2. The Vultures' Feast

The address was in the financial district, a part of Belgrave that Ivy had only ever passed through on buses, pressing her forehead against the cold glass while the towers slid past like monuments to a religion she did not understand. Now she walked among them on foot, her heels clicking against pavement that seemed to have been scrubbed clean by money itself. The building was called Endymion Tower, a spire of blue glass and black steel that rose fifty-three stories into the overcast sky. The lobby smelled of orchids and freshly brewed espresso, and the security guard who checked her name against a tablet did so with the bored efficiency of someone who had seen far stranger visitors at far stranger hours.

She was directed to the forty-first floor. The elevator walls were mirrored, and Ivy watched her own reflection multiply into infinity as she ascended. She had dressed carefully for this meeting: a charcoal sheath dress that was neither expensive nor cheap, pearl studs that had belonged to her mother, and a slash of burgundy lipstick that suggested confidence without aggression. She looked, she decided, like a woman who had been wronged by the world but refused to let it break her. Exactly the sort of woman they would expect to find.

The elevator doors opened onto a reception area of muted grey carpets and abstract art. A young man with a shaved head and a geometric tattoo crawling up his neck sat behind a curved desk, typing something into a computer. He looked up as she approached and smiled with teeth that were very white and very straight.

“Miss Reed. They’re expecting you. Please follow me.”

He led her down a corridor lined with frosted glass doors, each bearing a minimalist logo: a stylized letter A enclosed in a circle. Ivy filed this away for later research. The corridor terminated in a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the River Orme snaking through the city. The sky outside was the colour of pewter, and somewhere in the distance a single shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and turned the water to liquid silver.

There were four people waiting for her.

The first was a woman in her early forties, with sleek blonde hair cut in a geometric bob and a suit the color of dried blood. She sat cross-legged on a leather sofa, balancing a tablet on her knee, and regarded Ivy with the detached curiosity of a lepidopterist examining a new specimen. The second was a young man, barely out of his twenties, with the rumpled hair and caffeine pallor of someone who spent too much time in front of screens. He perched on the arm of a chair, a laptop balanced precariously on his thighs, and barely glanced up when Ivy entered. The third was an older man—mid-fifties, perhaps—with a neatly trimmed silver beard and the kind of quiet, reassuring presence that made you want to tell him your secrets. He stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back, and smiled at Ivy with what appeared to be genuine warmth.

And the fourth, rising from behind a desk of smoked glass and brushed steel, was Dorian Voss.

Ivy recognized him immediately, though she had never seen a photograph. He was tall and lean, with dark hair swept back from a high forehead and eyes the color of slate after rain. He moved with the unhurried grace of a man who had never needed to rush for anything in his life. When he spoke, his voice was low and measured, each word placed as carefully as a chess piece.

“Miss Reed. Thank you for coming. I hope the journey wasn’t too taxing.”

“Not at all.” Ivy accepted the hand he offered and found his grip cool and dry. “Though I have to admit, I’m not entirely sure why I’m here. Your email was… cryptic.”

“Cryptic is safer than candid, in our line of work.” Dorian gestured toward the sofa. “Please, sit. Can I offer you something to drink? We have a rather good single malt, if that’s to your taste. Or coffee, if you prefer to keep a clear head.”

“Coffee would be lovely. Black, please.”

The older man by the window moved to a sideboard and poured from a French press. He handed the cup to Ivy with a nod, and she caught the faint scent of sandalwood on his cuffs. Dorian settled into an armchair opposite her, while the blonde woman shifted slightly to make room. The young man continued typing, the sound of his keyboard a soft, insectile clicking beneath the hum of the ventilation system.

“Allow me to introduce everyone,” Dorian said. “The gentleman who poured your coffee is Marcus Fenn, formerly a senior partner at Clydesdale & Thorne. He specialized in litigation finance before deciding that the private sector offered more interesting opportunities. The young man with the laptop is Rafael Silva, who can find any piece of information that exists anywhere in the world, provided it has ever been connected to a network. And the woman on your left is Celeste Dumont. She handles our public relations, our strategic communications, and, when necessary, our more delicate negotiations.”

Celeste inclined her head with a faint smile that did not reach her eyes. “We’ve been following your case with great interest, Miss Reed. The video was masterfully handled. The tear on the courthouse steps was a particularly nice touch.”

