Chapter 390: Still in Play.

Melissa put the knife in my hand without a word.

The blade was warm from her palm. Azure turned her back to me — still Ingrid’s shoulders, Ingrid’s neck, Ingrid’s bald head — and I got the edge under the rope at her wrists. The fibres parted clean. One cut. The loops fell open and dropped to the stone between her heels.

Her hands came free and she was round and into me before I’d lowered the knife.

I held her.

And it was wrong in a way I hadn’t braced for. The height was wrong. The shoulders under my hands were narrower than Azure’s and the arms across my back were somebody else’s arms, and I was holding a body I’d watched get shoved through a door a few minutes back while a girl I knew lived somewhere behind it.

Her heart was going hard enough that I could feel it through both of us, a fast steady knock against my chest through the borrowed body.

I had to reach past Ingrid to find her.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just held on with her cheek against my shoulder, breath warm through the fabric of my shirt, arms locked across my back as if the corridor might take me again if she loosened.

"I really thought I wasn’t going to see you again."

"I’m here."

"Do you know why I came to the capital?"

"No."

"I want him dead." Her arms tightened. The words went into my shoulder, low and flat and finished. "Properly. Not put down. Dead. I know he’s already inside the Capital and I know he wants you. I want to be there when it happens."

Melissa stood behind me holding nothing but the dress, waiting. The hard white light sat on all three of us without kindness.

I’d already seen what he was going to do. A burning street with half the city gone and Sherry on the ground and him standing in the middle of all of it, unhurried, watching — purple hair, Mute’s face, the same empty patience he’d worn in the elevator with no heartbeat in his chest.

And my father had stood at a window in a forest house and warned me about exactly this.

He comes back every time. And every time, he comes back stronger.

She’s right anyway.

The one I saw in that street was wearing Mute’s body. Kill Mute and that version of him never gets there.

It just means whatever stands up next is worse than the one I’ve already seen.

"We get out of here first," I said, and eased her off me.

She let go. Wiped her face with the back of her wrist — a quick hard pass under each eye — and pulled herself straight. Ingrid’s posture settling back onto a body that was already deciding how long to keep wearing it.

"Yeah."

"My underwear," Melissa said, like that was the item on the agenda that couldn’t wait.

I turned round and pulled it out of my pocket. The fabric was still slightly damp from the bathroom rod. I held it out on my open palm.

"So what’s the plan?" She took it off my hand with no ceremony whatsoever and didn’t look at it — just closed her fingers around the cloth and kept her eyes on my face.

"This is Azure—"

"I know." She cut straight across me. "I had her the moment she hit that floor. She was lying there, terrified he’d notice."

"She reads minds?" Azure said. The pink hadn’t fully left her irises; it sat under the borrowed colour like a second layer.

"Yeah. And right now you want your pussy massaging Bram’s cock."

"Girls."

Both of them stopped. The corridor held the word and the silence after it.

"Ingrid’s up there," I said. "I think she’s doing everything she can to get this door open, and I believe her. But we’re not sitting on our hands in a basement betting five lives on one woman."

She was one woman. That was the whole of it. One woman above ground with my comms in her pocket and a man who’d already worked out enough to send somebody down here wearing her face. Max hadn’t arrested Azure this morning. He’d arrested Ingrid, and he’d meant it, and the only reason Ingrid was still walking around up there was that he thought she was already in a cell.

That kind of luck runs out. It usually runs out fast, and it never sends a warning first.

"You’re right." Melissa folded her arms. The black dress settled over them. "So what have you got?"

"Something. But it needs all of us on it." I looked down the corridor — past Sophia’s door, past the bar of sunlight on the floor, to the open frame at the far end. "Monica included."

"Monica’s easy." Flat, and certain. "Monica works with anybody if the arithmetic suits her. Sophia is the one who’ll put you through a wall."

"Sophia won’t be a problem."

She looked at me for a second too long.

"Sophia."

"Sophia."

Believe me.

And you’re not exactly difficult yourself. You’ve got no idea why you do half the things I ask you to.

Tell me my thoughts are covered.

[ Completely. ]

"Go and wake her," I said.

"Fine." Melissa turned and started down the corridor, the dress moving with her, bare feet quiet on the stone until she reached Sophia’s door and the sound of it opening cut her off from view.

"Where’s the washroom?" Azure asked.

I pointed at the last door on our side. She went after Melissa without another word — still Ingrid from the back, still the face Max had sentenced.

Then I turned the other way, toward Monica’s door, still standing open exactly as she’d left it.

The gap held corridor light and the quieter dark of her room. I stopped in the frame.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and her eyes already on the doorway — waiting for me the way somebody waits for a train they know the time of.

"You heard all of that," I said.

"Every word of it."