The first thing Sara notices is how little clothes Raphael is wearing. The second is the blood.

“Rapha?” She calls out, flinging open her window as the dog barks at his return. “What happened?”

Rapha says nothing, his figure grasping the doorframe to catch himself as he struggles to stand. Lupe growls, snapping and straining against his leash. Sara meets him on the porch, barefoot, raising a hand to silence Lupe, who opens his mouth and finds himself barkless, ribbon trailing from her wrist like a reddened serpent. She places her arm around Raphael, and carries him inside, to where the stove is still warm, and places him on a chair in the corner.

“Sara…” he whispers.

“Drink first,” Sara says, placing a cup before him.

Rapha brings his head close to the table, not quite trusting his arms to not give out enough to bring it to his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks out as he takes a small sip.

She sighs from the kitchen, preparing a washbasin of cool water and antiseptic. “It’s not your fault, Rapha. Blanca should have come with you.”

Raphael closes his eyes, throat too wrecked to wince when Sara places the cloth to his bloodied body, head too heavy to turn away. Very rarely does he hate this body, save for times like these, where his chest blooms like a prison and bleeds like a prisoner.

“I knew Rosa was sick,” he says, “Blanca needed to stay. There can’t only be one girl in the house.”

Sara exhales slowly. Señora Blanca is not a cruel madam, not in the slightest. She forbids the girls to be on their own in the house for their own safety. She shuts the rooms at 4am sharp, and keeps them all well-fed, well-rested, clean and healthy.

When Rapha had said his new name in the light, only three years after he had begun to work at The Three Soldiers, he was sure he was going to be turned out, and left workless, for where was a former Soldier girl to work beside from the street, where men could do to him as they liked, and pay only in the lack of injury?

He was taken off the floor, as he had expected, and solely did house calls. They may have been riskier, but Blanca never let him go alone, and they paid triple that which he had made working in the house, for there was a novelty to it, and to put it lightly, his clientele paid to cover their curiosity.

“She knows Sebastien is banned after what he did to Rosa,” Sara says, voice thick with frustration. Rosa’s arm had never really healed, and infections came back in waves that Sara’s magic could never fully bury. “And she let you do a house-call unaccompanied?”

Raphael looks at her then. “I owed him. Off the books. Blanca doesn’t know.”