Pemberton's office sits above a tailor's shop in Holborn, the kind of respectable address that raises no questions and invites no curiosity. The stairs creak beneath our feet as we climb, each step bringing us closer to another piece of the congregation's network, another thread to pull, another key to the names still waiting on my list.

  We don't knock.

  The door gives way to Corrine's lockpick in under thirty seconds—she learned the skill during her years with the cult, she told me once, when Celeste needed documents retrieved from places that weren't supposed to be accessible. One more tool forged in the service of evil, now turned against its makers.

  Pemberton doesn't try to run. He's not built for violence—soft around the middle, pale from hours spent in offices, hands that have never held anything more dangerous than a pen. He sits behind his desk and watches us approach with the expression of a man who always knew this moment would come.

  The office is exactly what I expected. Shelves of ledgers, meticulously organized. Filing cabinets with locks that wouldn't stop a determined child. Certificates on the walls proclaiming his membership in various professional societies, his legitimacy as a man of numbers and respectability. The congregation hides in plain sight, I've learned, wearing the masks of accountants and scholars and philanthropists.

  "The Tide," he says. His voice trembles slightly. "Shaw warned me. Said you were coming for all of us."

  "Shaw is dead." I circle the desk, putting myself between him and the door. The ritual scars throb steadily inside my torso—not warning, just awareness. This man isn't dangerous, not physically. But the damage he's done with his ledgers and his transfers rivals anything the ritual sites have produced. "Along with his guards, his warehouse, and his operation. You're what's left."

  "I'm just the accountant." The words come out in a rush. "I handle the finances, the transfers, the legitimate side of things. I don't—I've never been to the rituals. Never seen what they do. I just move the money."

  "The money that pays for the children." Corrine picks up a ledger from his desk, flips through it. "Expenses: transportation, clothing, medical examinations. Income: donations, investments, transfers from congregation accounts." She sets it down. "You know exactly what you're funding, Mr. Pemberton."

  "I know what they tell me." His eyes dart between us, calculating. "Charitable work. Orphan placement. Educating disadvantaged youth." His laugh is bitter. "I'm not stupid, of course. I've seen enough to guess. But guessing isn't knowing. I've never—"

  "Stop." My blade appears in my hand, faster than thought. "Every word you say to defend yourself is an insult to the children you helped kill. Shaw groomed them. Someone else drowned them. But your money made it all possible."

  He goes very still. The lamp on his desk flickers, casting shadows across his pale face.

  "What do you want?"

  "Everything. Names, locations, financial records. The entire network of congregation supporters across England." I lean closer. "And the doctor. Shaw's records mention a Dr. Aldous Crane. Who is he?"

  Something changes in Pemberton's expression. Fear, yes, but something else too—a deeper terror that suggests Crane is worse than Shaw ever was.

  "Crane is a surgeon. Or he was, before he lost his license for—" He swallows hard. "For experiments. The medical board said he was too interested in what happens inside people. The congregation gave him a new practice. A new purpose."

  "What kind of purpose?"

  "The children. After the rituals. Some of them survive, you know. Changed, like you." His eyes flick to my chest, where the marks hide beneath my dress. "Crane studies them. Studies the changes. He takes—" Another swallow. "He takes pieces. For research."

  The marks flare at his words. I feel them pulse with something that might be recognition—or rage.

  "Where?"

  "A surgery in Cheapside. Legitimate upstairs, but the basement—" He shakes his head. "I've never been there. I don't want to know what happens in that basement."

  "But you kept paying for it."

  "I—"

  "You counted the money that bought his tools. You balanced the books that funded his experiments. You made it all possible while pretending not to know." I press the blade against his throat. "The difference between you and Shaw is that Shaw believed in what he was doing. You just didn't care."

  "Please." Tears are streaming down his face now. "I have a family. Children of my own. I never wanted—"

  "Neither did they."

  I feel Corrine's hand on my arm. Gentle pressure. A reminder.

  "The records," her voice is barely audible. "We need his records."

  Pemberton talks for two hours.

  He tells us everything—the financial networks, the shell companies, the respectable businesses that launder congregation money. He names names: donors who know exactly what their money supports, politicians who look the other way, police inspectors who make investigations disappear. The congregation's roots go deeper than we imagined, spreading through London's power structure like rot through timber.

  Corrine takes notes, filling page after page with names and addresses and figures. I watch Pemberton's face as he talks, looking for lies, looking for omissions, looking for the moment when self-preservation outweighs cooperation. But he's too frightened to hold anything back. He saw what we did to Shaw's guards at the warehouse. He knows what we're capable of.

  "The money flows through three main channels," he explains, pointing to a ledger Corrine has spread across his desk. "Charitable donations—tax-deductible, untraceable. Investment returns from a portfolio that doesn't officially exist. And direct payments from European congregation chapters, disguised as import fees."

  "How much?"

  "Thousands of pounds per year. Enough to fund their operations, pay their informants, maintain their properties." He swallows. "Enough to keep men like me comfortable while we help them murder children."

  The admission surprises me. Most of the congregation's servants justify themselves, wrap their crimes in ideology or necessity or denial. Pemberton doesn't bother. He knows what he is. He's just too weak to have been anything else.

  He tells us about Crane's surgery, about the experiments, about the jars of preserved organs that line the basement walls. Children who survived the rituals only to be taken apart piece by piece in the name of scientific curiosity. His voice shakes as he describes it—not from guilt, I think, but from the visceral horror of knowing such a place exists and having helped fund it.

