Kol was waiting by the side entrance when I arrived. He didn't speak. Just handed me a black jacket with no markings and motioned to the truck idling by the curb.
Inside, crates lined the walls—neatly packed, professionally sealed. You wouldn't know they held anything illegal.
No logos. No slogans.
Just product.
Just weight.
Just another job.
I climbed in.
The door slammed shut behind me.
And we were off.
The van was colder than I expected. Not freezing, but still the kind of cold that settled into your fingers and stayed there, especially when you didn't move. I kept my arms tucked close to my body, eyes fixed on the interior of the truck, watching shadows ripple across the crates as we drove.
Kol sat up front with two others. They spoke in low tones, occasionally laughing, occasionally murmuring instructions I couldn't quite make out. I didn't ask questions. I wasn't here to talk.
I was here to learn. To listen. To survive.
The roads blurred past the narrow window. Streetlights gave way to residential flickers. Neon signs. Narrow alleys. And then we slowed.
Kol slid the side door open halfway and exchanged a package with a man waiting at the curb. Quick. Efficient. The man didn't linger. Didn't speak. Just nodded and walked off into the dark.
We drove on.
Eventually we pulled into what looked like a back-alley community—low buildings, broken fences, cluttered playground equipment rotting in small yards. The engine idled while Kol stepped out to speak with someone at the gate.
And that's when I saw them.
Three children.
No older than Mira.
Huddled together on a bench near the corner of a fenced-off lot. One had no shoes. Another clutched a plastic bag that looked like it used to hold candy. Their cheeks were red from the wind, eyes big and tired.
One of them laughed—thin and cracked—and the sound went straight through my ribs like a blade.
They weren't crying. They weren't even begging. Just... sitting there. Existing. Waiting for something, or someone, or nothing at all.
Something in me shattered.
Mira.
I could see her in every single one of them.
The tiny stubborn chin. The wide blinking eyes. The way they leaned into each other like they'd forgotten what safety was supposed to feel like.
Nyx stirred in the back of my mind.
We should be with her, she whispered.
I gripped the edge of the seat. Hard. "I know."
We could have stayed. We could have said no.
"And they would've shut the shelter down."
Silence.
But the ache didn't ease.
I leaned forward slightly, watching the children until the van jolted into motion again. Until the corner disappeared. Until the night swallowed the bench and the laughter and the memory it left behind.
I missed her.
Gods, I missed her.
And I missed him too.
Nine.
His stillness. His soft, questioning eyes. The way he sat like he was always waiting for permission to exist. The way his hand had hesitantly touched mine in yesterday's session—small, warm, barely-there.
He didn't speak much. But he didn't need to.
You left him, Nyx murmured.
"I didn't have a choice," I whispered back.
You did.
The words stung.
I stared down at my hands. They didn't feel like mine anymore. Too steady. Too practiced. The kind of hands that belonged to someone who could calmly ride in a van full of drugs while children sat barefoot in the cold.
The kind of hands that didn't tremble when they watched their mate being treated like a doll.
What was I becoming?
"Second stop's ahead," Kol called from the front. "Rhea, you good back there?"
I blinked, realizing too late I hadn't answered aloud. "Yeah," I said, voice flat. "Fine."
The van slowed again. Another alley. Another figure in the dark. Another faceless exchange that took less than two minutes.
More product offloaded. More silence.
I didn't want to do this again.
Not because it was dangerous.
But because it was so, so easy.
No gun to my head. No chains on my wrists. Just a quiet, indifferent system that swallowed people whole.
Nine was in that system.
Still kneeling. Still smiling when told. Still submitting to hands that had no right to touch him.
He hadn't known he could say no. Hadn't even known what no meant.
I wondered if he'd noticed I hadn't come today. If he was waiting in that room, tracing his fingers along the edge of the wall, wondering what he'd done wrong.
"He doesn't understand absence," Nyx whispered. "Only rejection."
My throat tightened.
I thought of the last time I'd seen him—eyes tracking my every movement like I was something sacred. Like I was a lighthouse in the fog.
I wasn't.
I was part of the fog now.
The truck jerked forward again, rattling the crates around me.
I leaned my head back against the cool metal wall and closed my eyes.
Just for a second.
Just long enough to pretend I was somewhere else.
Back at the shelter. Holding Mira's hand. Watching Nine try to mimic a smile with that confused, almost heartbreaking gentleness.
Back before the choices got too heavy to carry.
Back before survival meant complicity.
Back before I lost myself to all of this.
The van didn't stop again for a long time.
But the ache in my chest didn't stop at all.