The next morning broke without ceremony.
Fog swallowed the city in thick, choking folds, turning gaslights into hollow yellow eyes that watched without blinking. Somewhere beyond the river, someone screamed. No one went to check.
Carmen sat at the kitchen table, polishing a small blade until it shone like a sliver of hunger. She didn't look up when Vivienne stumbled into the room, hollow-eyed, clutching the edges of her coat as if trying to hold herself inside her own skin.
Julian leaned in the doorway, watching them both.
Silent.
Steady.
Waiting for something to crack.
Vivienne didn't speak at first. She just stared at Carmen, at the steady rhythm of the blade across cloth.
"What are we doing?" she asked finally, voice dry and cracking like old wood.
Carmen didn't stop polishing.
Didn't blink.
"We're surviving," she said simply.
Vivienne let out a breath that could have been a laugh or a sob. She didn't know anymore.
"And them?" she whispered, glancing toward the couch where Mara still slept, curled tight around a knife she didn't yet know how to use.
"They're the price," Carmen said, her voice smooth and clean as a scalpel sliding through flesh. "Not everyone deserves to be saved."
Vivienne shook her head, trying to summon anger, trying to summon anything that might feel like a spine.
But she knew the truth.
She had known it for a long time.
There were no heroes left here.
Only survivors.
Only architects of beautiful, brutal endings.
Hargreave crossed another line that night.
He found a name.
Not Carmen's.
Not Julian's.
Not even Vivienne's.
But a pawn.
A girl left behind without a spiral to guide her.
A girl who had run after the first kill and thought she could disappear.
Her name was Liza.
She was hiding in a crumbling boarding house near Spitalfields, her hands trembling too hard to lock the door properly, her face raw from crying.
Hargreave didn't knock.
He kicked the door open.
Liza shrieked, scrambling back across the floor, her bare feet skidding against the dirt.
"I don't know anything!" she sobbed before he could speak.
Hargreave didn't care.
He crossed the room in three strides, grabbed her by the wrists, pinned her against the peeling wallpaper.
"You do," he hissed.
She wept, the sound tearing from her throat like something half-born.
He pressed harder.
He needed answers.
He needed names.
He needed something real before the city swallowed itself whole.
"You know," he growled.
Liza's breath hitched.
And she broke.
Not into clarity, but into a flood of half-truths—scraps of things, glimpses, twisted facts she barely understood.
A woman.
A man.
A house with boarded windows.
A church burned black.
Hargreave wrote it all down with shaking hands, the ink bleeding into the paper like a wound.
He didn't see Liza sink to the floor afterward.
He didn't hear her whisper, over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," until her voice shredded itself to silence.
He just left.
Because mercy was no longer part of this story.
Carmen lit a cigarette with steady hands, standing at the window as the city staggered under the weight of its own terror.
Julian stood behind her, his shadow stretching long across the floor.
Vivienne watched from the kitchen table, her fingers tracing meaningless patterns into the dust.
"She'll break," Julian said quietly.
"Let her," Carmen replied.
Vivienne thought they were speaking about her.
She hoped they were.
It was better than thinking they were speaking about the city itself.
Mara stirred in her sleep, murmuring something that sounded like a prayer.
Carmen smiled, slow and cruel.
Julian kissed her shoulder, light as a blade grazing skin.
They didn't speak of love.
Not because they didn't feel it.
But because love was too small a word for what they had.
They were need.
They were destruction.
They were each other's permission to exist.
The next day, Mara made her second kill.
It wasn't elegant.
It wasn't even clean.
The woman screamed for a long time before her throat closed. The blood splashed across the alley walls, pooled between the cobblestones.
Mara stood over her, shaking, her knife clutched so tightly that her knuckles bled.
Carmen approached, boots splashing through blood, and took the blade from Mara's hand without a word.
Mara stared at her, something broken shining behind her eyes.
"I did good," she whispered, desperate.
Carmen tilted her head, studying the girl like an artist examining a cracked sculpture.
"You did enough," she said.
Mara sagged, tears streaking her cheeks.
For a brief moment, Vivienne saw a glimpse of the child still trapped inside her.
Carmen saw it too.
And she stepped back.
Because weakness was a scent, and it always drew predators.
Julian came up behind Mara, wrapping an arm around her shoulders in a gesture that almost looked tender.
"Rest," he said. "You've earned it."
Mara leaned into him, weeping quietly against his chest.
Vivienne closed her eyes.
She didn't need to see what would happen next.
She already knew.
---
Later, when the streets were empty again, Carmen and Julian sat by the fire, the smoke curling against the ceiling.
Vivienne sat on the floor, knees drawn to her chest, listening as they spoke in low, even tones about the next moves.
Not strategies.
Not tactics.
Just inevitabilities.
They spoke of bodies like stones dropped into rivers.
Of consequences like weather.
No malice.
No glee.
Just necessity.
Vivienne realized, in that moment, that Carmen and Julian were not monsters because they enjoyed the spiral.
They were monsters because they understood it.
Accepted it.
Welcomed it with open hands while the rest of the world still tried to deny its teeth.
And she realized something else too, cold and slow and sickening.
She was beginning to understand it too.