Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The week moved the way all weeks did when your attention was elsewhere. Classes happened, Bellas brought meals, I slept beside Aria most nights and Isabella a few. I fed when the hunger nudged me, which happened more often than I’d expected and with less internal drama than I would’ve preferred.

That was the part I didn’t want to examine. The feeding had become routine. Just something I did, like showering or eating breakfast used to be. The mechanics no longer required conscious thought, the aftermath no longer triggered guilt spirals. I noticed the shift the way you notice your shoes wearing in, comfortable and concerning in equal measure.

Professor Zellaris had looked at me with something between amusement and curiosity when I’d approached her after Occultism with questions about invocation-specific summoning geometry. She’d walked me through the principles, then warned me that if I ended up stranded in a mortal realm beyond my contracted duration, the Academy’s policy was strict. Best case, I’d repeat the year. Worst case, expulsion.

I’d thanked her and spent the next three nights in the library anyway, cross-referencing resonance binding theory until the glyphs made sense.

Now I sat in the middle of the result, chalk lines branching out around me in patterns that looked organic from the centre but resolved into strict mathematical ratios when viewed from above. Aria sat to my left, Isabella to my right, both positioned at precise anchor points I’d measured twice.

Aria shifted her weight. “How long did he say this would take?”

“He didn’t specify an exact time,” Isabella said without opening her eyes. “Only that he’d attempt the invocation today.”

“It’s been ten minutes.”

“Then it’s been ten minutes.”

Aria’s exhale carried maximum theatrical suffering. She crossed her arms, which lasted perhaps five seconds before she uncrossed them and rested her hands on her knees instead. Her heel started tapping.

Isabella’s jaw tightened fractionally.

I watched the interplay and felt something warm settle in my chest that I immediately tried to categorize as familiarity rather than affection. These were my people. Temporarily. The distinction mattered even if the feeling was the same.

Aria caught me looking and tilted her head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing the smile thing.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are. The little one.” She leaned forward slightly. “Did I do something funny?”

“No.”

But I was smiling, I realized. Small, yes, but present. The same way someone smiles when they walk into their apartment after a long trip and everything’s exactly where they left it.

The thought landed wrong.

I adjusted my position slightly, checking the chalk lines around my feet even though they didn’t need checking. What happened when the real Lily came back. What happened to this, specifically. Aria didn’t know she’d spent two weeks befriending an imposter. Isabella had aligned herself with someone who wasn’t actually a succubus princess, just a human wearing one.

Would they maintain this when Lily returned, or would it shatter the moment they realized the real princess was someone else entirely.

My stomach twisted. Not hunger. Not arousal. Just a tightness that felt suspiciously like loss pre-emptively experienced.

I didn’t get time to examine it.

The chalk beneath us flared white, then blue, the geometry activating in sequence from the outer ring inward. Mana pulled through the anchor points in a rush that lifted my hair off my shoulders.

“Finally!” Aria’s shout came half a second before the world folded sideways and dropped us through.

* * *

The geometry resolved differently this time, depositing us not onto concrete but onto stone worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic, the kind of smoothness that has nothing to do with maintenance and everything to do with time.

The chamber was genuine. That was the first thing I registered, the difference between a room repurposed for ritual use and a space that had been built for it, the walls curving inward at angles that had nothing to do with architecture and everything to do with resonance. Torch brackets. A ceiling low enough that I’d have to duck if I tried to extend my wings. The chalk we’d arrived through was newer, fresh lines over carvings that predated them by what looked like several hundred years.

Charles stood at the edge of the circle. No Miriam. Two men in dark suits flanked him at a distance that was either professional or nervous, and from the way neither of them had let their hands fully settle at their sides, I was putting my money on nervous.

Charles himself looked like a man who had slept poorly and made peace with it. His eyes moved to me first, held for a moment, then shifted to the group as a whole.

“You came,” he said.

“Contract,” Isabella said, which covered it.

Aria spun a slow half-circle, taking in the chamber with her chin lifted, breathing it in. Then she spotted the two men.

“Charles.” She sounded genuinely delighted. “You reconsidered.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“The fun. Having some.” She nodded toward the suits. “You brought friends.”

