The lobby of the Moonlight Sonata transformed, in the hour before the meeting, into something that could only be described as organized chaos.
The suits had been Julius’s idea, naturally, because Julius approached every occasion with the conviction that it deserved a theme, and the theme he’d landed on was "unified front of menacing elegance," which in practical terms meant that everyone was currently in various states of open warfare with each other.
Willow and Nara had started it. They always started it. This time the inciting incident was a single shoe—Willow’s, apparently, though Nara’s position was that possession constituted a compelling counter-argument—and within four minutes the disagreement had escalated into a foot chase around the ticket stand that knocked over two candelabras, one decorative vase Julius had very specific feelings about.
"Those are mine," Willow snarled, making a grab for the shoe as Nara vaulted over the back of the lobby’s velvet chaise.
"Your foot isn’t in it!" Nara announced from the other side, holding it above her head. "Unclaimed territory!"
"My foot was in it thirty seconds ago—"
"Then you should’ve moved faster."
Across the lobby, Brutus was conducting his own private war against his suit jacket, which had been cut for a person with two arms and a different understanding of what shoulders were supposed to do.
His arm had found the wrong hole somehow—a geometric outcome that shouldn’t have been possible and yet there it was—and now the jacket had rotated forty-five degrees around his torso and was refusing to rotate back. Every attempt to correct it only tightened the situation further.
Meanwhile Grisha drifted, with the unhurried predatory patience she applied to most things she wanted, toward Felix, who had been minding his own business.
She was leaning down toward him, which given the height differential meant she was practically folded in half. "You’ve got a pretty mouth," she said, the words rolling out with the casual delivery of someone commenting on the weather. "Wonder what else it’s good for."
Felix’s face had gone through approximately six colors in rapid succession and was currently attempting a seventh.
His eyes were the size of dinner plates. His hands, which had been resting calmly at his sides, had migrated upward to press flat against his own chest in the involuntary self-protective posture of a person whose nervous system had raised several urgent flags simultaneously.
The reason for this was obvious, because Grisha’s suit pants, which had fit fine twenty minutes ago, were now making structural commitments that the fabric had not been designed to honor. The strain was impressive in the way that natural disasters are impressive—large, undeniable, and not interested in your personal comfort level.
"Relax," she said, placing her hand on his shoulder and licking her lips. "I’d be gentle. Probably." Felix made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, wasn’t quite a squeak, but existed somewhere in the distressed frequency between both—then turned and sprinted directly across the lobby, placing himself next to Llyod as though he were selecting blast cover.
Nara had gotten onto the chaise and Willow had followed her onto it. Both of them were now grappling across the cushions in a tangle of limbs with the single shoe caught between them like a disputed treaty document.
Nara had both hands on it. Willow had one hand on it and the other braced against Nara’s face, pushing, which Nara was ignoring with impressive commitment.
Brutus had somehow made the jacket worse, the collar now migrated up around one ear.
Llyod leaned back against the ticket stand, his arms folded, watching all of it with the soft, patient sigh of a man who’d long since made peace with the fact that the world was not going to organize itself to his preferences.
Felix stood beside him, small and neatly pressed, watching the group with wide eyes. He’d been assigned lobby guard duty with Llyod for the evening, a fact he’d received with the quiet acceptance he applied to most things Julius decided for him.
Julius drew a breath so controlled and deliberate it was almost its own performance—the intake of a man choosing, consciously, to weaponize restraint—and then his theatrical voice came out of its separate register and filled every corner of the lobby with the clarion authority of someone who had genuinely, finally, had enough.
"Enough!"
It landed like a dropped anvil. Nara froze mid-gloat. Willow’s hand stopped clawing at Nara’s face. Grisha’s expression didn’t change. Brutus stopped trying to fix the jacket, which at least prevented it from getting worse.
Julius let the silence hold for as long as it needed to.
"Nara," he said, in the measured voice of a man reading from a list he’d mentally compiled over the last fifteen minutes. "Give Willow her shoe. Willow. Put it on your foot and stop giving her death threats. Grisha," He turned. Grisha met his eyes with perfect innocence. Julius held her gaze for one long beat. "Leave Felix alone."
"I was paying him a compliment."
Julius merely sighed, deciding not to contest that statement.
