AI Rain chopped at the pavement outside The Raven’s Nest and turned the gutters into thin rivers. The green neon sign over the door flickered against wet brick, painting Quinn’s hands the colour of pond scum as she held her warrant card up to block the glare and watched the entrance through the curtain of water.
A couple in soaked club wear stumbled out laughing, then disappeared into a waiting cab. A man in a blazer followed, head down, cigarette cupped, smoke torn away by the wind.
Quinn kept still. Her leather watch sat heavy against her pulse .
The door opened again. Tomás Herrera stepped into the rain with a canvas medic bag slung across his shoulder, the strap cutting a dark line across his chest. The Saint Christopher medallion at his throat flashed when the neon caught it. He paused on the top step and scanned the street, eyes warm and alert, like he measured where the danger came from and how fast it ran.
Quinn moved off the wall.
“Herrera.”
He flinched, then his face hardened. Water ran off his hair in strings. His left forearm—scarred, pale against olive skin—tightened as his hand went to the bag strap.
“You followed me out here,” his voice came low, Spanish edges on the consonants. “You want a drink, Detective?”
Quinn kept her hands visible, shoulders squared. “I want answers.”
“Ask someone who likes you.”
A black cab rolled through the puddles and threw a wave of dirty water at the kerb. Quinn stepped back a fraction to avoid the splash.
“You’ve been operating without a licence,” Quinn’s words cut clean through the rain. “You’ve been seen at scenes you don’t have any right to be at. People keep turning up patched together who should’ve bled out on the way to A&E. And you keep turning up near Silas’ bar.”
Tomás’s gaze slid past her, down the street. His jaw worked once.
“You lot always start with ‘people keep turning up’.” He lifted his chin at the door behind him. “You want to arrest me for handing someone a bandage?”
“I want to know who you’ve been treating. I want to know what you’ve been buying.”
His fingers twitched on the strap. “Buying? In Soho? You think I pop out for a miracle and a packet of crisps?”
Quinn stepped closer until she could smell antiseptic beneath the wet wool of her coat. “You carry that bag like it’s a body.”
Tomás’s eyes narrowed .
“You shouldn’t be out here on your own,” he muttered.
Quinn’s mouth stayed flat. “That concern won’t keep you from a cell.”
A beat hung between them, thin as a wire. The bar’s door opened behind him, letting out a wedge of warm light and a breath of old spirits. Tomás’s gaze flicked to it, then back to Quinn.
“You don’t know what you’re poking.”
Quinn’s throat tightened. A flash of another night—blue lights on wet tarmac, her partner’s body bag zipper catching on a torn sleeve, DS Morris’s name on a tag swinging as the rain slapped it. She swallowed it down.
“I know when someone runs,” Quinn answered. “And I know when someone’s hiding.”
Tomás’s lips peeled back, not a smile. “Then chase.”
He turned and broke into a sprint.
Quinn launched after him, boots striking water from the pavement. Her coat dragged at her legs; she shrugged it off her shoulders and let it slap against her back like a sail. Tomás cut across the road between two cars, forcing a delivery driver to brake with a horn blast. Quinn followed, one hand up to shield her face from spray, the other reaching for her radio on instinct before she remembered she’d told her unit she wanted eyes only.
Tomás didn’t glance back. He ran like he’d done it before, sliding around pedestrians, using bodies as shields. A group under an awning jumped as he shoved through.
“Police!” Quinn’s voice ripped out. “Stop!”
A man with a takeaway cup spun, then retreated into a doorway. Nobody stepped in. London kept moving.
Tomás ducked into an alley between a closed record shop and a kebab place with its shutters down. Quinn followed and the world narrowed to wet brick and the harsh stink of old urine.
Tomás vaulted a stack of black bags. One split as he landed, spilling wet cardboard and rotting food into the water.
Quinn’s foot caught on the edge. She kicked through and kept her balance, teeth clenched.
“You’re making this worse!” she shouted, breath burning .