“They’re here to observe. Documentation, primarily. After what happened last week, the AOR wanted—”

“Oh, right, last week.” Aria pivoted toward me and grabbed my arm with both hands. “That’s actually more reason! Lily basically saved your life, yeah? Saved the whole job. Without her you’re—” she made a sound and a gesture that required no translation, “—dead mortal on a tunnel floor. So really, a little favour in return, that’s just fair isn’t it, Lily?”

She turned the full weight of those purple eyes on me.

I’d been caught mid-thought and answered before the shape of the question had finished forming. “Sure.”

“See!” Aria released my arm and faced Charles with the satisfaction of someone who had won a point in a game no one else knew they were playing. “She agrees. And I promise we won’t drain you too much. Just a little bit. Hardly counts.”

I replayed the last four seconds.

Charles cleared his throat. “While I appreciate the offer, I must still decline.”

“You sure? You look tired.”

“I have other obligations this evening.”

Aria studied him for a moment with the expression of someone taking a loss graciously because they’ve already moved on to the next hand. “Suit yourself.” She turned back to Isabella and me. “We’ll find mortals who are more fun. So.” Her weight shifted. “What’s the plan?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Her face changed, and she grabbed Isabella’s wrist and mine simultaneously, pulling us half a step closer like she needed us in range for the idea to transmit properly.

“Competition.”

Isabella’s eyebrow moved a centimetre.

“What kind of competition,” I said.

“Who hunts the most mortals. We split up, go into the city, meet back Sinday morning, count. Whoever fucked the most wins.” She paused, considered. “Bonus points if you get more than two at the same time.”

“That’s quite crude,” Isabella said.

“But?”

A pause. “I see no reason against it.”

I opened my mouth to decline. The word was right there, practical and clean, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

Then I stopped.

Forty-eight hours. Aria and Isabella would be occupied and entirely unsuspicious. No questions about where I’d gone or who I’d spoken to.

“Fine,” I said.

Aria beamed. “And the winner gets to decide the loser’s punishment. Second place gets nothing. Or they get to participate in the punishment, if the winner’s feeling generous.”

Isabella tilted her head. “Fine by me.”

“Wait.” I looked at her. “I didn’t agree to that part.”

“Too bad.” Aria was already turning away, that particular brightness in her voice that meant the decision was final because she’d decided it was final. “Game’s on.”

Charles stepped forward, one hand raised slightly. “I’ll just remind you that the contract from last week still governs conduct in—”

Aria turned back to him. The grin had softened into something almost reassuring, which was somehow worse. “We signed it, didn’t we? No permanently harming fragile mortals.” She tilted her head. “It did say permanently.”

The two suited men went very still.

The bare sconce nearest Charles guttered once in the draft from nowhere in particular.

Aria’s laughter went up into the ceiling and came back down from every angle at once.

* * *

The door behind us was stone. The one in front was metal, with a brushed steel handle and a keypad, and beyond it the corridor had drop ceilings and fluorescent strips and the particular nothing-smell of recirculated air. The transition happened in about four steps.

I scanned left, then right, then the face of every person we passed in the hall.

Not her. Not her. Definitely not her.

The corridor fed into a wider space and Charles steered us toward an office where a woman in a grey blazer was already sitting behind a desk with a folder open in front of her. She looked at the three of us the way someone looks at weather they’ve been warned about.

The conversation was brief and procedural. She asked questions in the particular flat register of someone who has a checklist they’d rather be finishing. She asked whether the original contract terms were still in effect. Charles produced the document and she examined the seal along its edge, turning it slightly until something in the signature-line caught the light and satisfied her. She made a note. She asked if we understood that the terms remained binding within and without the building. Isabella said yes. She made another note. She closed the folder.

We were escorted back out into the hall.

The lift was unremarkable except for the floor indicator, which had been counting up from negative eight. The panel showed no negative buttons. Ground was marked G, and G was where we were going, and I was not going to think too hard about what occupied the seven floors below the one we’d been processed on.

Charles stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the middle distance, which was the wall, which was about thirty centimetres from his face. Aria stood beside him. She had her weight on one hip and her head tilted at the angle she used when she was deciding what to say next, which was usually the most dangerous interval in any conversation.

“You weren’t this boring before,” she said. “All those questions. The paper. That woman looked at the contract like it had personally offended her.”

“Procedures were updated following last week.” Charles kept his gaze on the wall. “The incident necessitated a review.”

“Updated how?”

“Your group’s classification was revised.” A pause. “If not for the existing contract, it’s unlikely the summoning would have been authorised a second time.”