"And Brutus—" He paused, looked at the jacket situation with fresh eyes, and then crossed the lobby in four steps and fixed it with two precise adjustments and a sharp tug, the way someone fixes something they couldn’t bear to look at for a second longer. Brutus blinked. The jacket sat correctly on his shoulders for the first time all evening.
Julius returned to his position by the front door.
"We walk in as one," he continued. "We sit as one. We do not escalate anything unless Loona escalates it first. Does everyone understand, or does someone need me to raise my voice again? Because I will. I’ll do it right now. I have no reservations about it."
The room assembled itself into something approximating order. I grinned at all of it, straightening my own cuffs as the scene unfolded before me.
I’d grown quiet fond of my dress in the specific way you grow fond of armor you’ve been issued—it fit the role, it fit the city, and frankly it fit me in ways the mirror confirmed.
But there was something about the black suit that sat differently on my shoulders, something that felt less like a costume and more like a statement. Sharp lapels, clean lines, the kind of cut that said I took the trouble of arriving at this meeting looking like a threat without needing to announce it.
I liked the change of pace.
Moments later we set off, moving through the theater’s front doors and out into the night air of the mid-slum alley that separated the Moonlight Sonata from its neighbor.
The distance was short—barely fifty paces—but Madame Seraphine’s brothel had a presence that made those fifty paces feel like crossing a threshold between different categories of space.
The building announced itself through atmosphere before aesthetics. Black stone, deep and absorptive. Green accents ran through the architecture like veins—carved into the window frames, threaded through the iron of the fence, glowing faintly in the lettering above the entrance where the establishment’s name sat in script I’d already filed away.
The Midnight Verdant.
From the outside it wore its decay openly—cracked stonework, a gate with one hinge older than patience, window glass that had gone slightly opaque with grime. The kind of building that read as abandoned to anyone passing without reason to look twice.
However, the outside was a lie. A considered, maintained, deliberately projected lie.
The doors opened before we reached them, swinging inward with mechanical precision and absolutely no one visible to have opened them. Smoke rolled out from the gap, dark and fragrant—something sweet under something bitter, incense layered over something older and less classifiable.
Julius beamed. His face lit with the pure unguarded delight of a man in the presence of dramatic craftsmanship, and he clasped his hands in front of him like he’d been given an unexpected gift. Brutus glanced down at me with a sturdy expression.
I nodded once.
We moved in as a group.
The change in atmosphere hit before my eyes adjusted—a shift in temperature, in pressure, in the particular quality of air that carried too many things dissolved in it.
The space was vast, dark, and deliberately, architecturally gothic. Black marble floors, veined in deep green that caught the candlelight and pulsed with it.
The candles themselves—hundreds of them, distributed across iron chandeliers, wall sconces, and candelabras clustered on surfaces throughout—burned green, actual green, chemical, steady, and utterly wrong in the way that made the shadows they cast fall at angles that didn’t quite match the light sources.
The walls were carved oak, dark and dense, covered in panels depicting scenes I allowed my eyes to slide over without stopping on any single detail for too long.
Draping black silk hung between the panels, pooling on the floor at the base of the walls. The ceiling was high enough to be dark, the green light failing to reach it.
And then there were the patrons.
The lobby held perhaps thirty of them, occupying the furniture, the alcoves, the spaces between—nobles by their dress, powerful by their bearing, the kind of wealth that didn’t need to announce itself because it had never once in its existence been in a room where it wasn’t the most significant thing present.
Until tonight, possibly.
They were doing what the patrons of the Midnight Verdant came to do, and they were doing it with savage, unrestrained brutality, right there in the open like animals claiming fresh meat. No discretion. No shame. Just the wet, violent symphony of flesh being used and broken.
A silver-haired elf lord had a young fox-eared slave bent over an ornate chaise, pounding into her with vicious, bone-jarring thrusts that slammed her hips against the wood hard enough to split skin.
Her face was mashed into the cushions, blood trickling from her bitten lip and a split eyebrow as she whimpered brokenly with every savage drive. He gripped her tail like a leash, yanking it back hard enough to make her spine arch unnaturally while he snarled and rutted deeper, his balls slapping against her with obscene force.
Nearby, two burly human nobles shared another slave on her knees. One brutally fucked her throat, his thick cock bulging visibly in her neck as she gagged and choked, tears and thick strings of drool pouring down her chin.
