Chapter 9: The Physician's Escape
The door swung shut behind her with a sound like a coffin lid sealing.
One moment Nadia was staring at the huddled, trembling form of Physician Corbin in the greasy lamplight of the tavern, the next a hard arm locked around her waist and a damp, stinking hand clamped over her mouth. She was yanked backward off her feet. Finn’s shout—a raw, truncated roar—was cut off by the thick wood. She heard the meaty thud of a body hitting the door from the other side, once, twice, and the splintering of old timber.
Then she was moving, dragged stumbling through absolute blackness. The air changed instantly from the tavern’s fug of fish and ale to the cold, wet stone smell of a buried place. The hand over her mouth tasted of salt, river mud, and iron.
“Quiet, little rabbit,” a voice grunted in her ear, hot and wheezing. It wasn’t Corbin’s educated tone. This was coarser, older. “Just a walk. Be good and you might see the sky again.”
Her mind, white with panic for three heartbeats, slammed into a sharp, desperate focus. Be good. She had been ‘good’ her entire life. Silent. Compliant. It had bought her nothing but stitches and solitude.
She went limp.
It was a gamble. Her dead weight was harder to haul. The man cursed, his grip shifting, the arm around her waist loosening a fraction to readjust. That was all she needed.
She didn’t try to bite the hand—it was too large, too strong. Instead, she threw her head back with all her strength. The back of her skull connected with his face. There was a wet crunch, a howl of pain, and the hand fell away. She stumbled forward, hitting a slimy wall, her hands scraping on rough brick.
“You bitch!”
She didn’t look back. She ran. The darkness was total, a physical thing. She kept one hand on the cold wall, her feet slipping on uneven, wet stone. Behind her, heavy, furious footsteps splashed in pursuit. A thin seam of light appeared ahead—a faint, grayish outline around what might be a door or a turn. She aimed for it, her breath sobbing in her throat.
The light wasn’t daylight. It was a single, guttering tallow candle in a rusty sconce, stuck in a junction where her tunnel met another. She skidded to a halt. Left or right? Both passages swallowed the weak light after a few yards.
The splashing footsteps grew louder. He was gaining.
Right. She went right, for no reason other than it seemed to slope slightly upward. The candlelight died behind her, and the blackness returned, thicker, a suffocating velvet. She forced herself to slow, to place her feet carefully. Making noise now was a death sentence.
She stopped, pressing herself into a shallow recess, ears straining. The footsteps stopped too. He was listening.
“Can’t see down here, can you, milady?” his voice echoed, bouncing off the wet walls. It was a taunt, but also a confession. He was blind in this dark too. “I know these warrens. You don’t. You’re just meat in a pipe.”
Nadia held her breath. The malnourishment that had left her slight now worked in her favor; she barely displaced the air. She could hear his ragged breathing, the drip of water somewhere.
“Corbin talked too much,” the man continued, his voice moving, cautious. He was feeling his way along the wall opposite hers. “Sweet man with a knife, but a flapping mouth. His job was to stitch you up and keep it quiet. My job is to clean up the mess when quiet costs extra.”
A.L. The ledger. The blackmail. This was the ‘dissatisfied’ client’s solution.
A new sound filtered into the tunnel. Muffled, distant. Finn’s voice, shouting her name. He was somewhere above, in the tavern or on the docks. The sound was thin, ghostly, but it was a lifeline.
The man heard it too. He swore softly. “Time’s up, rabbit.”
His footsteps came faster, less careful. He was gambling on speed now. Nadia waited, her heart hammering against her ribs. She judged the sound, the approaching splash. As it drew level with her niche, she lunged out into the passage, shoving with all her strength against the space where his body should be.
She connected with solid muscle. He grunted, off-balance. She didn’t wait. She turned and fled back the way she had come, toward the remembered junction. Behind her, a furious roar and a massive splash—he’d fallen.
She hit the junction, the faint memory of the candle’s location her only guide. She chose left this time, running her hand along the wall. This passage was drier, the air smelling of old timber and rats. A faint draft touched her face. Airflow.
A shape loomed in the periphery of her light-starved vision—a ladder, crude rungs set into the stone, leading up to a square of slightly less profound darkness. A hatch.
She scrambled up, her worn slippers slipping on the wet wood. The hatch was heavy, a thick door reinforced with iron. She threw her shoulder against it. It didn’t budge. Locked, or barred from the outside.
Desolation washed over her. Below, she could hear the man recovering, his curses echoing closer.
