the mouth of a narrow alley as Mara slid a blade between the ribs of a merchant, her face blank, her hands trembling not from fear, but from the violence of existence.
There were no tears.
No prayers.
Only blood.
Only belonging.
Carmen took Mara's hand afterward, cleaned the blade with the hem of the girl's coat, and whispered into her ear.
"You're not lost anymore."
Mara cried then—ugly, broken sobs buried against Carmen's coat—and Carmen let her, stroking her hair once, twice, before gently pushing her away.
Julian lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke into the cold.
Vivienne watched from the shadows, her heart hollow.
Another pawn.
Another offering.
Another brick in the cathedral of rot they were building.
She wondered if Mara knew how short her usefulness would be.
She wondered if she had ever really known herself.
The city was eating itself now.
Not because Carmen demanded it.
Because it wanted to.
The killings had become static—white noise vibrating under every conversation, clinging to every coat hem.
The papers called it madness.
The politicians called it conspiracy.
The priests called it judgment.
They were all wrong.
It was evolution.
The city was shedding its skin, burning away the weak, sharpening its teeth.
And Carmen Vale stood at the center of it, calm and steady as a surgeon guiding the blade.
That night, back in the flat, Julian opened a bottle of stolen brandy, pouring two glasses.
He handed one to Carmen without speaking.
They clinked the glasses together once—not a toast, but a checkpoint. A silent agreement.
Vivienne sat at the kitchen table, writing because there was nothing else left for her to do.
Her pen scratched across the page in words she would never dare read again.
Mara slept curled on the couch, blood still drying under her nails, dreaming the dreams of those who think they have been chosen when they have only been marked.
Carmen drank deeply, feeling the fire spread through her chest.
Julian leaned back, watching the flames dance in the hearth.
For now, the Spiral held.
For now, they ruled.
But Carmen knew—the deeper the spiral dug into the bones of the city,
the harder it would be to climb out if anything ever cracked.
She smiled, slow and certain.
She had never intended to climb out.