Author's note - wow. I really let this slide. So long since an update. To everyone who stuck with me, I don't deserve you. You were far too patient with me and I took you for granted. It's not going to happen again. I'm back and I mean to stay! Also: this chapter's quote comes from Laurence Sterne - "A Sentimental Journey." Because a girl has got to put her English degrees to good use!

Victor slept with one arm over Nightingale. She did not sleep at all - she sobbed into her pillow the whole night, silently and without stopping.

"You've been crying," he remarked when he woke up. He had reached for her and she had gone very stiff and utterly stony, but when he lifted himself up to peer at her, he had been able to see her puffy, red eyes, eyes that would have had Bobby howling at her in an instant.

She said nothing. He reached over and turned her face. She refused to meet his eyes. He was lucky she did not bite his hand. When he leaned forward and kissed her, tears leaked out of the eyes she had shut to avoid seeing him.

"You're crying," he said, with more anger in his voice. "Stop crying. Smile, won't you?"

Nightingale waited for him to hit her, unable to stop her tears. She felt very much like Rose. Soft, sweet, weak Rose. Rose, her sister. Rose, whom she loved.

"Rose," she murmured, very quietly.

"What was that? Stop muttering," said Victor.

Nightingale sat up, naked to the waist above the sheets. She did not cover herself. She stared right into Victor's bright, bright eyes and spoke again.

"For Rose," she said. Her tone was even. Her breath came and went in measured intervals. Her thoughts had cleared.

"What are you talking about?" asked Victor, though he seemed a little less angry since Nightingale had stopped crying.

Nightingale spat directly in his face.

She was ready for the slap and when it came, she refused to make a sound. Victor backhanded her across the face, and her head snapped to the side. She felt her teeth tear into the inside of her cheek and she tasted blood - her own. She turned back to face him. He looked angry.

"Look what you made me do," he said.

She refused to respond to that. After a moment, he gave a sigh.

"I suppose this is to be expected," he said. "The influence of that damned Detective Beckett has soured you. You used to be so sweet - what happened?"

Nightingale considered that it would be so easy to kill him - so easy to take his throat in her hands and crush the life out of him. But his life meant that of so many others - of all the Inamoratas in his grasp. Each and every one of them was a sister, or a brother. She would not betray them.

She lifted her head and stared into his cold, cold eyes. Her own eyes burned the tears she had shed. But she was determined that those tears not be in vain. If she was to suffer for the freedom of her brothers and sisters, so be it.

"I - I don't know," she said. She made her voice soft and shy. He would think that he had won - good, he needed only to think that for a few more hours. Then the case would be over and she would be free. "I - forgive me, Victor. I am so confused."

It worked. She was still a good actress. She was still the Queen of the Bordello, and the protectress of the Inamoratas. He cocked his head and touched her face.

"It's all right," he said. She thought about ripping his fingers off, one by one, and used that perverse pleasure to force a smile onto her face. "You'll have time to figure things out. I'll help you."

Nightingale wondered what he meant by that. Surely he knew that after the case was over he would not see her again. Still, that was the least of her concerns.

So she nodded. He nodded, too. He held her face in his hands and kissed her. The touch was gentle in force but brutal in what it implied. "Good," he said. "Now, I've got to go. I've got to give the others details about how...wonderful you were." He winked and Nightingale felt bile rise in her throat.

"All right," she said. Her voice was soft. He would assume this meant obedience, but in reality it was quiet rage. 

He kissed her forehead and got up. As he dressed, Nightingale noticed that he was walking gingerly. She sneered behind her hand and then, to seal the deal, surreptitiously uncovered herself. She lay back, as if only in repose, but made the shape of her body as distracting as possible.

When he looked back at her, he gave a moan. "How can I leave that?" he asked.

He had better, for if he looked at her like that for much longer she would surely kill him. 

What she did was smile, as winsomely as she could with her red-rimmed eyes. It worked - he sighed and approached her. At once, she threw the sheet over herself. As he came toward her for a kiss, she placed the sole of her foot against his chest and pushed him away.

"Ah-ah," she admonished him. "You have to go. I need you to go. It will help me, and I need you to help me."

The mention of her need seemed to fire something in him, and she got a wide smile. Now she allowed him to kiss her before he departed.

She wasted no time. Getting up, she dressed quickly, and then moving as far from the door as possible, spoke aloud to the open air.

"This is Nightingale," she said, to her anklet and the agents listening. She wondered whether they had listened all night, or whether they had shut their ears against the sounds. She hoped they had - she did not need to know they had heard her shame. "Nightingale to either team. Come in."

