I'm cleaning blood from under my fingernails when Corrine finds me.

  Not fresh blood—it's been three days since Lyon, three days since Ashworth's body cooled on the monastery stones. But I keep finding traces of it. In the creases of my knuckles. Beneath the edges of my nails. As if the kill has seeped into my skin and refuses to wash away.

  Days in Montmartre blur together. We've established a routine—patterns of movement and stillness designed to avoid detection. Mei goes out at dawn and returns at dusk, gathering intelligence from Fontaine's network. Corrine analyzes documents. And I wait, trapped in three small rooms above the Paris rooftops with nothing but time and the ache in my chest that grows larger every day.

  I stand at the window and watch the city breathe. Normal people, living normal lives. People who have never felt the cold weight of a blade in their hands.

  The girl who cried over dead cats, who carried spiders outside—she feels like a stranger now. My mother would be horrified by what I've become. Or maybe she'd understand that sometimes kindness isn't enough.

  I don't know anymore.

  "You're brooding."

  Corrine's voice pulls me out of my thoughts. She's standing in the doorway, a cup of tea in each hand, her gray-green eyes studying me with an expression I can't quite read.

  "I'm thinking."

  "Same thing, the way you do it." She crosses to where I'm sitting, hands me one of the cups. The tea is hot, sweetened with honey the way I've come to prefer it. She noticed without me ever telling her—the way I'd push aside the sugar and reach for the honey jar at breakfast. Small things. The kind of things people notice when they're paying attention. "Mei says you've been like this since Ashworth. Quieter. More distant."

  "Ashworth was different from the others."

  "How?"

  I consider the question. Try to find words for something that's been nagging at me since the cloister—since I stood over his body and felt nothing but emptiness where satisfaction should have been.

  "He offered me a deal. Said he'd let me walk away, tell the congregation I was dead." I sip the tea—hot, sweet, grounding in its ordinariness. "The others never did that. Garrett fought until I cut his throat. Webb tried to bargain with information. Cross just accepted it—she was the only one who didn't beg. But none of them offered to just... let me go."

  "And you said no."

  "Of course I said no. He spent twenty years hunting people like you, like me. Twenty years of catching defectors and dragging them back to be killed. He doesn't get to pretend he has a conscience just because he's tired of killing."

  "But it bothers you."

  I set down my tea, turn to face her fully. The carvings respond with their quiet rhythm under my ribs—steady, patient, always reminding me of the connection to something vast and cold and utterly indifferent to human concerns about morality.

  "It makes me wonder. What if one of them isn't like the others? What if there's someone on my list who actually regrets what they did? Who would stop if they could? Who's spent years trying to make amends in whatever small ways are available to them?" I pause, searching for the right words. "Would killing them still be justice, or just... murder?"

  Corrine is quiet. Her hands wrap around her own cup, seeking warmth against the December chill that seeps through the old windows.

  "I regret what I did." Her voice cracked. "Every day. Every moment. The children I watched die, the rituals I participated in, the lies I told myself to make it bearable. If I could take it back—if I could undo even one of those deaths—I would give anything."

  "But you can't."

  "No. None of us can." She meets my eyes. "That's the thing about the past, Eleanor. It doesn't care about regret. It just is. The children we failed are still dead. The rituals we witnessed still happened. The people we should have saved are still beyond saving. No amount of guilt changes that."

  "Then what's the point of regret?"

  "Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it's just the price we pay for being human." She sets down her tea. "But here's what I've learned, in six years of running and hiding and hating myself for what I allowed to happen: the question isn't whether someone feels bad about what they've done. The question is what they do with that feeling."

  "Ashworth offered to let me go. That's something."

  "Is it? Or is it just the last desperate act of a man who wanted to die feeling like he'd done something good?" She shakes her head. "He spent twenty years hunting defectors. Twenty years of catching people who tried to escape and delivering them back to be killed. One offer to one target doesn't balance that scale."

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  A sound from downstairs—footsteps, voices. We both freeze. My hand finds my blade. Corrine's breath catches.

  The voices fade. Just the landlord, talking to a delivery boy. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.

  But my heart is still racing when I turn back to her.

  I nod. I do know. But the question remains, gnawing at the edges of my certainty like rats at a rope. "I just wonder sometimes whether I'm becoming what they made me. Whether the void is eating everything else, leaving nothing behind but the hunt."

  Corrine reaches out. Her hand finds mine, fingers cold from the December chill.

  "You're becoming yourself," she says. "Whatever that is. Whatever that means. The fact that you're asking these questions—the fact that you're wondering about the difference between justice and murder—that means you're still human. Still capable of something more than killing."

  "Something like what?"

  "I don't know yet." Her grip tightens. "But I'd like to find out. With you."

  The marks fall still against my ribcage. That strange stillness that only happens in her presence—the calm in the center of the storm that's been raging inside me since Dover. I don't understand it. Don't know why her touch affects the connection to the Deep One in ways no one else's does.

  I don't pull my hand away.

  "What if the killing never stops?" I ask. "What if the list empties and another one takes its place? What if I've become something that can only exist in the hunt?"