Aria turned to look at me fully, purple eyes lit with something between delight and scandal. “Did you hear that?” She slapped my shoulder, open-palmed. “You’re practically illegal. You might be the reason succubi get banned from this mortal realm entirely.”

I felt the sting of it, more from the enthusiasm of delivery than the force. “Thrilled.”

The counter ticked up to G and the doors opened onto carpet and pot plants and a reception desk with a logo I didn’t recognise behind it. Two people in ordinary clothes looked up from their monitors and looked away again, the practised disinterest of people who have been told exactly what to do when the lift delivers guests they shouldn’t acknowledge.

We made it out without incident.

The sky outside had gone amber at the edges, the last of it bleeding out above the rooftops. Aria stopped on the pavement and held up the disc they’d handed her before we left, turning it between two fingers. It was small, flat, matte black. She brought it close to her face and then held it at arm’s length, like the distance might clarify things.

“What is this? They said keep it on us, but I don’t feel anything in it.” She tilted it. “Is it jewellery? Mortal jewellery is interesting sometimes.”

“Tracker, but not the magical kind.” I said.

Isabella glanced at the disc in her own palm. “Logical, given the revision.”

“Quite wise for mortals,” Isabella added, and slipped it into her coat.

Aria looked at hers another moment. “Can we destroy it?”

“You can,” I said. “If you want AOR deciding what their next classification for us should be.”

She thought about this for exactly as long as it took to decide she didn’t, then tucked it away.

Then she looked up the street, pointed at nothing in particular, and said, “Meet back here, Sinday morning,” and walked away at a pace that suggested the competition had already started.

I watched her go. Then I looked at Isabella.

“Guess we should move.”

Isabella’s gaze drifted toward the direction Aria had vanished. One corner of her mouth shifted, barely. “She’ll be back.”

“Will she.”

“In approximately four minutes,” Isabella said, “when she remembers which one of us is carrying the currency.”

I laughed, short and quiet, more exhaled than voiced.

The streetlights came on in a row down the block, one after the next.

* * *

Three minutes and forty seconds. I had counted.

Aria came around the corner at a half-jog, hair wind-tousled, one hand already extended toward me before she’d finished closing the distance.

“The money.” She snapped her fingers twice, a gesture that would have read as rude from anyone else. “I need the money. Some of it. A reasonable amount.”

“How much is reasonable?”

“Like… enough to start.” She waved the hand. “I’ll get more after.”

I reached into the bag at my hip and pulled out the folded notes. Aria took them, fanned them once with her thumb, and turned to go.

Then she stopped.

Her eyes dropped to the bag. Small thing, black leather, cross-body strap, the kind that cost more than it had any right to. She’d picked it out on Oxford Street two days ago and held it up like an offering while I’d said I didn’t need it and she’d bought it anyway.

“Is that…” She pointed. “Did you actually start carrying it?”

“It’s useful.”

“It’s the one I got you.” Her tail swung once, a wide arc. “You love it.”

“I needed something to mask my ring usage,” I said. “Pulling items out of thin air gets noticed.”

“That’s still a yes.” She pressed the notes against her chest with both hands, briefly, like something confirmed. “Okay. Okay, also—” She pointed at the bag again. “The phone thing. The one Miriam gave us.”

I was already reaching back into the ring.

I’d checked it before she arrived. The screen still lit, the SIM seated correctly, the signal bars present, no visible damage beyond a faint discolouration along one edge where the heat had found a seam in the casing. Gehenna runs too hot for any electronics in general, but this one had survived better than I’d expected.

I held it out.

She took it and turned it over in her palm, lips pursed, giving it the same critical inspection she’d given the tracker disc twenty minutes ago.

“Does it still work?”

“Seems like it. Don’t forget to charge the battery.”

“Right, right.” She was already pocketing it. “Miriam showed me the charging thing. The little wire. I remember.”

“You remember.”

“Mostly.” She grinned, pointed at me like she was confirming a private wager, and bounced back the way she’d come, already pulling the phone out again as she walked, thumbing at the screen with cheerful concentration.

I watched until she turned the corner.

Isabella had moved two paces to stand beside a lamp post, her coat buttoned against the evening chill, arms loose at her sides. She hadn’t watched Aria go.

“Sinday morning,” I said.

