Ten hours earlier, a dark vehicle sat parked down the street from the building.

It had been there long enough to stop being noticed. Six men were spread between the car and the pavement, two inside, the rest standing in twos near the corner, close enough to watch the entrance and far enough that nobody walking past would think anything of them.

They did not talk much. They did not smoke or check their phones or do any of the things bored men did. They watched the door.

The leader sat in the front passenger seat with his elbow on the window frame. When his phone buzzed, he answered on the first ring and said nothing, only listened.

"Is the boy gone?" the voice on the other end asked.

"Hasn’t come home since yesterday," the leader said. "We’ve had eyes on the building all night. It’s just the mother."

"Then it’s simple." The voice was calm and far away, the voice of a man who was somewhere comfortable. "Smooth. No noise, no mess, no body. You take the woman and you wait. The boy comes looking, and when he comes looking, he listens."

"Understood."

"He cleared Floor 15 two days ago." A pause. "Don’t give him a reason to be there before you’re ready for him."

The line went dead.

The leader put the phone away and checked the time.

The four on the pavement drifted back toward the car.

"All this for one woman," one of them muttered. He was the youngest, and he said it the way young men said things to sound like they had done this longer than they had. "We’ve got six bodies on an old lady in a flat."

"The pay’s six bodies’ worth," another said. "So shut up and take it."

"I’m only saying—"

"Don’t." The leader did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "Both of you. We are not here to be clever. The kid cleared a story floor on a global feed two days ago, which means the kid is a problem we do not want, which is exactly why we go in while he is somewhere else." He looked at each of them in turn. "Clean. Fast. She walks out on her own feet or we carry her, but she walks out breathing. Nobody touches anything they don’t have to."

Nobody argued after that.

They had done jobs like this before. A quiet building, a frightened person, a door that opened easier than people expected. They were not walking into a fight. They were walking in to take an old woman out of a flat before her son got home, and there was nothing about that they had not done a dozen times.

They expected fear.

They did not expect resistance, and they did not expect a child.

Inside the flat, Mrs Ganner was trying to get Nyra to settle.

It was not going well. The small jacket Nyra wore over her wings was off, folded on the back of the couch, and Nyra herself was sitting on the floor with a wooden block in each hand, not playing with them, just holding them. She had been like this since the night before. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"When is Daddy coming home?" Nyra asked. Again.

"Soon, love." Mrs Ganner crouched down with a fresh cup of warm milk and set it on the low table. "He had to stay out for work. He’ll be back today."

"He said he’d be back at night."

"He did. And then work got bigger than he thought." She brushed a hand over Nyra’s hair, careful around the place where the wings folded out of her back. "That happens with your daddy. He always comes back. You know that."

Nyra leaned into the hand without letting go of the blocks.

"Nana," she said quietly.

"Mm?"

"Stay."

Mrs Ganner smiled at that. She still did not fully understand the child in her house. She did not know where the wings came from, or why James had come home one day carrying a baby with feathers, or what any of it meant for the future. She had decided, somewhere in the first week, that none of it changed the only thing that mattered, which was that there was a small one in the house who needed looking after.

"I’m not going anywhere," she said.

Then the lock clicked.

It was not James’s key. It was something thinner, working the lock from the wrong side, and Mrs Ganner was on her feet before the door even opened, one hand already reaching back for Nyra.

The men came in fast and quiet.

The leader was first. He did not shout. He stepped into the room, took it in, and held up one open hand the way you’d hold it up to a frightened animal.

"Mrs Ganner." His voice was level. "Nobody here wants to hurt you. You’re going to come with us, and if you do that quietly, this ends with everyone fine. Do you understand me?"

"Get out of my house." Her voice shook, but she did not move back. She moved sideways, putting herself between the men and the small shape on the floor. "I don’t know who you are. Get out."

"That’s not one of the options." The leader nodded once, and two of the men spread to the sides. "Phone’s not going to help you. Neither is shouting. Come with us now and we don’t have to do anything either of us will remember badly."

She lunged for the side table where her phone was charging.

A man caught her wrist before she reached it.

She fought him. She was not a fighter, but she was a mother in her own home, and for a few seconds she made it hard, twisting and pulling and dragging them both into the table. A mug went off the edge.

Crash.

That was when the youngest one saw Nyra.

"There’s a kid." He said it like a complaint. "Nobody said anything about a kid."

The leader looked at the small girl pressed against the couch, blocks still in her hands, eyes huge.

He made the call in under a second.

"We take her too."

And Mrs Ganner stopped fighting for herself.

She turned, hard, and got one hand on Nyra’s shoulder.

"Run," she said. "Nyra. Go, now, run—"

Nyra did not run.

She stood with her back against the couch and shook, and the tears came, and she did not move an inch toward the door her grandmother was pointing at. She did not understand half of what was happening. She understood that strangers were in the house and that they had their hands on Nana.

"Look at it," the youngest said. He almost laughed. He crouched a little, the way grown men did when they talked down to children, and reached toward her. "It’s just a—"

"Don’t touch Nana," Nyra said.