Tomás’s voice floated back, tight. “You don’t know what worse looks like.”
He burst out of the alley into a wider street and cut north, away from Soho’s glow into darker stretches where the street lamps looked tired. Quinn’s lungs pulled hard. Her jaw ached from the clamp of discipline she’d carried for years.
He turned into a side street where the road dipped, then into a stairwell that led down to an older part of the city—concrete steps slick with algae, the kind the council forgot existed. A rusted metal sign warned about CCTV. The camera above it hung smashed, its lens gone.
Quinn hit the first step, boots skidding. She grabbed the rail and felt a film of slime under her palm.
Below, Tomás’s shoes slapped wet concrete as he descended fast, using the rail for balance. The medic bag banged against his ribs.
“You’re going underground,” Quinn called after him. “That won’t save you.”
“It might save you,” he threw back without turning .
The air changed as the steps dropped. The rain noise faded, replaced by a low hum that rose from beneath the street. Quinn’s breath fogged in front of her.
At the bottom, a corridor opened—old Tube tiles stained brown, ceiling low, fluorescent lights dead. Someone had strung bare bulbs along a cable, their weak glow pulsing when water dripped onto the wire. Painted arrows on the wall pointed deeper, the paint fresh enough to shine.
Tomás took the corridor at speed.
Quinn followed, hand drifting to her shoulder holster under her soaked shirt. She didn’t draw. Her world had rules, even here.
A figure stepped out of a recess ahead, hood up, face hidden. Quinn’s pulse spiked. The figure’s hand rose, palm out.
Tomás didn’t slow. He dug into his pocket as he ran and threw something small and pale. It spun through the air and the hooded figure snatched it.
The hood lifted enough to show a mouth and a nose—skin pitted, lips cracked.
“Bone for bone,” the figure rasped.
Tomás shoved past, shoulder brushing the figure’s chest. The hooded one didn’t fight him. The figure’s gaze snapped to Quinn and held.
Quinn slowed a fraction, eyes locking on what the figure held: a token shaped like a knucklebone, drilled through and threaded on wire. It glistened wet under the bulb.
“Evening,” Quinn’s voice came even, clipped. “Metropolitan Police.”
The hooded figure’s laugh sounded like a cough .
“Police,” it echoed , tasting the word. “No uniforms down here.”
Quinn took a step forward. “Where does that corridor lead?”
The figure lifted the bone token higher, like an answer and a dare. “Where you got no warrant.”
Quinn’s gaze slid past, trying to catch Tomás’s shadow. He had already vanished around a bend.
“Give me that token.”
The hooded figure tucked it away. “Pay.”
“I’m not buying access to—”
“Then you stay up top with the rain and the drunks,” the figure cut in, voice rough. “Down here? You knock on the right door. You don’t kick it in.”
Quinn’s fingers flexed. The corridor air smelled of damp plaster, old electricity, and something else underneath—metallic, like pennies held too long in a sweaty fist.
“What’s your name?” Quinn asked.
The hooded figure shifted weight and water dripped from the hem of its sleeve. “What’s yours?”
Quinn didn’t give it. She lunged.
The figure moved with a jerk, quick and practiced, stepping aside and letting Quinn’s momentum carry her past. A hand hooked at Quinn’s belt. Something tugged.
Quinn spun and caught the figure’s wrist. The skin felt cold, dry despite the wet air. The fingers clamped hard.
“Don’t,” the figure warned, a hiss between teeth.
Quinn twisted the wrist, forcing the hand open. A small object dropped into her palm—bone, smooth, warm from being carried . The figure’s other hand darted toward Quinn’s throat.
Quinn drove an elbow into the ribs beneath the hoodie. The figure grunted and folded.
“Tell your mates,” Quinn breathed, crushing the bone token in her fist. “If they’re selling things that get people killed, I’ll find them.”
The hooded figure straightened in a slow sway, head tilted.
“You don’t get it,” it muttered. “If you go down there with that badge in your head, they’ll smell it.”
