The scream wasn't loud. That was the first thing.

It was the kind of scream that knows it has an audience — controlled at the edges, shaped for a room. I had heard real screams in trauma bays, sounds that came from somewhere below language, and this wasn't that. This was a performance with good acoustics.

Milan looked down at her side, where the ivory silk had bloomed red, and her face did something careful and practiced. Her knees buckled just enough. One hand flew to her mouth.

"Something's — there's something in it —"

I crossed the room. Surgeon's instinct, not friendship. I got my hands on her before I thought about it, checking the wound — shallow, a half-dozen punctures along her ribs, nothing arterial, nothing that would actually matter. She was bleeding the way you bleed when you've planned to bleed.

She was already texting with her free hand.

Lucian arrived in eleven minutes. I know because I counted. I stood by the north-facing window while a junior fitter pressed a cloth against Milan's side, and I counted the minutes the way I count compressions — something to do with my hands while the rest of me went very still.

He came through the door already looking at her.

Milan turned her face into his chest before he could cross the room, and she said my name once, quietly, into his collar.

"Aspyn was alone with it."

I watched him hear it. I watched his shoulders settle. I watched his face go the specific blank that I had always read as composure and was only now understanding was something else — a decision being made fast, behind glass, where I couldn't reach it.

He looked at me.

Three years. Three years of his face, and I had never seen it aimed at me like that. Like I was a variable he was solving for.

"How many?" he said.

"How many what?"

"Needles." His voice was flat. Careful. The voice he used for board members and bad news. "How many needles in the lining."

"Lucian, I didn't —"

"How many."

I stopped. I looked at him for a long moment. He didn't look away.

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't put them there."

Milan made a small sound against his chest. He put his hand on the back of her head, slow and automatic, and kept his eyes on me.

"Take them out," he said.

I heard the words. I understood them grammatically. I waited for the rest of the sentence — the part where he said *with the tools on the table,* or *get Renata back in here,* or anything that would make it mean something other than what it meant.

No other part came.

"No gloves," he said. "No tools. I want to see your hands."

I think I said his name. I'm not sure. What I remember is the quality of the light — still, northern, indifferent — and the gown on its stand with the blood drying brown at the hem, and my own hands at my sides, already knowing what they were about to do.

I crossed the room. I crouched at the lining.

The first needle went in under my thumbnail and I didn't make a sound. I have never made a sound when my hands hurt. It is the one skill I have never been able to unlearn, the thing trauma surgery does to you that nobody warns you about — you stop registering your own pain as information worth reporting.

I worked along the hem. The needles were set deep, threaded into the basting, angled so they'd catch on skin and not on silk. Someone had been careful. Someone had taken time.

I kept my hands steady.

Lucian stood four feet away and watched. He didn't move. He didn't speak. Milan had her face turned into his shoulder and her eyes closed, but she wasn't crying anymore — I could see that from the floor. She was very still, the way you're still when you're listening.

Twenty. Twenty-five. My fingers were slick. I wiped them on my jeans and kept going.

At thirty-two I looked up at him. Just once. I don't know what I was looking for — some crack in the glass, some version of him that was watching this and couldn't stand it. The version that had knelt on my kitchen floor and pressed his forehead to mine and called me the only real thing he had.

He looked back at me and said nothing.

I looked back down.

Forty-one. I laid them in a row on the floor, small and bright, and pressed my palms flat against the cool hardwood — my old trick, my stupid grounding trick — and breathed.

"Good," Lucian said. His voice hadn't changed register once. "Now you understand consequences."

I stayed on the floor for another moment. Not because I couldn't stand. Because I was deciding something, down there in the north light with my blood on his fiancée's floor, and I needed the decision to be exact.

I stood up. I didn't look at Milan. I didn't look at him.

I walked to the door, and I left, and I did not say a single word, because there was nothing left that needed saying.