Your mother is probably dead, he’d say.And without her, I probably will be, too.
Halfway there, it started to drizzle. The rain tasted like smoke.
“Do you want my jacket?” he offered.
“How gentlemanly.”
He slipped it off and draped it over Enne’s shoulders. It swallowed her, made her look like a lost waif as she wandered through the rain. Something in Levi’s chest constricted seeing her in his jacket, something an awful lot like satisfaction. It felt like a dangerous thing.
“Thanks.” She slipped her hands into the pockets and tugged it closer around herself.
“We should have a talk, you and I, when we get back,” he said hoarsely.
She looked up at the dark sky, her expression unreadable. “Can it wait until tomorrow?”
Levi’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Yes. Of course.” More than anything right now, he really needed a decent night’s sleep. If Lourdes was dead, Levi would need to spend the next seven nights earning the volts the only way he knew how: from card table to card table, all across the North Side. If things were different, he’d bring a team of his best dealers with him from the Irons—but that meant telling the Irons the truth, and Levi would rather die in the Shadow Game than have his friends learn how he’d betrayed them.
He’d already dug his own grave, and he wouldn’t bring the Irons down with him.
When they returned to St. Morse, they rode the elevator quietly to their floors. As Enne stepped out to walk to her own apartment, his breath hitched. He didn’t want to spend the night alone. Maybe he could invite her upstairs, pour them each a drink and confide everything to her. He had a feeling she might understand his problems better than anyone.
“Here’s your jacket,” Enne offered, her gaze on the floor. “Thanks.”
Levi took it numbly and slipped it back on. “You don’t need to... I mean, you can come...”
“I’d really like to be alone,” she said.
“Oh. Oh, yeah...of course.” He wasn’t the only one with problems, but apparently Enne didn’t want to share hers tonight.
The elevator’s gate closed, and Levi felt acutely alone.
* * *
Levi found Jac passed out on his couch with a five-inch cut along his right eyebrow, bruised purple and green and stitched up with black thread. The whole room smelled like his aura: light and clean, like he’d opened the window even though it was bolted shut.
Levi shook him awake. Jac sat up with a start and rubbed his eyes.
“Took a nap,” he mumbled.
“Who did those stitches? A blind man?” Levi asked.
“Oh, these?” He pointed to his forehead—as if Levi could’ve been referencing a different wound—and gently touched the scar, flinching. “I did. Last night.”
“That’s not from work, is it?” he asked. Guests at Jac’s tavern, the Hound’s Tooth, could grow rowdy in the early hours of the morning. But sometimes Levi suspected Jac was the one starting those fights. The guests could blame it on liquor. He didn’t know how Jac rationalized it.
“No. Not—”
“I thought you were done boxing.” Levi fought to keep his voice steady instead of stormy. He tried to be patient with his friend, but on nights like this one, it wore at him. Sometimes he felt like no matter how much he helped Jac, it wouldn’t matter until Jac started helping himself. “They always rig those games. Remember the time they slipped you something? You were out over twenty-four hours.”
“Cool it. I didn’t eat or drink anything. And I won. Ten volts. Not bad, eh?”
Levi didn’t bother with a response. He was a breath away from shouting, but he couldn’t tell if it was from anger or simply exhaustion.
Levi sighed and hung his hat on the coatrack. “What are you doing here?” He unbuttoned his jacket.
“I thought I’d check in on you,” Jac replied. “Only a week left. I have one of our runners watching Luckluster—seeing if the Torrens are up to anything unusual—”
“My gun,” Levi blurted, feeling around his empty pockets in alarm. He’d definitely brought it with him earlier that day. He knew better than to traverse the North Side without it. “Muck.My gun’s gone.” Then he remembered the image of a certain missy wearing his jacket, and he panicked.
