Lottie began to change.
Not in ways you could name aloud.
Not in ways you could cut clean.
It was in the smaller fractures.
The little splinters you only noticed when it was already too late.
The way she watched Carmen now — not like a soldier awaiting orders, but like a sinner kneeling at the altar, waiting for absolution with blood already smeared across her lips.
The way her voice softened whenever she spoke to Julian, eager for the scraps of approval he threw with the carelessness of a man tossing bones to a dog he already planned to drown.
The way she carried the knife even when she didn't need it — thumb always resting along the hilt, a silent promise pressed against her own pulse.
It was slow.
It was inevitable.
It was perfect.
Carmen let it happen.
She didn't correct Lottie when she began to mimic her — the tilt of her head, the way she paused mid-sentence to let silence do the wounding, the way she smoked like she was setting the air itself on fire.
She didn't pull away when Lottie's clothes grew darker, sharper, stitched with the quiet violence of a girl who finally understood that beauty was a weapon too.
She didn't speak when Lottie began looking at her like she was the last star burning above a graveyard.
Because Carmen knew something Lottie hadn't yet learned:
Love is just another infection.
And Carmen had already prepared the cure.
Hargreave made his move that same week.
He planted stories in the papers — lies polished to a feverish shine.
A vigilante group.
A secret society.
An uprising of the broken.
Anything desperate enough to force them into the open.
Anything loud enough to shatter the quiet coil of the spiral.
Carmen read the papers over a cracked cup of black coffee, her fingers tapping a slow rhythm against the table's edge.
She barely smiled.
Julian barked a soft, sharp laugh from across the room.
They knew exactly what Hargreave was trying to do.
And they knew exactly why it would fail.
Desperation always made people noisy.
And noise made people bleed.
The next assignment wasn't a kill.
Not exactly.
Carmen slid a photograph across the table.
A banker.
A father.
A man whose clean fingernails had buried more bodies than any knife ever could.
Lottie looked up from the picture, her young face pinched with the hunger she hadn't learned how to hide yet.
"You want me to kill him?" she asked, almost breathless.
Carmen shook her head slowly, a wolf patient with a new cub.
"No," she said, voice slick as velvet pulled tight across a blade.
"I want you to ruin him."
Lottie blinked.
"How?"
Julian leaned over, tapping the photo with two fingers, casual as a man ordering wine.
"You take everything he loves," he said. "And you leave him breathing just long enough to miss it."
Lottie moved fast.
Too fast.
She followed his children from school.
Whispered poison into his wife's ear through anonymous letters scrawled in a child's messy hand.
Paid a servant to murmur false sins into the waiting mouths of neighbors who wanted to believe the worst.
By week's end, the house was silent as a tomb.
The banker sat on the stoop, head in his hands, the ruins of his perfect life curling around him like smoke from a fire he couldn't even see yet.
Across the street, Lottie stood soaked in rain, smiling like the child of a vengeful god.
Carmen watched from the window of a hired car.
Julian lounged in the passenger seat, flipping a silver coin in lazy arcs through the dim air.
"She's quick," he said.
Carmen didn't look away from the wreckage.
"Too quick."
Julian smiled, a sharp, empty thing.
"She thinks she's winning."
Carmen exhaled smoke through her nose.
"Let her," she murmured.
Back at the flat, Lottie paced like a thing with too many teeth and nowhere left to bite.
She dropped onto the couch beside Carmen without asking permission, a puppy too stupid to know the leash had already snapped around its neck.
"I did it," she whispered.
Carmen didn't look at her.
Didn't touch her.
Didn't praise her.
She stared into the fire and said only, "Yes."
The word hit harder than any slap could have.
Lottie wilted without understanding why.
Shifted closer.
Clung tighter.
Julian watched from the corner, sipping whiskey, his eyes half-lidded, his smile thin as a knife's edge.
It was never about love.
It was never about loyalty.
It was always about need.
And need made better corpses than any knife ever could.
That night, Carmen stood at the window again, smoke curling from the cigarette trapped between two fingers.
The city outside howled — a wounded, breaking thing too stupid to know it was already dying.
Julian pressed against her back, his mouth brushing the side of her throat.
His hands slid under the hem of her shirt, fingers tracing the old scars he loved best — the ones no light ever touched.
He kissed the hollow of her shoulder, slow and reverent.
"She'll beg soon," he murmured against her skin.
Carmen smiled faintly.
"And when she does," she said, her voice quieter than the grave, "we'll teach her the difference between need and worth."
Because monsters didn't mourn.
They waited.
They sharpened.
They smiled while the world burned.
And Lottie —poor, sweet, doomed Lottie —was already kindling stacked at their feet.
Waiting for the match.