The other rammed into her from behind, his hips slapping against her ass with enough force to leave deep red bruises blooming across her skin. They laughed as they used her like a toy, passing her back and forth, occasionally slapping her face or punching her ribs when she faltered.
Blood had found its way to the marble floor in at least three different places—fresh crimson smears from split lips, torn cunts, and battered bodies. One slave lay sprawled near a pillar, cum leaking from her gaping holes while a patron casually stomped on her stomach, making her vomit and curl in agony.
The sounds coming from the rooms off the lobby’s sides were not sounds that a person’s brain filed quietly—they were guttural screams, meaty impacts of fists on flesh, the wet ripping of bodies being violated beyond their limits, and the wet, rhythmic squelching of cocks destroying unwilling holes. These were the kinds of noises that arrived and stayed, burrowing into your skull like parasites.
One door stood slightly ajar to my left. I didn’t intend to look. I looked anyway.
The peripheral pull of motion dragged my eyes sideways. Inside, a massive orc patron had a trembling rabbit beastfolk slave strapped to a blood-soaked table. Her left arm had already been hacked off at the elbow with a jagged cleaver that now rested beside her severed limb.
She screamed hoarsely as he sawed through the bone of her right thigh with deliberate, grating strokes, blood spraying in rhythmic pulses with every desperate beat of her heart. Her eyes were wide with animal terror, mouth stretched in a silent scream after her voice had given out. The orc grinned, his cock hard and dripping as he worked, clearly savoring the way her body jerked and convulsed with each cut.
I tore my gaze away, slamming a mental door on the image, but it was already burned behind my eyes—something I would be carrying for a long time.
Nara walked beside me with her ears perked, her tail twitching with a light, unbothered rhythm, taking in the room the way she took in most rooms—with cheerful, untroubled presence, as though the world’s various horrors were simply additional features of the landscape she moved through.
Willow’s face had settled into the specific blankness of her demonic nature, expression flat and uninvested, the particular calm that wasn’t peace but rather the absence of a human’s involuntary response. She’d seen things like this before, in whatever shape her long existence had taken, and she’d filed it somewhere that didn’t touch her face.
Julius had gone pale. Not dramatically—he wasn’t performing it—just the quiet physical response of a man whose body had registered something his theatrical instincts didn’t have a framework for. He kept his bearing, kept his chin up, but the color had left his cheeks with genuine honesty.
Grisha snorted. A single sound, short and flat, the auditory equivalent of a shrug.
Brutus was looking at the ceiling. With focus. Sustained, deliberate focus. His jaw was set, and his remaining hand had closed into a fist at his side, which it did when he was holding something in rather than expressing it.
I kept my face even and my pace steady, because I was the one who’d chosen to walk through this door, which made me the one responsible for what happened next on the other side of it, and that required a version of me that was operating rather than reacting.
At the far end of the lobby, a grand staircase rose in a single sweeping curve, black marble banister, green silk runner up the center of each step. The architecture framed the top of it the way a stage frames an entrance.
Madame Seraphine stood at the top.
She had the quality that very specific kinds of dangerous people have—the quality of someone for whom the space around them has reorganized itself by agreement, every sight line in the room arriving at her as though gravity had been renegotiated in her favor.
She looked down at us with an expression that wasn’t unwelcoming nor warm. Elvina appeared at her side a moment later, stepping into view with quiet diligence.
Her gothic clothing had been restored—the structured dark pieces, the detailing, everything back to the immaculate version of itself I remembered from the tower.
Her hair was still down, falling around her face in a tangled dark curtains. The cuts on her cheek were recent. The bruise along her jaw was three days old by the coloring.
Our eyes met across the length of the lobby and the full height of the staircase.
Hers went wide for a second—a flicker of something that might’ve been relief, might’ve been alarm—and then narrowed to a gaze that was flat, serious, and steady, a controlled expression only held by someone executing a role and not permitting themselves the luxury of anything else.
Mine didn’t shift in the slightest.
"Welcome," Madame Seraphine said, and her voice rich and measured, each word placed with meticulous care. "I’m so pleased you could join us." She turned with unhurried grace. "Come. My private lounge is upstairs. We have quite a bit to discuss."