In reality, she knew that David had listened. She knew that he would have listened to the whole thing. She could see him sitting by the pale light of a glowing monitor, in the late hours of the night, listening. He would have sat still and quiet, in that deadly rage. 

The anklet buzzed. Not the shock she was used to, but a quiet vibration. Someone was there. Most likely all of them. She had to sit down, relief at not being alone washing over her.

"Everything is proceeding according to plan here. Is everything on schedule for today? One buzz for yes, two for no," she said.

One buzz.

"You know that Victor Trevor is Renatus?" she asked.

One buzz again.

"I'll confirm when I'm in position by activating my anklet, and we can begin the operation. Confirm with me via a pattern of four vibrations that you're in position," she said.

One buzz again.

"Then I'll confirm verbally that the cell block guard is distracted, and you can break cover," she said.

Another buzz.

She nodded, though there was no one there to see. "Good. Nightingale out."

She got one last buzz, and then nothing. Still, she knew they were still there, and that was some comfort. But still, she was alone. Alone with her thoughts in the quiet room. Had she been back in the bordello, she could have counted on a sister coming to visit her - whether it was the merry Sparkle, the sardonic Magenta, the understated Mermaid, or the gentle Rose, she could have expected company.

She thought of them fondly, and that was comfort in itself. But as the minutes passed, she felt herself lacking someone else.

Nightingale longed for Robin. It was a sort of yawning, gaping agony that seemed that made her want to curl in on herself to try to fill the void. She was nearly sick with her yearning. She could tolerate anything else - separation from Colm, even, since she loved him differently, and her sisters, for this sacrifice was for them - but the distance from Robin agonized her.

She was a strong woman, she knew that. The events of the previous night had proven that, if nothing else. But now she did nothing but pull her knees up to her chin and lie still and silent on the floor, whining soundlessly to fight the loneliness.

The guards found her on the floor when they entered the room some hours later. They instructed her to get up and she did without a fight. She was entering the final phase of the plan - being transferred to a holding cell. It would not be long now.

She followed them tamely down the halls, requiring no shoving or pushing. Neither touched her, which surprised her but which she welcomed. They loaded her into a hovercraft, and she went. 

She was not alone in the hovercraft. There were three men with her. They paid her no mind as their colleagues hastened her in and strapped her into her seat with warnings that if she tried to rise, they would make sure she stayed still. 

These men were guarding something - something that sat before them in a large, armoured container. Something that seemed to belong to the Triumvirate. Each one was heavily armed, carrying rifles that Nightingale recognized as M-33s. Military grade.

It was most likely contraband. Inamoratas weren't the only thing that the Triumvirate sold on the black market. 

She sat quietly between her guards on the journey, listening carefully to their conversation. One was complaining about his girlfriend - the woman was insistent on getting a cat, apparently, and the man preferred his carefully-curated collection of exotic birds. The other offered suggestions about vacation locales, claiming that the Rocky Mountains were an essential destination.

It was strange to hear such a beige conversation from the mouths of monsters. They were merely men, she realized. Men following orders from monsters.

The journey did not last long. They hadn't even left the city, merely headed to its outskirts. They landed on the roof of a large building - exactly identical to the blueprints provided by Trevor as Renatus - and Nightingale was ushered out.

Down she went, visually confirming that the blueprints were accurate. So far, Victor seemed to have been true to his word. She went down three levels, before being taken out of a lift and into what must have been a detention centre at some point. There was a guard on either side of the lift's doors.

At the centre of the room was a guard station containing six guards. Sprouting off from it was a passage. Through the glass-paneled double doors, guarded by another two guards, she could see blocks of cells. Ten guards here in total, exactly what was predicted. She knew that Rory and Amartya would enter through the lift doors, using Amartya's cover to get them into the building.

That cover would be blown immediately as he and Rory began shooting, and as Caroline and David burst through a vent in the ceiling, and Nicholas and Daniel through one in the wall adjacent.

"No fucking way," said one of the guards to her companions, snapping Nightingale out of her strategic contemplation. "Holy shit."

"They weren't kidding. That's Nightingale," said another.

"Better believe it," said one of hers.

"Let me see her," said the first one.

Her guards stopped her and two of those at the station drew up to them. One of them stared hard at her, as if examining an animal in a zoo. "Son of a bitch," he said. "I never saw her in the flesh, you know. But wow. She's incredible. No wonder they paid so much for her."

