The Pain Trade

Six years of watching people deteriorate should have broken Emil Forsberg's conscience long ago. As a receptor handler at one of the city's most prestigious pain-transfer clinics, he feeds, monitors, and manages the bodies that absorb wealthy clients' suffering — prisoners, debtors, the stateless, all legally designated to carry agony that isn't theirs. Emil has made peace with the work, until a new receptor named Katya Riedel arrives with her mind still intact and her questions impossible to ignore. What she reveals about the ward beneath the clinic will change everything Emil thinks he knows about pain, complicity, and what the broken want from those who looked away.