“Here.” She glanced at the building’s face briefly. “Seven o’clock. Earlier if there is cause.”

I nodded. She held my gaze for a moment, measuring something, then turned and walked north, unhurried, her glamoured hair catching the streetlight once before the crowd absorbed her.

The pavement hummed faintly under a passing bus.

* * *

The street had thinned out past the bus stop, enough that I could walk without being shoulder-checked every six paces. I pulled out the spare phone, found Faith’s number in the contacts, and pressed call before I could talk myself into waiting.

It rang twice.

“Hello?” A pause, half a beat, then: “…Lily?”

“Evening. How’d you know it was me?”

“I didn’t. Then you spoke.” Another pause, shorter. “Took you long enough.”

“Last week was complicated.” I turned left at the junction, keeping to the quieter side. “I was busy.”

“Don’t tell me.” Her exhale came through clearly. “One of our contractors, the one who liaises with Hellspawn Oversight Unit, apparently summoned a handful of young succubi to assist with some fieldwork. That’s been the topic of every corridor conversation for six days.”

I kept my voice even. “Should you really be telling me that?”

“It’s not classified. Summoning is regulated, not prohibited, and the contract was filed properly.” She sounded like someone who had repeated this distinction several times already. “The problem wasn’t the summoning.”

“What was the problem?”

“One of them,” Faith said, “demonstrated capabilities that nobody in HSU’s records has documented for succubi of that age. Now the whole unit is debating whether their classification framework needs restructuring. I work for VCD and I’ve spent three days listening to people from three different departments argue about it in the break room.”

“That does sound rough.”

“You have no idea.” A brief silence. “Did you find anything? About Liam?”

The pavement reflected a smear of yellow from the chippy on the corner. I stepped around a couple walking hand in hand without breaking stride.

“I was going to ask you the same thing. But I did come across something in my research. A tracking spell, localisation-based.”

“I’ve already tried three different locator spells,” Faith said. “None of them returned anything. If you need clearance or a ritual site, I can arrange it. Come into the AOR office, I have contacts in the main branch beyond VCD.”

I almost laughed. The image assembled itself neatly: me walking through the front door of the AOR building, Faith somewhere inside, and whatever interdepartmental chatter had been circulating for six days about an unusually capable summoned succubus resolving itself the moment someone looked at me directly. The tracker on me didn’t help the picture.

“It’s genuinely not necessary. The spell is low-footprint. No invasive thresholds that would require permits.”

“You’re sure.”

“Very sure.” I turned the corner and the wind picked up off the side street. “I’d rather we just meet somewhere and compare notes directly. Less friction.”

“Fair enough.” Keys, or something metallic, shifted on her end. “I’m at my flat tonight. Come by in an hour.” She gave the address.

“I’ll be there.”

She hung up.

I lowered the phone and stood at the kerb, watching a black cab idle at the light on the opposite side.

* * *

The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old upholstery. I’d flagged it two streets from where I’d hung up, and now the city scrolled past the window in sodium orange while I turned the tracker over between my fingers.

Small. Black. About the weight of a coat button.

I’d been thinking about Faith’s address, the route, how long I had. I hadn’t thought about this until right now, sitting in the back of a taxi with the disc catching the passing lights.

The tracker knew where I was. Which meant someone chose to look, could place me at the home address of a one of their agent tonight. Me, specifically, the succubus from the summoning. The one generating interdepartmental argument for six days. Parked outside Faith’s building, or worse, inside it.

Faith would either have to explain why a classified contractor’s tracker was pinging her flat, or she’d pull the file herself and spend about thirty seconds connecting it. The summoning, the fieldwork, the capabilities that didn’t match any classification on record.

I turned the disc over again.

Destroying it wasn’t viable. Neither was the ring. Either option and someone’s board lit up, agents checking last known coordinates, and whatever quiet latitude I’d managed to accumulate since signing that contract collapsed entirely.

The driver’s eyes found mine in the rear view mirror, then dropped. He’d been doing it every few minutes, easy and practised enough that he probably didn’t register it as a choice anymore.

“First time in this part of the city?” he tried.

“Something like that.” I was watching the disc, not him.

“Nice night for it. Bit cold though, yeah?”

“Mm.”

The obvious answer had been sitting there since I’d first looked at the problem, patient as furniture. I just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it yet because it didn’t feel like something I would have reached for, six weeks ago.