Her fingers scrabbled over the surface of the hatch, searching for a latch, a keyhole, anything. They found a cold metal bolt on her side. It was stiff, rusted shut. She clawed at it, breaking nails, feeling skin tear. With a final, grating shriek, it slid back.
She shoved again. The hatch lifted an inch, spilling a sliver of murky dawn light and the smell of rot and wet hemp. It was blocked by something heavy. She pushed with the last of her strength, a desperate, silent scream tightening her throat.
The weight shifted. With a scrape, the hatch lifted. She shoved it fully open and hauled herself out, collapsing onto a floor of gritty, wet planks.
She was in a low, windowless shed crammed with mildewed fishing nets, broken crates, and barrels of tar. The heavy weight had been a sack of wet ballast stones shoved carelessly over the hatch. Dawn light seeped through gaps in the wall.
She kicked the sack back over the hatch and dragged a heavy barrel on top of it, jamming it shut. A moment later, a furious pounding thudded against the wood from below. The barrel shuddered but held.
She didn’t celebrate. She ran to the shed’s door, which was latched but not locked. She slid it open a crack.
She was on the docks, but a different section. Larger warehouses, silent and looming, replaced the taverns. The river stretched out, gray and slow. And there, fifty yards away, she saw Finn.
He stood on the main wharf, a stark, tense figure amidst the morning mist. Two of the Emperor’s guards were with him. He had a fisherman by the front of his tunic, speaking to him with a quiet, deadly intensity that made the man tremble. He was scanning the river, the buildings, his movements sharp with controlled panic.
She slipped out of the shed and began moving toward him, staying close to the warehouse walls. Her gown was soaked to the knees with tunnel filth, her hair had come loose, and her hands were bleeding.
Finn saw her. His entire body froze for a split second. Then he was moving, covering the distance between them in swift, long strides. He didn’t run; it was more like a predator closing in. The guards hurried after him.
He reached her, his hands coming up to grip her shoulders, his eyes scanning her for injury. “Where? How?”
“Tunnel. Under the tavern. A hatch in a storage shed,” she got out, her voice shaking. “He’s down there. He works for whoever paid Corbin. He was sent to clean up.”
Finn’s gaze flicked to the shed, then back to her face. Something fierce and unreadable flashed in his gray eyes. “Show me.”
He didn’t let go of her arm as they approached the shed. He directed the guards to flank the door. With a sharp gesture, he moved the barrel and dragged the sack aside. The pounding from below had stopped.
Finn drew the utilitarian dagger from his belt. He looked at her, a question in his eyes.
“He’s armed,” she whispered. “Knife, at least. He knows the tunnels.”
Finn nodded. He handed his dagger to her, hilt-first. It was surprisingly heavy, the steel cold. Then he pulled a second, shorter blade from his boot. “Guard the hatch. If it’s not me who comes out, use it.”
Before she could respond, he dropped silently into the darkness.
The silence that followed was worse than the pursuit. The guards stood rigid, weapons drawn, staring at the black opening. Nadia clutched the dagger, her knuckles white. The sounds from below were vague, shifting: a scrape, a muffled thud, the sound of water disturbed.
It felt like an hour. It was probably two minutes.
Finn’s hand appeared on the ladder rung, then his head emerged. His expression was grim, his jaw tight. He hauled himself out. There was a fresh, shallow cut on the back of his left hand, bleeding freely. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Gone,” he said, his voice flat. “There’s a channel down there, connects to an old drainage culvert that empties into the river. He went out that way.” He took his dagger back from Nadia, wiping the clean blade on his thigh before sheathing it. “But he left a present.”
He opened his other hand. In his palm lay a small, mud-smeared token. It was a gambling chip, made of cheap bone, stamped with a symbol: a grinning rabbit holding a stitch-needle like a sword.
“He dropped it during our… discussion,” Finn said. The cut on his hand suggested the discussion had been violent. “It’s from a place. A dive called The Laughing Rabbit, in the Coinmakers’ District. Known for surgeries without questions and bets on anything that bleeds.”
Nadia stared at the chip. The rabbit again. No longer just a cruel message, but a marker. A trail. “He wants us to follow.”
“Or he’s arrogant enough to think we won’t dare,” Finn said. He looked at the guards. “Secure Corbin. Get him to the palace dungeon. Tell my father we’re following a lead in the city.”
The guards saluted and moved off at a run toward the tavern.
Finn’s attention returned to Nadia. He took in her disheveled state, the filth, the trembling she couldn’t quite suppress. The fierce protectiveness from moments ago was banked, replaced by a weary, shared resolve.
“You’re hurt,” he stated, reaching for her torn hands.
