Damp first. The alley behind the tannery held onto the day's heat like something reluctant to let go of it, humid enough that Zelene felt her borrowed dress sticking to the small of her back before they'd even found what they were looking for. Somewhere close, the river's smell mixed with the sharper tang of curing leather, chemical and animal both, thick enough to catch in the back of her throat.
Focus. Not the smell. The wall.
Beside her, Finn adjusted the shawl draped over his shoulders for what had to be the tenth time since they'd left the others, tugging the fabric a little higher to hide the line of his jaw. His hair — longer than most men wore it, which had turned out to be a small mercy — hung loose around his face now instead of tied back, and someone, probably Corvin, had shown him how to soften his gait into something less like a boy trying too hard and more like a person who'd simply always walked that way.
It was, Zelene had to admit, unsettlingly convincing.
Please let it stay that way.
"There," Finn murmured, voice pitched carefully soft, nodding toward a weathered board nailed beside a side door, three streets past where Old Fen had told them to look. Torn notices layered over each other in mismatched ink, most of them ordinary — a lost dog, a room for let — until one, fresher than the rest, caught the low lantern light.
WORKERS WANTED — WOMEN ONLYROOM & BOARD PROVIDEDINQUIRE WITHIN, NO QUESTIONS ASKED
No questions asked. Something cold slid down Zelene's spine reading it, the particular dread of a sentence built to sound generous while meaning the opposite.
"That's it," she breathed. "Has to be."
"Feels like it's trying too hard not to sound suspicious," Finn said, his voice still low, still careful, even here where no one could hear them. "Which somehow makes it worse."
Her pulse had already climbed, quick and shallow under her ribs. She kept her hands still at her sides through sheer stubbornness, running through it once more in her head — hood forward, voice low, don't flinch, don't stare too long at his hands or his face, act like a woman with nowhere else to go — and beside her, Finn was doing the same thing in his own way, she realized, his shoulders drawn in slightly, chin angled down, every motion smaller and softer than the boy she knew.
If they look too closely at either of us, this is over before it starts.
"Ready?" she whispered.
Finn nodded once, exhaled, and knocked.
The door opened almost immediately — too immediately, like someone had been waiting just behind it.
The man filling the doorway made Zelene's breath catch before she could stop it. He was enormous, shoulders nearly spanning the frame, forearms thick as some men's thighs, a face set into the particular blankness of someone paid to look unbothered no matter what walked up to his door.
"Help you," he said. Not quite a question.
"We heard you're looking for workers," Zelene said, keeping her voice low and even, careful not to let it shake. "We don't have anywhere else to be tonight."
The man's eyes moved over them both, slow and assessing.
Don't look too long at him. Don't look too long at Finn either — that's worse.
His gaze lingered on Finn a beat too long, and Zelene's stomach dropped, cold and sudden, certain for one terrible second that he'd already seen through it — the wrong set of shoulders, the wrong angle of jaw, something small and wrong that gave the whole thing away.
Please. Please don't look any closer.
But the man only grunted, apparently satisfied, his attention already sliding past to take in the rest of the alley behind them before returning inside.
"Name?" he asked, looking to Zelene first.
"Lynn," she said.
His eyes shifted to Finn.
For one endless second, nobody spoke. Zelene felt her own heartbeat pounding somewhere in her throat, loud enough she was half convinced he could hear it too.
Say something. Anything. Don't let the silence be the thing that gives you away.
"Wren," Finn said finally — soft, quiet, the name pulled straight from the girl waiting back with Nym, chosen, Zelene suspected, because it was the first thing that came to mind under pressure and he hadn't had time to invent anything better.
The man grunted again, unbothered, and stepped back from the doorway. "Come in, then. Master wants to see anyone new himself."
Master. The word settled wrong in Zelene's chest, heavy and deliberate, exactly the kind of word men used when they wanted obedience dressed up as respect.
They stepped over the threshold together, and the door shut behind them with a heavier sound than Zelene expected, final in a way that made her pulse spike again.
The inside smelled worse than the alley — tannin and something staler underneath it, the air close and warm despite the door they'd just come through. A narrow hall stretched ahead, lit by a single lantern, doors closed on either side, utterly silent in a way that felt wrong for a building supposedly full of workers.
No voices. No footsteps. Nothing.
Zelene glanced sideways at Finn — meant to catch his eye, some silent confirmation that he felt the same wrongness she did — and the movement was the last clear thing she registered.
Something struck the back of her skull, sharp and sudden, pain blooming white and total before the world tilted sideways beneath her. She heard Finn make a short, strangled sound somewhere close, cut off almost as soon as it started.
Should have—
The thought never finished. The floor came up to meet her, and then there was nothing at all.