  "Then we'll cross that bridge when we reach it." She almost smiles. "But I don't think that's true. I've seen you with the marks quiet. I've seen the way you soften when you think no one's watching. There's still someone in there, Eleanor. Someone who isn't just a weapon."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because weapons don't ask questions about whether they're weapons. They just cut."

  We sit like that for a long moment, hands intertwined, watching the Paris night through the dirty window.

  "Tell me something," she says quietly. "Something that has nothing to do with the hunt."

  "I used to collect seashells. When I was seven." I pause. "I can't remember what any of them looked like now."

  "I collected pressed flowers. Celeste used to help me. Before." Her grip tightens. "I keep wondering if I could have saved her."

  "You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."

  "I know. But I still wonder."

  The candle gutters. She looks younger in this light. Less guarded.

  "I'm glad you found me," I say.

  "You gave me a reason to stop running." She meets my eyes. "That's not nothing."

  Before I can respond, the night explodes into motion.

  The knock comes at midnight.

  Not on the door—on the window. Three sharp taps, a pause, then two more. Mei's emergency signal.

  I'm awake instantly, blade in hand before my eyes are fully open. Corrine stirs in the chair where she'd fallen asleep, her hand reaching for the knife I taught her to keep close.

  "Stay here," I whisper. "Don't move until I signal."

  I cross to the window in the dark, keeping low, keeping to the shadows. The glass is cold against my fingertips as I ease it open just far enough to see.

  Mei is on the fire escape. Her face is drawn, pale in the moonlight, her breath misting in the December cold. She's been running—I can see it in the way she's breathing, the tension in her shoulders, the way her hand rests on her blade as if expecting attack at any moment.

  "He's here," she murmurs. "The Hound. In Paris. I just received word."

  The cold that runs through me has nothing to do with the December night.

  "How close?"

  "Too close. One of Fontaine's contacts spotted him in the Marais three hours ago. He was asking questions at the bookshop." Her eyes are hard. "Fontaine got out through the cellar, but his cover is blown. He's been working with us for decades, and now he's running because of us."

  Guilt twists in my chest, sharp and unexpected. Another person's life upended because they tried to help me.

  "What else?"

  "Sullivan was showing a sketch. Three women. Chinese, English, young." Mei's eyes flick to Corrine, visible in the doorway now. "He knows about her. Knows she's working with the Tide. The congregation has put together the pieces."

  Corrine makes a sound—not quite a gasp, something smaller, something broken. The sound of someone who spent six years running and just learned that the running is about to get harder.

  I want to go to her, but there's no time.

  "How did he find us so quickly?"

  "The watcher in the village. The informant at the inn. The gendarme on the train who looked too long and walked away too quickly." Mei shakes her head. "It doesn't matter how. Sullivan is here and he's hunting. And he's not like Ashworth—he won't tire, won't waver, won't offer deals. He'll track us until one of us is dead."

  I reflect on what Fontaine told us. A man who sacrificed his own daughter and convinced himself it was holy. A man who hunts because hunting is the only thing keeping him from facing the truth.

  "Then we kill him first."

  "Eleanor—"

  "What choice do we have? Run again? Find another safe house, start over, wait for him to find us there too?" The marks ignite beneath my ribs, responding to my anger—or perhaps to the proximity of danger, a killer's focused attention somewhere in the Paris night. "He's one man. We know he's coming. This is our best chance to end it."

  "He's more dangerous than Ashworth. He's been doing this longer than I have."

  "But he's never hunted someone like me."

  My words come out harder than I intend. But they're true. Sullivan has hunted defectors, apostates, people who ran from the congregation. He's never hunted someone the Deep One decided to save. Never faced someone with marks that sense danger, sense water, sense attention in the darkness.

  "We need to move," Corrine says. Her voice has steadied—she's found the resolve that terror tried to steal. "Tonight. Now. Even if we're not going to confront him, we can't stay here."

  She's right. Whether we run or hunt, staying in this safe house is suicide.

  "Fontaine has a bolt-hole in Montparnasse," Mei says. "Smaller, but harder to find. We can be there in an hour."

  "And then?"

  "Then we decide. Fight or run. Hunt or hide." Mei's eyes meet mine. "But we decide together. No more splitting up, no more divided forces."

  I look at Corrine. At the fear in her face and the determination beneath it. At the woman who spent six years running and is finally ready to stop.

  "Together," I agree. "Pack light. Move fast. We're gone in ten minutes."

  The next hour is a blur of motion. Gathering essentials, destroying anything that might identify us, slipping through Paris streets that have become a hunting ground. Every shadow could hide a watcher. Every footstep behind us could be the Hound.

  But somewhere in the night, I feel the marks begin to pulse faster. Not warning—anticipation. The prey has become the hunter, and for the first time since Ashworth, I feel something that isn't emptiness. I feel alive, and for the first time since Dover, that feeling doesn't scare me.

  What scares me is the shadow I glimpse crossing the rooftops behind us—there and gone in an instant, too fast to be certain. The Hound is closer than we thought.