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  "I've never been there," he says again, like the distinction matters. "But I've seen the requisitions. Surgical tools. Preservation chemicals. Glass containers in specific sizes." He closes his eyes. "You can imagine what those containers are for."

  I don't have to imagine. The marks remember—fragments of vision from the Deep One, glimpses of what happens to the children who survive the drowning only to face something worse.

  He tells us about the Hound—Marcus Sullivan, the congregation's senior hunter. How Sullivan lost his daughter twelve years ago and has been hunting defectors ever since. How he's the most dangerous enemy we'll face.

  "He's different from the others," Pemberton says. "The guards, the enforcers—they do it for money or faith. Sullivan does it because he has to. Because if he stops, he'll have to admit what really happened to Lily."

  "What do you mean?"

  "She didn't want to go. The ritual, I mean. She wrote letters, begging him to save her. He kept them—reads them every night, from what I've heard. But he went through with it anyway. Let them take her. Let them—" Pemberton's voice breaks. "He convinced himself it was an honor. That she was chosen. But he knows. Deep down, he knows he murdered his own daughter."

  My mind goes to my own ritual. The faces of the eighteen who held me down. The gentle voice that told me everything would be fine.

  "He's not just hunting us," I say slowly. "He's hunting proof that Lily's death meant something."

  "He's hunting proof that he's not a monster." Pemberton wipes his face. "Find the evidence that the congregation is real, that the Deep One is real, that the rituals actually work—and he can keep believing. Keep running from the truth."

  The marks beneath my ribs pulse with recognition. I feel Pemberton's information settling into place, reshaping my understanding of our enemies.

  Shaw was a true believer who thought he was doing good.

  Pemberton is a mercenary who didn't care what he funded.

  Sullivan is a father who murdered his daughter and can't face what he's done.

  Three kinds of evil. Three reasons why the congregation has to fall.

  "Crane." I straightened. "Where exactly?"

  Pemberton tells us. An address in Cheapside. A surgery that looks respectable from the outside. A basement where children are dissected while their hearts still beat.

  "You won't find it easy," he warns. "Crane is paranoid. Protected. He keeps specimens from every ritual—insurance against the congregation. They can't move against him without exposing themselves."

  "Insurance doesn't protect against someone who doesn't care about exposure."

  "No." Pemberton's eyes meet mine. "I suppose it doesn't."

  "What do we do with him?"

  Corrine's question hangs in the air as Pemberton sits bound in his chair, documents scattered around him like evidence at a trial. We have what we came for—more than we came for, actually. The financial records alone could dismantle half the congregation's English operations.

  The question is whether Pemberton lives to see it happen.

  "He didn't fight," Corrine says. "He cooperated. Gave us everything."

  "He also funded fifteen years of child murder without asking questions."

  "I've noticed." She doesn't argue. "But killing him now, after he's talked—it feels different."

  "Different how?"

  "Execution rather than combat. Justice rather than survival." She meets my eyes. "Does the distinction matter to you anymore?"

  The honest answer: I don't know. The marks hum their satisfaction, and I feel nothing but the cold efficiency that's become my default state. Pemberton is complicit. Pemberton deserves death. The logical conclusion is obvious.

  But Corrine is watching me. Looking for something—proof that I'm still capable of mercy, maybe. Proof that the ritual hasn't completely consumed who I used to be.

  "Leave him." I glanced back. "Tied up, gagged. By the time someone finds him, we'll be long gone. Let the congregation deal with him—he's betrayed their secrets. They won't be kind."

  "You're certain?"

  "No." The honest answer. "But we have bigger targets. Crane. Sullivan. The congregation's leadership." I look at Pemberton—tears still streaming, relief flooding his face at the realization that he's going to live. "He's not worth the time it would take to kill him properly."

  It's something else. Some subjects are more valuable alive. Their ongoing transformation provides data that dissection cannot.

  Maybe there's still something human left inside the emptiness after all.

  "Crane tomorrow," Corrine says as we gather the documents. "After we've had time to plan."

  "Crane tomorrow." I pause at the door, looking back at Pemberton. "Tell the congregation the Tide is coming. Tell them we know everything. Tell them to be afraid."

  We disappear into the night, leaving him alone with his ledgers and his fear.

  Eleven names remain.

  The hunt continues.

  Corrine walks beside me through the dark London streets, close enough that our shoulders occasionally brush. The contact is small—accidental, perhaps, but I find myself noticing it. Finding comfort in it.

  "You didn't have to spare him," she says quietly.

  "No."

  "But you did anyway."

  The gas lamps cast pools of light that we pass through like swimmers surfacing for air. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell strikes the hour. Two in the morning. The city sleeps around us, ignorant of the monsters walking its streets—both the kind we hunt and the kind we've become.

  "My mother used to say that kindness isn't weakness," I tell her. "That choosing mercy when you could choose violence—that's where real strength lives."

  "Do you believe that?"

  I consider the question. The hollow space in my chest where feeling used to live. The marks that pulse with hunger for the kill.

  "I don't know anymore. But I remember believing it. That has to count for something."

  Her hand finds mine. Warm fingers lacing through cold ones. The marks go still, that strange peace that only she brings.

  "It counts," she says. "To me, it counts."

  We walk on through the darkness, hand in hand, hunting monsters together.

  Tomorrow, we find Crane.

  Tonight, we're almost human.

  But as we turn onto our street, I notice something that makes my blood freeze.

  The boarding house window—our window—is dark. We left a candle burning.

  And in the shadows across the street, a figure watches. Patient. Still. The posture of a hunter who has found what he was looking for.

  The marks flare their warning a heartbeat too late.

  "Corrine." I don't take my eyes off the watcher. "We've been found."