She pulled them back, tucking them into the folds of her ruined skirt. “It’s nothing. We’re losing time.”
He studied her face for a long moment. “You fought him.”
It wasn’t a question. She gave a single, sharp nod.
A faint, almost imperceptible thing touched his eyes—not a smile, but an acknowledgment. He shrugged off his own heavy, dun-colored outer coat, revealing the plain shirt beneath, and wrapped it around her shoulders.
The coat smelled of him—leather, steel, and a faint, clean scent of linen soap beneath the river damp. It was immense, swallowing her frame, the residual warmth from his body a startling contrast to the tunnel’s chill. She pulled the rough fabric tighter, her fingers curling into it.
“Thank you,” she said, the words automatic.
He just nodded, his eyes already scanning the maze of wharves and alleys leading into the city. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’re not waiting for an escort.” He started moving, and she fell in beside him, the coat’s hem brushing the wet planks. Their pace was brisk, eating up the dockyard. The city was beginning to stir around them, shutters banging open, vendors rolling carts over cobbles with a rumble like distant thunder.
He kept her on the inside, away from the water’s edge and the shadows between buildings. The casual, protective precision of it wasn’t lost on her. “This place, The Laughing Rabbit. You know it?”
“By reputation. It’s a gutter.” He guided her around a pile of stinking fish guts. “Fight circles in the basement. Surgeons for hire in the back rooms. They’ll stitch up a stab wound for a copper, no questions, or remove a problem for a silver mark.”
“A place where a man like Corbin might find extra work,” she reasoned, her mind clicking pieces together. “Or where someone might hire a man to silence him.”
“Exactly.” He shot her a sidelong glance. “You’re thinking like a spymaster.”
“I’m thinking like someone who wants to survive the day,” she corrected quietly. Her hands, tucked inside the sleeves of his coat, throbbed. “The rabbit on the token. It’s the same symbol.”
“It’s a brand. They’re bragging.” His voice was low, edged with a cold disgust. “Turning what was done to you into a… a tavern sign. A joke for criminals.”
The raw anger in his tone, for her, was a foreign and unsettling feeling. It felt like a cornerstone shifting somewhere deep inside her. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she focused on the next step. “We’ll be recognized. A prince and his… wife. In a place like that.”
He produced two items from a pocket inside his tunic: a simple, dark woolen scarf and a nondescript, wide-brimmed traveler’s hat he must have taken from the fisherman. “Here. Pull the hood of the coat up too. Keep your head down. I’ll do the talking.”
She wrapped the scarf around her head and neck, tucking her hair away, and donned the hat. It smelled of stale sweat and river. She was now just another shadow in a dirty coat. Finn himself needed little disguise; in his plain, stained clothes, without his armor or sigils, he just looked like a large, dangerous, and tired mercenary. The scar did the rest.
The Coinmakers’ District was a cacophony of hammers on metal and shouted barter. The streets narrowed, the buildings leaning in as if exhausted. The air hung thick with the smells of hot solder, offal, and unwashed bodies. Finn moved through it with an unsettling ease, his posture subtly changing, becoming looser, more predatory.
He stopped before a doorway set below street level, marked only by a small, weather-faded sign painted with the outline of a rabbit. The paint was chipped, but the rabbit’s grin was wide, its needle-sword held high.
No laughter came from within. Just a low, persistent murmur and the clink of glass.
Finn descended the three steps, Nadia close behind. He pushed the door open.
The smell hit her first: old blood under lemon vinegar, cheap gin, and the greasy scent of fried dough. The room was hazy with pipe smoke and low-ceilinged. A handful of men, their faces hard and their clothes worn, looked up from their drinks and their hushed conversations. Their eyes, flat and assessing, slid over Finn and lingered on her for a half-second before dismissing her. A woman in his coat was property, not a threat.
The barman, a thick-necked man with a web of broken capillaries across his cheeks, wiped a tin cup with a grey cloth. “We’re closed for cleaning.”
Finn walked to the bar, the wooden floorboards creaking under his weight. He didn’t sit. He placed the bone token on the stained wood with a deliberate click.
“Looking for the owner of this,” Finn said, his voice a gravelly approximation of his normal tone. “Fellow dropped it. Owes me money.”
The barman’s eyes flicked down to the token, then back to Finn’s face. A flicker of something—caution, recognition—passed through them. “Don’t know faces for tokens. Chips get passed around.”
“This one’s special.” Finn leaned forward, just a little. “Got a rabbit with a needle. I hear this is the place for… specialized stitching.”