But pragmatically, plainly, it was the cleanest option available. The driver carried it around for a couple of hours. I retrieved it after. No alert, no flag, no gap in the record. He’d be stationary or local while I was at Faith’s. If nobody decided to check tonight, the coordinates would show an unremarkable slow drift through residential streets and nothing more.

I needed a reason he’d agree without asking questions he shouldn’t ask, or remembering details he shouldn’t remember.

I had means. That was the word that came, flat and precise. Means.

I sat with that for a moment, watching the streetlights cross his dashboard.

He’d be happy to help, I thought. He’d be proud of it, afterwards, the way people are when they’ve done something for someone who made them feel chosen.

The taxi slowed at a red.

“Actually,” I said, and shifted forward slightly so the line of my neckline changed in his mirror, “I could use some help. From someone who knows the area.”

His eyes came up. Stayed this time. His throat moved.

* * *

“I don’t suppose,” I said, just above a murmur, “you’d stop somewhere quieter.”

His eyes hadn’t left mine since I’d shifted forward. He nodded before I’d finished the sentence.

He knew a place. Of course he did.

The alley was off a side street behind a shuttered logistics warehouse, the kind of narrow throat between buildings that London generates automatically, filling in the gaps between everything intentional. He pulled in and cut the engine and the city went muffled and orange through the windscreen.

I thought, briefly, that six weeks ago I’d have found another angle. Talked him into leaving the cab somewhere, distracted him with conversation, relocated the disc while he wasn’t watching.

But I’d been here thirty-five days. And there was something in me that had stopped pretending the pleasure was incidental, a side effect, something to endure for the outcome. It wasn’t. I’d known it wasn’t for a while now. Whatever version of me climbed back into Liam’s life, if I made it back at all, could figure out what to do with that knowledge. Tonight I was here, in this body, with this particular set of capabilities and appetites, and the window was closing. I could feel it the way you feel a season change, the specific quality of light going different.

So I swung my legs across and settled onto his lap, unhurried, his thighs shifting under my weight to accommodate.

“Thank you,” I said, adjusting so we were properly face to face in the narrow dark. “For being accommodating.”

His hands found my waist immediately, warm through the fabric. His breathing had changed.

“Not a hardship,” he managed.

“No.” I let my thumb trace up the line of his jaw, two fingers finding his chin. “I don’t imagine it is.” I tilted his face up until his eyes had nowhere to go but mine. “Look at me.”

He looked. His mouth opened slightly around something he was about to say, something about my eyes, she’s got the most, I’ve never seen, the shape of the thought audible before the words.

“Shh.” I pressed two fingers gently to his lips.

* * *

I lifted my fingers from his lips and he kissed me.

Not tentative about it either, which I appreciated. His hand came up to the back of my neck and he kissed me like he’d been thinking about it since I’d gotten in the cab, which he probably had. I let him set the pace for a moment, cataloguing. Warm mouth, slight stubble, the faint smell of coffee and something woodsy. Decent technique.

He was, I noticed, genuinely attractive. Sharp jaw, good hands, the kind of face that improved with proximity. It still surprised me, faintly, the way this body simply registered that information and filed it as relevant. Liam wouldn’t have clocked another man’s jaw. Wouldn’t have felt the warmth of it, the pull. Thirty-five days, and I still caught myself slightly off-balance at the ease of it, the way attraction arrived without argument.

His hands moved down my sides and I shifted closer, and the front seat of a London cab turned out to be a specific kind of cramped that required constant renegotiation. His knee caught the gear stick. My elbow found the horn. We both paused.

“Maybe,” he started.

“Recline the seat.”

He reached down and the seatback dropped, which gave us maybe twenty centimetres of additional vertical space and not much else. But twenty centimetres was enough.

I settled over him properly and his palms slid up under my skirt, unhesitating, and I let him work for a bit, let his fingers find the inside of my thigh and move inward with increasing confidence until they reached where I was already wet, which produced a sharp intake of breath from him and a quieter one from me.

“Christ,” he murmured.

I rocked against his hand and said nothing, because there was nothing worth saying. His fingers moved carefully at first, then less carefully, and I braced one hand against the headrest and let the sensation build until it was interesting enough to require attention, then I pulled his hand away and reached down to his belt.