Quinn backed away, eyes scanning for a second attacker. None came. Just the corridor, the dripping, the bulbs pulsing.
She ran.
The corridor widened into a disused platform. Old adverts clung to the tiled walls, their faces peeled away to leave pale ghosts of smiles. Newer signs hung crooked—hand-painted boards with symbols Quinn didn’t recognise, arrows pointing toward what looked like a service tunnel . People moved through the gloom in clusters, heads down, hoods up, bags held close.
Not commuters. Not tourists.
A tall man with a shaved head rolled a trolley loaded with glass jars. A woman with glittering rings on every finger leaned against a pillar and watched Quinn pass with eyes that held no question, only appraisal. A pair of youths in trainers argued in low voices over a small cage covered with cloth that shifted from the inside.
Quinn’s stomach tightened.
Tomás ran across the platform and shoved through a gap where a maintenance door had been propped open. Light spilled from inside—amber, smoky, alive with motion.
Quinn chased him to the threshold and stopped short.
Sound poured out. Not the clean echo of a station. This sounded like a market jammed into stone: voices haggling, laughter that turned sharp, the clink of glass, a distant thud that might have been music or machinery. Incense tangled with the smell of damp earth. Someone cooked meat somewhere, fat spitting into flame.
Quinn leaned in and saw the world beyond the door.
Stalls crowded a long tunnel, their awnings patched from velvet , tarpaulin, old flags. Lanterns hung from pipes and cables like trapped stars. Tables overflowed with items that didn’t belong in any evidence locker she’d ever signed for: vials of liquid that glowed faint blue, bundles of dried herbs tied with hair, knives etched with symbols that seemed to shift when her eyes tried to focus . A man displayed teeth on a velvet cloth as if they were pearls. A woman offered tiny bottles to a customer whose pupils looked stretched wide in the low light.
Tomás’s dark head bobbed through the crowd, then vanished.
Quinn stood in the doorway, rainwater dripping off her hair onto the concrete. Her hand closed around the bone token until it pressed into her skin. Her other hand hovered near her holster.
A voice near her elbow cut in, flat and amused.
“You lost, officer?”
Quinn turned.
A teenager leaned against the wall, too thin for the coat he wore. His face carried bruises in yellow stages, and his eyes held that quick, hard shine of someone who learned how to read danger before he learned how to spell. A small tattoo marked his neck: a simple line drawing of a crow.
Quinn kept her stance firm. “This place has a name?”
He pushed off the wall and sniffed. “You don’t know, you don’t belong.”
“I asked for a name.”
“The Veil Market,” he replied, like he enjoyed the taste. “You got the token. You don’t got the manners.”
Quinn’s gaze returned to the tunnel. Men and women brushed past each other with the wary precision of pickpockets and prey. Nobody looked surprised to see a stranger. They looked hungry to see what she carried.
A broad-shouldered bouncer stood just inside, arms crossed, face hidden behind a half-mask carved from dark wood. The mask’s mouth curled into a grin that never shifted. The bouncer’s head turned toward Quinn. Not eyes—she couldn’t see eyes—but attention landed on her like a hand on the back of her neck.
The teen’s voice dropped.
“Turn around,” he warned. “You can still climb the stairs and pretend you never smelled it.”
Quinn’s throat tightened again, and Morris’s name flashed like a bruise. She remembered the unanswered questions, the reports that read clean while her gut rotted. She remembered the way the case had slipped through her fingers like water.
Tomás’s medallion had caught the neon. Tomás’s bag had bounced heavy.
Quinn lifted the token.
The teen’s eyes widened . “You nicked that?”
Quinn stepped over the threshold.
“Police,” she called into the noise, voice steady enough to cut a line through the chatter. “Tomás Herrera. I need a word.”
The market’s sound didn’t stop. It bent, shifted, watched.
The wooden mask turned toward her in a slow tilt.
Quinn tightened her grip on the bone token and walked down into the Veil Market.