The room had gone quiet. Nadia stood by the door, her back to the wall, watching the other patrons. One, a thin man with nervous fingers, slowly set his drink down.
“We handle injuries,” the barman said carefully. “Accidents happen.”
“I’m not here about an accident.” Finn kept his voice conversational, but it carried in the stillness. “I’m here about a job. A specific job, from a few years back. A noble girl, down south. Required discretion. And a permanent solution.”
The barman froze. The cloth in his hand stopped moving. “You’re not here for surgery.”
“No. I’m here for the ledger. The one Corbin used. You have a copy. Or you know who does.”
A chair scraped behind them. The thin man was standing. “Corbin’s a ghost. You should be too.”
Finn didn’t turn. “He’s currently enjoying the Emperor’s hospitality. He’s singing like a canary in a mine. Your name come up yet?”
It was a bluff, but a good one. The barman’s face paled. The thin man took a step forward.
Nadia saw his hand dip toward his belt. Her own breath locked in her chest. The memory of the tunnel, of the man’s hands on her, flashed hot and bright. She didn’t think.
She let out a low, pained whimper, hunching her shoulders, drawing the coat tighter. The performative flinch of a battered woman. Every man in the room, conditioned by the environment, glanced at her—including the thin man. It was a half-second of distraction.
Finn moved.
He didn’t draw his dagger. He turned, his movement a blur of efficient motion, and his fist connected with the thin man’s temple. The man dropped like a sack of stones, unconscious before he hit the floor. The sound was a dull, final crack.
Finn turned back to the barman as if he’d just swatted a fly. He placed a silver mark on the bar next to the token. “For your trouble. And for the ledger. Now.”
The barman stared at the silver, then at the unmoving form on his floor. The calculation in his eyes was immediate and mercenary. Loyalty here was cheaper than silver.
He reached below the bar, not for a weapon, but for a small, waxed canvas packet. He slid it across the wood. “Copies of the notes. Not the whole book. Insurance. Corbin was an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid.”
Finn took the packet, not opening it. “The man who took the token. Who is he?”
“Calls himself The Needle. Does collections. Special jobs.” The barman’s voice dropped. “He was here, before dawn. Paid his tab in full. Said he was taking a long trip downriver.”
“He won’t get far,” Finn said, pocketing the packet. He nodded toward the unconscious man. “He’ll have a headache. Recommend he forgets our face.”
They left the way they came, emerging into the weak daylight. The door shut behind them, muffling the resumed murmur inside. Finn didn’t speak until they were two streets over, his grip firm on her elbow as he steered her into a narrow, deserted alcove stacked with empty crates.
He looked at her, his gaze searching. “That sound you made. In there.”
She met his eyes, her pulse still rabbiting in her throat. “It worked.”
A slow breath escaped him. He gave a single, acknowledging nod. Then he opened the waxed packet. Inside were several folded sheets of cheap paper, covered in cramped, familiar handwriting—Corbin’s. Not the ledger of payments, but notes. Descriptions.
He scanned one, his brow furrowing. Then his face went utterly still. The blood seemed to drain from beneath his tan, leaving the scar on his face stark and livid.
“Finn?” she asked, dread pooling in her stomach.
He didn’t answer. He handed her the top sheet.
The note wasn’t about her. The heading read ‘Procedure for the Lady Maria of Ashford. Discretion paramount. Outcome: Successful simulation of virginity, per client request. Fees paid in full by proxy.’
It was dated six months ago. Around the time her younger sister, the beloved Maria, had become engaged to a wealthy, elderly viscount known for his traditional… expectations.
Nadia’s vision wavered. The words swam. Her father had not just mutilated her. He had paid for the same service for her sister, the golden child, to secure a better marriage with a lie. Her suffering hadn’t been unique. It had been a blueprint.
And the proxy who paid for Maria’s procedure was denoted only by two letters, smudged but unmistakable: A.L.
The world narrowed to the filth-strewn stones beneath her feet. The horror was no longer a private, shameful prison. It was a commodity. Her father had shopped here.
Finn’s hand cupped her elbow, steadying her. His touch was the only real point in a spinning universe. “Nadia.”
She looked up at him. The guarded melancholy in her amber eyes had burned away, replaced by a pure, incandescent fury she never knew she possessed. It was quiet, and it was absolute. She may have hated her sister for how she treated her, but this was just wrong.
“We’re not going back to the palace yet,” she said, her voice terrifyingly calm.
He watched her, seeing the transformation. “Where?”
She took the note from his hand, folding it with meticulous care, and tucked it deep inside his coat, next to her heart. “To send a message of our own. To my father.”