He helped. The cramped space made it awkward, hip against the steering column, my elbow against the door, but we sorted it out the way people always sort it out, through improvised geometry and mutual cooperation. When I took him in my hand he made a sound low in his throat. He was hard and substantial, not as large as Bellas but enough to make the shift in my breath completely involuntary.

I guided him to me and sank down slowly, feeling the stretch of it, the fullness, my thighs taking my weight against his. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise if I bruised.

I set the pace from the first stroke.

Slow, to start. Deliberate. His head went back against the reclined seat and his jaw tightened and I watched his face with mild clinical interest while the pleasure built steadily in my own body, the friction of it, the specific weight of another person underneath me. The cab windows had fogged completely. Outside, London continued indifferently.

He tried twice to take over the rhythm and both times my hips simply didn’t cooperate. Not a decision exactly, just the body knowing what it wanted. He caught on quickly and let me have it.

The pace built over the next several minutes by increments, his breathing getting rougher, mine staying measured longer than I expected before it too frayed at the edges. I pressed my palm flat against his chest. He pulled me down harder and I let him, the angle shifting into something that made my spine go electric.

“God,” he breathed, “you’re incredible.”

I didn’t answer. I was past conversation.

His hands worked against my hips and I rode him through the building pressure, the windows completely opaque now, the cab’s interior its own sealed world. When I felt him tensing toward the edge I finally let go of the rhythm I’d been keeping, let the sensation overtake the management of it, and the orgasm arrived less like a wave and more like a detonation, sudden and total. He came a moment after, groaning, his hips bucking up into mine.

I sat with my forehead tipped forward, both hands on his chest, breathing.

The cab ticked quietly around us.

This wasn’t so bad, some part of me thought, unhurried and sincere. This body, this life, the texture of it. Staying might not be…

The thought completed itself before I could stop it, and something cold moved through me from the base of my spine to the back of my skull.

* * *

The cold hadn’t faded by the time I lifted myself off him. I filed it under later and focused on the immediate logistics of rearranging clothing in a reclined cab seat without putting an elbow through the windscreen.

He was still catching his breath when I swung back into the passenger seat. The windows had started to clear at the edges, London reassembling itself in grey patches through the condensation.

“Thank you,” I said, and leaned across to kiss his cheek. My hand found his jacket pocket at the same moment, two fingers slipping the tracker disc inside against the lining, smooth and unhurried. “That was lovely.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite words.

“Can I get your number?” I held up my phone. “I’ll need a lift later.”

He recited it without hesitation and I saved it, then looked at him properly for the first time since we’d started. Slightly rumpled, still flushed, wearing the particular expression of a man who had revised his expectations of the evening sharply upward and hadn’t finished processing it.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“Felix.” A beat. “Felix Hartley.”

“Vera.” I offered my hand and he shook it, which made him laugh a little, which was the right reaction.

He pulled back onto the road. We drove in comfortable quiet for a few minutes, the cab straightening its route toward somewhere plausibly unrelated to Faith’s flat, the tracker riding Felix’s pocket at roughly walking pace through evening traffic.

“You working later?” I asked.

He coughed. “Could… probably take the rest of the day, actually. If something came up.”

“Good.” I watched a cyclist weave between two buses and disappear. “I’ll call you in a couple of hours. If you want.”

The if you want was professional courtesy. He agreed with the energy of a dog that had just heard its going for a walk, and I looked out the window to keep from smiling at him too directly.

He pulled over two blocks past a junction I recognized. I checked the cross street against the map I’d memorized, confirmed the distance to Faith’s building was far enough to be unremarkable, and gathered my bag from the footwell.

“A few hours,” I said, stepping out.

“I’ll be ready.” He’d straightened up in his seat. Both hands on the wheel, practically eager.

I shut the door and waved once without turning back, already moving.

The evening air had sharpened since earlier, damp from somewhere further west. I kept my pace unhurried, just another woman walking southeast, nothing in particular. The bag hung from my shoulder. Around the next corner, out of any sightline back to the cab, I slid my hand inside it, touched the ring, and pushed the bag into storage. The strap vanished from my shoulder mid-step.

Faith’s building was twelve minutes away.

The cold from the cab hadn’t moved. It sat at the base of my sternum, not quite pain, not quite fear, something with neither label that my body apparently intended to keep there regardless of my preferences on the matter.

I crossed at the lights with the pedestrian signal and didn’t examine it further.