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I fully planned on making Beck get drunk with me so I could lose my mind Lance was a woman.

Sometimes, people did that in Guttertown and we respected it, but you knew them before and then you knew them after.

Lance had always been Lance. We all grew up together and at no point did I know Lance wasn’t a man. I had a lot of questions.

But first, I had to fix this.

“Do you think you could track Trevils to the Merchant District and bring him here?” I asked Basselt. “We need witnesses they trust.”

“That’s dangerous for Basselt,” she said.

“Look, I don’t know what to call you. Do you prefer Lance? It’s dangerous for everyone if Trevils isn’t here.”

“My name is Lucy but if you can’t call me Lucy in private and Lance in public, then call me Lance. If you’re going to go back to being an arse again, then just don’t talk to me at all.”

I was so confused. We knew Mark as Mark and then she wanted to be Amelia, so we called her Amelia. We always called her Amelia. No one called her Mark anymore, in private or in public. If someone called her Mark behind her back, someone was probably going to whoop their arse.

Still, I could do that. I just needed to know what Lucy preferred.

And I had no intention of things going back to how they were before.

If anything, I needed to explain myself even better than I’d planned before because if I’d known Lance was a girl, I wouldn’t have broken her nose. I was going to have to live with that.

“How much time do I have?” Basselt asked.

“Don’t shift,” I said, because he already said he was faster on four legs. It was too much of a risk. “If he wakes up, I’ll just thump him again. It would be immensely satisfying.”

This man killed countless women and children, but he’d also cut Lucy.

I didn’t know she was Lucy, but I’d been in love with Lance since we were kids.

It didn’t make a difference to me either way what gender she was or what gender she wanted to be.

I’d let her go because I thought we were related, but now that I knew she wasn’t, I was going to make it right and make her mine.

I couldn’t kill the Ghoul because that wasn’t the plan, but I’d love to knock the shit out of him.

I had my next target, too. When she forgave me, I was going to find out who gave her those scars on her torso and really enjoy killing them.