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The place was larger than it looked from outside. Of course it was. Filth businesses often hid depth where honest buildings hid windows. The entry hall opened into two long side corridors and one central room where rough tables, ledgers, chain loops, and holding screens turned human misery into managed inventory.

The first thing Lily saw was a child in a side cage looking through the slats with the exhausted blankness of someone who had cried beyond sound already.

The second thing she saw was a woman in a clean dark dress standing near the central desk, fingers stained with ink, nails trimmed like a clerk, her posture was calm like a manager. She did not hold a branding rod. She did not swing a chain. She did something worse.

She held the contract seals.

The woman’s voice carried across the room with bored authority. "Two girls go to the east lane. Mark them as voluntary debt settlement. If they scream, gag them. If they bite, break teeth. Do not waste medicine."

That voice was not forced. It was practiced. It belonged here.

The third thing Lily saw was blood on the woman’s sleeve. A thin smear, it was dry at the edge, like it had been wiped there and left without care.

It was wrong blood. Bad blood. The kind Sekhmet had told her to choose.

Not because it tasted better.

Because it deserved her mouth.

The room erupted before thought fully caught up.

Vera and Vela split left and right, blades and blood-fast movement turning the side guards into falling shapes before they found formation. Sekhmet hit the center and became exactly what such dens feared most. Not justice. Not law. A stronger predator with rules of his own.

A handler grabbed the hot branding iron and swung it.

Sekhmet caught his wrist. The skin sizzled. Then the man screamed.

Sekhmet broke the arm and drove him across the desk hard enough to split wood.

Bat Bat vanished into the rafters after kicking a key ring from a fleeing runner’s belt. It spun once through the air. Vela caught it without looking.

Lily did not chase a man. She moved toward the woman.

The woman turned at last, her irritation sharpening into interest when she saw Lily’s dress and Lily’s face.

"A buyer’s daughter," the woman said, smiling thinly. "You are lost?"

That smile was the woman’s last real mistake.

Lily crossed the space between them before the sentence had fully died.

The woman snapped a hand up. A hidden knife slid out from her sleeve with a soft metallic whisper. Her movement was clean. It was skilled. She was not a helpless clerk. She was the kind of human predator who survived by looking harmless until the moment she was inside your ribs.

Lily slipped inside the blade line. Her hand struck the woman’s wrist. There was a crack sound heard by all.

The knife dropped with a ting.

The woman’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in anger.

"You think you can..."

Lily struck the side of her throat. It was not to kill. But to disrupt her breath. It was to steal her rhythm.

The woman gagged and stumbled half a step, and Lily felt it, the pulse under skin, the living blood moving like a secret she could now hear.

Her hunger rose. Not like it rose with Sekhmet.

Sekhmet’s blood was authority and relief and bond, the kind of warmth that made the body want to cling. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

This was different. This was her first human feeding.

Her first time biting a living human throat and knowing the person could scream, the person could plead, the person could die, and the person could carry fear and meaning in every drop.

For a heartbeat Lily hesitated, not because she lacked courage, but because the reality was loud.

The blood was loud. The smell was loud.

The part of her that used to be only Lily felt small under the weight of what she was about to do.

Then she remembered the cages. The child locked inside. The sentence about breaking teeth. The way the woman had spoken about girls like it was some inventory item. Not a human being.

Lily’s jaw tightened.

"Yes. This one."

Her fangs came down.

The woman’s eyes widened just before Lily bit her. The bite was precise, not savage. A clean puncture under the jawline where the pulse hit strongest.

The woman jerked and tried to fight, but Lily’s grip on her collar was iron now, not because she was stronger than every Rank four in the world, but because hunger made her focused in a way normal emotion never did.

Warm blood burst into Lily’s mouth. And Lily’s body reacted like a starving animal finding water in a desert.

Her throat swallowed without permission. Her tongue tasted copper and salt and something else underneath, not magic, not romance, but the flavor of a human life shaped by cruelty.

It was not the taste itself that shook her. It was the feeling.

The way the blood slid into her and her hunger quieted instantly, like a screaming child suddenly soothed by a hand over its mouth.

The relief was terrifying. The relief made her want more. Her instincts whispered.

’Take it all. Drain her. End her. Feel the full silence after.’

Lily’s fingers trembled. Her eyes widened slightly.

For the first time, she understood what Sekhmet meant when he said hunger could lie. Hunger could convince you that killing was calm. That draining was peace. That the end of another heartbeat was the only way to stop your own throat from burning.

Lily forced herself to count.

One swallow. Two... Three...

Her chest loosened. Her vision sharpened. Her hearing sharpened.

She could hear the woman’s heart hammering against her fangs like a trapped animal.

Ba dum. Ba dum. Ba dum.

The woman tried to claw at Lily’s arm, her nails were digging, it was a desperate move from her.

Lily drank one more time, then she stopped.