Ivy felt a cold prickle at the base of her skull but kept her expression neutral. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you don’t.” Celeste’s smile widened a fraction. “That’s the first rule of this business, isn’t it? Plausible deniability. You’re very good at it. Better than most. Which is precisely why we asked you here.”

Dorian leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Miss Reed—may I call you Ivy?”

“If you like.”

“Ivy, then. I want to be completely honest with you, because I suspect you will appreciate honesty more than flattery, and you will certainly see through anything less. We are not philanthropists. We are not activists. We are, to put it bluntly, opportunists. The world is full of wealthy institutions that routinely mistreat people, and when those institutions are caught, they are prepared to pay enormous sums of money to make the problem go away. The problem, however, is that most of the people they mistreat lack the resources, the knowledge, and the sheer bloody-mindedness required to extract those sums. That is where we come in.”

“You’re litigation funders,” Ivy said, keeping her voice carefully flat. “You bankroll lawsuits in exchange for a percentage of the settlement.”

“That is the legal description,” Marcus said from his position by the window. His voice was a pleasant baritone, tinged with the faintest trace of a regional accent he had spent decades trying to erase. “The practical description is somewhat broader. We identify high-value opportunities. We cultivate them. We shape the narrative, manage the press, apply pressure at the right points, and, when the moment is right, we negotiate a resolution that benefits everyone. The plaintiff receives compensation. The institution receives discretion. And we receive a return on our investment.”

“And what do you get out of Harrington & Cole?” Ivy asked.

“That depends entirely on you,” Dorian said. “Your case is textbook. A luxury retailer with a history of complaints, a sympathetic plaintiff with a compelling story, and video evidence that the company cannot explain away. Left to your own devices, you might secure a settlement of fifty thousand crowns, perhaps a hundred if you find a decent lawyer. With our resources, we believe we can multiply that figure by a factor of ten. Perhaps more.”

Ivy took a sip of her coffee. It was excellent. She let the silence stretch for a moment, watching the way the four of them watched her. Celeste’s gaze was calculating. Rafael’s was distracted. Marcus’s was avuncular. And Dorian’s was something else entirely—something that felt almost like recognition, as though he were looking at her and seeing a reflection of himself.

“And your cut?” she asked.

“Forty percent,” Dorian said. “Standard for our industry. You keep sixty, and we handle everything: legal fees, media strategy, private investigators, expert witnesses. You won’t pay a single crown out of pocket.”

It was a lie, of course. Ivy knew enough about the world she was trying to enter to recognize that the forty percent was just the visible cost. The hidden costs—the favors owed, the leverage accumulated, the strings attached—would be far more expensive. But that was precisely what she was counting on. The deeper they pulled her in, the more she would learn.

“I’ll need some time to think about it,” she said.

“Of course.” Dorian reached into his jacket and produced a slim business card. It bore only the stylized A logo and a phone number. “Take as long as you need. But I should mention that time is, to some extent, a factor. Harrington & Cole’s legal team has already reached out to several of our competitors. The vultures are circling, Ivy. We are simply the most competent vultures.”

The meeting ended with handshakes and murmured pleasantries. Rafael finally looked up from his laptop long enough to give her a distracted nod. Celeste walked her to the elevator and pressed the call button with a manicured finger.

“One piece of advice, before you go,” Celeste said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Dorian likes to present himself as a businessman. Don’t be fooled. He’s a predator. The most dangerous kind, because he genuinely believes he’s doing people a favor by devouring them. If you sign with us, make sure you know exactly what you’re signing.”

The elevator arrived. Ivy stepped inside and turned to face Celeste as the doors slid shut. The last thing she saw was the blonde woman’s smile, sharp as a scalpel.

Ivy did not return to Brindlewood immediately. Instead, she walked down to the river and found a bench overlooking the water. The wind had picked up, whipping the surface into a chaos of whitecaps, and the single shaft of sunlight had vanished behind a wall of advancing clouds. She sat with her hands buried in her coat pockets and replayed the meeting in her mind, analyzing every word, every glance, every micro-expression.

