Chapter 8

Genevieve

The merchant services office was already open when I arrived, my collar up against the drizzle and a list of questions I'd been composing since I'd given up on sleep entirely.

The process took most of the morning. Multiple offices, separate queues, a property registry search that required a form I didn't have and had to go back to obtain. The clerk at the lending desk explained the collateral terms in the flat, unhurried tone of someone who had given this speech so many times it had stopped meaning anything to him.

I read every line. When I got to the clause about binding claim upon the debtor's essential essence, hereinafter defined as soul-substance, I stopped.

Then I looked up. "Is this standard?"

"Yes."

I looked back at the contract. I thought about Barnaby's back room floor. I thought about the burning in my chest that had started again, low and persistent, the kind that meant my body was keeping a tally I couldn't afford to ignore. I thought about the fact that I had run out of other options.

I picked up the pen and signed.

The key was old iron, heavy in a way that felt like it was testing whether I meant it. I closed my hand around it and walked back to Cobblestone Alley without letting myself think too hard about what I'd just done, because if I started thinking I would slow down, and slowing down was not something I could afford.

The door opened on the first try. The bolt slid back with a sound like something waking up after a long time, and I pushed it wide and propped it open with a brick from the threshold before the smell could change my mind.

Mildew. Old wood. Years of sealed air composting its own memories. I stood in the doorway and let the draft move through, then crossed into the room and started moving.

The counter first. I pressed my palms flat against the surface and leaned my weight onto it — scarred and stained, years of use carved into the grain, but solid underneath. The cabinets held. Two hinges screamed when I touched them. One panel had warped past saving. I went through the mugs on the back shelf one by one, turning each over to check the base, setting the usable ones in a row.

Twelve. Four broken. I carried the broken ones to the door.

Twelve mugs. That's a start.

The stove needed work — ash packed solid in the firebox, chimney blocked, but the iron itself was intact and the structure hadn't shifted. The water ran brown first, then cleared. Two floorboards near the window lifted slightly under my weight and I marked them in my head: fixable, not urgent.

I did not look at the storage room door.

It was there, in the left rear corner, exactly where it had always been — on this side of the wall and the other side both, because apparently that was simply how this building worked. I looked at it once. Then I turned away, because whatever was behind it was not today's problem, and I had a rule about not opening things I couldn't close again before dark.

I was on my knees scrubbing the floor behind the counter when I heard the knock on the open door.

Barnaby filled the frame. He was holding a bucket in one hand and a bundle of rags in the other, and he had the expression of someone who had made a decision and was not interested in discussing it.

"You started without me," he said.

I sat back on my heels and looked at him. "I don't remember asking."

"You didn't." He stepped over the threshold, set the bucket down, and looked around the room with the slow, assessing gaze of someone who had lived next door to this building for years and was finally getting a proper look inside. "Years of dust. You were going to do this alone?"

"Oh, I need you."

Barnaby was already moving toward the back wall, examining the shelving with the practical eye of someone who built things for a living and had opinions about wood. He pressed his thumb against one of the brackets, tested its weight, moved to the next one.

"These are good," he said. "Old growth. They don't make shelving from this anymore, costs too much. Whoever built this place knew what they were doing."

I thought about the crack in the corner plaster. About the door handle set two inches lower than standard. About standing in the front room on the other side of a wall that no longer opened and knowing the layout the way you know a room you grew up in.

"Apparently," I said.

We worked without talking much at first, which suited me fine. Barnaby moved through the room with the unhurried competence of someone who had been doing physical work his entire life and didn't need to narrate it.

He cleared the shelving, knocked the worst of the dust from the ceiling corners with a long-handled brush he'd apparently thought to bring, and at some point produced a second scrub brush from the bucket without explanation and handed it to me when I wore through the bristles on the first one.

I was working on the window frames — warped, swollen with moisture, fighting me every time I tried to get a cloth into the corners — when he spoke again.

"The woman who ran this place before. Did I tell you what she made?"

"Drinks," I said. "You mentioned."

"All kinds." He was on the other side of the room, moving the last of the broken fixtures toward the door. "Hot things in winter, cold things in summer. I was young when she was here. My mother used to send me over on cold mornings with a coin for something warm." He paused, and I heard the particular quality of silence that meant someone was remembering something they hadn't thought about in a long time.

"She had this one thing she made. Coffee, but not like anything you'd get at the market stalls — darker, richer, with something in it that I still can't name. She'd brew it in the mornings and the whole alley smelled like it before most people were even awake." He set down the last broken chair leg. "Grown men would stop in the middle of the street just to figure out where it was coming from."

I stopped scrubbing.

Coffee. Something else underneath.

Roast level matters more than people think, I thought, automatically. Too light and you lose the body, too dark and it turns bitter. Get the grind right, control the water temperature, and whatever she was adding — cinnamon, maybe, or something smokier — it would carry through the whole cup instead of sitting on top.

"Did people come from outside the alley for it?" I asked.

"From several streets over, some of them." He set down the last broken chair leg. "She never had enough. Always ran out early."

I looked at the counter. At the twelve usable mugs in a row. At the coffee machine I'd spent the better part of an hour scrubbing down, the brass fittings finally visible underneath the grime, the whole thing still and waiting like it had been saving itself for exactly this.

She ran out early.

"You thought of a name yet?" Barnaby asked, without looking up from the shelf he was wiping down.

"Not yet."

"Doesn't have to be clever. Just something that means something to you and sticks in people's heads." He moved to the next bracket. "Mine came from the old oak barrel I found in the back room when I first took the space. Seemed honest enough."

I looked at the door. At the alley beyond it, the blackthorn hedges running along the far wall, scraggly and overgrown and completely indifferent to whether anyone found them attractive.

"The Blackthorn," I said.

Barnaby turned around and looked at it the way he'd looked at the shelving — carefully, with genuine consideration.

"Good name," he said, and went back to wiping.

By the time the light through the windows had shifted from grey to something darker, the floor was clean enough to walk on without leaving footprints, the shelves were cleared and wiped down, and both windows were functional. My arms ached from the shoulders down. There was something unidentifiable on my sleeve that I had decided not to investigate.

Barnaby stood in the middle of the room and looked at what we'd done.

"Better," he said.

It was better. It was still a wreck by any reasonable standard, but it was the kind of wreck that looked like someone had started rather than the kind that looked like someone had given up, and that distinction mattered more than I could explain.

"Then I need coffee beans," I said. "Good ones, consistently, at a price that doesn't make the margin disappear. Same for cream and milk." I looked at the ceiling rather than at him, because this was easier to say without making eye contact.

I leaned against the counter and let myself breathe for a moment.

"Finnick Sutton," he said. "Orchard outside the lower district. Apples, pears, coffee beans — he's got a plot of the stuff growing on the south-facing slope, been doing it for years. Supplies half the market vendors and most of the serious buyers in the lower district." He turned toward the door. "Doesn't deal with people he doesn't trust, but he's fair when he does."