The other one reached out a hand to touch her and her companion batted it away. "You got a death wish? She's Trevor's. If you touch her you'll be eating your own balls for breakfast tomorrow."

The man he'd addressed flinched back . "Too bad," he said.

"Maybe later," said Nightingale, speaking for the first time. She smiled, cocky and flirtatious. "You come meet me later, I'll show you what Mr. Trevor's money bought."

He grinned but she got shoved into the cell block, past another guard who whistled at her and suggested where she could put that pretty mouth of hers. She was put into a cell at the very end of the long, long row, the door was locked, and she was left.

For a moment, she stood in the darkness. The block was poorly lit but her vision was better than the guards'. She could see out, past her cell, to much smaller enclosures that held anywhere between two and five Inamoratas each, most of whom had clung to the bars and watched her with wide eyes. She did a quick tally - thirty cells on a row, each one with an average of three Inamoratas, and she had seen five floors of cells.

Four hundred and fifty of them, in this place alone. 

Suddenly, her own pain was magnified by four hundred and fifty. She stood there in her cell, surrounded by a suffering that was beyond bearing, the quiet sorrow of four hundred and fifty miserable creatures. 

A voice spoke up out of the darkness, startling Nightingale, who was lost in a fog of misery.

"Who are you?" said a voice, as sweet as music and as gentle as the summer rain - an Inamorata's voice. Nightingale looked up to see its owner was a tall young woman, whose hair gleamed copper in the dim light, and whose amber eyes were wide with sorrow.

She did not have to lie when she responded. "Nightingale," she said. She approached the bars that separated their cells, and now another figure emerged from the gloom. This one was a young man, taller than the woman, but equally beautiful. His blue eyes shone, fierce and proud, and he stood straight before her. He reminded her very much of Steel.

"I knew it," he said. His voice was high, but not feminine. The sweet tenor trill of a cello, similar to the musical lilt of Robin's voice. "I knew they had you. The guards were talking about you, how they finally found you."

All three of them hung off the bars, Nightingale on one side, the two others beyond her. "How long have you been here?" she asked them.

"Only a few days. We're here temporarily. We're being shipped out to the new bordello soon. They were just waiting for you," said the man.

"Me?" said Nightingale.

The woman nodded. Her companion watched her carefully and Nightingale saw it plain as day - he loved the woman. "Mr. Trevor likes to talk when he's happy," she said, in that sweet, sweet voice. "He said to me that once you were here we were all going to go away. All the birds. To the Birdcage."

"The Birdcage?" asked Nightingale. She was sure that her team could hear what they were saying, and knew that this could be very helpful intel.

The man's lip curled. "It's their latest venture. The Birdcage is going to be the most expensive of all the bordellos on the market, and made up of only the finest slaves. They've been building it for a while, and you were their final acquisition."

Nightingale nodded.

"You're not frightened?" asked the girl.

Nightingale smiled very gently at her. "No. I'm not. Now, what are your names?"

"Falcon," said the man, and Nightingale thought it an appropriate name - he was sleek, trim, and indisputably powerful, with ferocity coiled tight just under his skin. Nightingale extended her hand through the bars and he shook it, as if surprised at the gesture.

"Starling," said the woman, and Nightingale's lip curled. She was beginning to see a trend. Bordello owners seemed to choose the most horrendously cliched names for their property. "Are you okay?"

Nightingale realized that Starling was pointing to her face. Nightingale smiled, touching her split lip, letting her fingers climb over the tender bruise spreading over her cheek. "Yeah," she said.

"Did Trevor do that to you?" asked Falcon, as Starling kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to Nightingale's cheek.

"There," said Starling. Her gentle smile nearly broke Nightingale's heart. "All better, now."

"Yes," said Nightingale, in answer to Falcon's question. "Backhanded me. I've had worse."

"What did you do?" he asked.

"Spat in his face," she replied.

Falcon grinned. He reached out and touched Nightingale's face like Starling had. "This is a badge of honour, Gale," he said. After a moment, he went on. "Why aren't you frightened?"

"There's no time to explain," said Nightingale. In a low voice, she went on. "Something's going to happen very soon. I need to you get as far away from the door to your cell as you can. Spread the word, if you can."

Starling nodded earnestly, and vanished back into the gloom. Falcon remained. She spoke to him next. "There's just one guard in the cellblock, right?"

Falcon nodded.

Nightingale nodded. Kneeling down and activated the scrambling device on her anklet. That was the first step.

After a moment, her anklet began to vibrate. It buzzed once, twice, a third, and a fourth time.

Nightingale grinned. It was time.