The organization was larger than she had anticipated. Dorian Voss was clearly the leader, but the others were not mere employees; they were partners in a well-oiled machine. Marcus Fenn provided legal legitimacy and access to the corridors of power. Rafael Silva handled surveillance and intelligence gathering. Celeste Dumont managed perception and narrative. Together, they formed a four-headed hydra, and Ivy had just been offered the opportunity to become a fifth head.

Or, more accurately, to pretend to become one.

She pulled out her phone and began making notes, using a shorthand of her own invention that would read as gibberish to anyone who intercepted it. She recorded everything she had observed: the layout of the office, the security protocols, the brand of coffee on the sideboard, the make of Rafael’s laptop, the faint callus on Marcus’s right middle finger that suggested he still wrote with a fountain pen. She noted the tension between Celeste and Dorian—not romantic, she decided, but competitive. Two apex predators circling the same territory. She noted the way Rafael had flinched when Marcus spoke, a tiny reaction that suggested a history of belittlement or worse. She noted the framed photograph on Dorian’s desk, turned so that only he could see it, and the way his gaze had flicked toward it twice during their conversation, as though seeking reassurance or warning.

These were the threads she would pull, in time. But first, she needed to secure her position.

Over the following week, Ivy played the role of the cautious, overwhelmed victim being courted by powerful interests. She scheduled a second meeting with Dorian, this time at a café in the arts district, and peppered him with questions about the legal process, the timeline, the risks. She allowed herself to seem nervous, uncertain, grateful. She mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she had been approached by a journalist from the national press who wanted to run a follow-up piece. Dorian’s eyes sharpened at that, and Ivy knew she had just given him another reason to keep her close.

She also began her own research. Using a prepaid phone and public Wi-Fi at a library two districts away from her apartment, she started building dossiers on each member of the Aegis Group. Marcus Fenn had left Clydesdale & Thorne under a cloud of suspicion involving a missing client fund, though no charges had ever been filed. Celeste Dumont had worked for a public relations firm that specialized in crisis management for corporations accused of environmental crimes; one of her campaigns had been linked to the silencing of a whistleblower in the Nordhaven oil scandal. Rafael Silva had a sealed juvenile record and a series of online aliases that Ivy traced back to a notorious hacker collective. And Dorian Voss himself appeared to have no past at all before a certain point eight years ago—as if he had simply materialized, fully formed, into the world of high-stakes litigation.

This last detail intrigued Ivy the most. She spent three consecutive nights combing through archived news articles, corporate registries, and social media profiles, searching for any trace of Dorian Voss before his emergence. She found nothing. It was as though the man had been invented. And that, she realized with a slow, creeping chill, was almost certainly the truth. The name was a construct. The identity was a mask. Somewhere beneath the polished surface was a different person entirely—someone with secrets so dangerous that they had to be buried beneath a new life.

Ivy did not find this alarming. She found it exhilarating. It meant that she and Dorian were playing the same game, and she had always been a quick study.

On the eighth day after the initial meeting, she called the number on the business card. Dorian answered on the second ring.

“I’m in,” she said.

“Excellent,” Dorian replied, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Come to the office tomorrow morning. There’s someone I want you to meet. A new client. I think you’ll find his case… illuminating.”

The line went dead. Ivy stared at the phone for a long moment, then set it down on the kitchen counter and walked to the corkboard on her wall. She added a new photograph to the constellation of images: a grainy still of the Aegis Group logo, captured from the frosted glass door. She traced a line of red string from the logo to a photograph of Dorian Voss, and then another line from Dorian to a blank space at the edge of the board that she had labeled, in tiny, precise handwriting, with a single word:

ORIGIN.

The game was changing. She had entered the vultures’ nest, and soon she would learn to feed alongside them. But as she stepped back from the board and surveyed the web she was weaving, Ivy felt the same quiet certainty she had felt outside Harrington & Cole on that grey January morning.

She was not here to feed.

She was here to burn the nest to the ground, and she did not need a reason. The act itself was the point. The art of destruction for its own sake was the purest thing she had ever known, and somewhere in the shadows of Endymion Tower, a man who called himself Dorian Voss had no idea what he had just invited through his door.

Ivy turned off the lights and went to bed. She slept dreamlessly, the sleep of a woman who had already decided exactly how the story would end.

The only question that remained was who would burn with her.