Like before, the bullet lodged itself in the floor. Bryce winked at her, unharmed, and Enne nearly dropped the revolver in shock. No matter what she did, this was one game she could not win.
“Whatareyou?” Levi asked Bryce, though of course, Enne felt they all now knew the answer. In the City of Sin, all of the legends were true.
“I am the secret of the House of Shadows,” he answered.
The peg stopped on the nine, and several others in the crowd dropped dead.
Amid the screams, something in the room shifted in that moment, as though the air had grown sparser, the temperature colder. The strings around them, all at once, pulled taut.
Bryce let out a triumphant howl of laughter and snapped his fingers. The roulette table vanished, and from where it had stood, hundreds of silver Shadow Cards rained down, sweeping across the stage floor. They were Jonas’s counterfeits—the key props to Levi’s plans for tonight. The Fool.
Bryce tossed a final card on top of them, and unlike the others, its foil shined gold. It fluttered as it fell and landed face-up. The Magician.
“There’s a price to keep the devil away,” he murmured, echoing the lines someone else had once uttered to Enne before the Shadow Game. Another villain. Another monster. “Unless you’d prefer they’d come to play.”
And with those words, Bryce disappeared like a wisp of smoke.
A
“My mother was superstitious. Shatz, really. Whenever she got attached to something, she would throw it away. She said that’s how shades find victims—they bind to pieces of you. They need a connection.
“She told me, ‘Evil isn’t random—that’s what makes it
the opposite of goodness. Evil is designed.’”
—A legend of the North Side
LEVI
For the first time in his life, Levi lost his faith in destiny.
The Irons and the other gangs outside had failed. Jonas had been apprehended. Levi himself had nearly died. He’d watched countless others die in front of him, in this ballroom, at the hands of an impossible villain who had disappeared before their very eyes.
This was not glory.
This was not greatness.
He grabbed Enne by the wrist and pulled her toward him. “Down the hallways, past Vianca’s office, through the back entrance,” he hissed, because fleeing was their only option left.
Enne didn’t move. “We couldn’t save any of them.” Her voice was hoarse, and Levi didn’t like the hopeless look in her eyes as she scanned the dead in the room. It wasn’t a look he recognized on her.
“No, we couldn’t,” Levi breathed. Bryce being Vianca’s third omerta felt painfully obvious now. He’d run into Bryce for the first time outside of St. Morse after all. And there’d always been a certain spite in Bryce’s voice when he spoke of the donna—the same spite in Levi’s own.
But he couldn’t dwell on that now. After tonight, the fate of the city dangled by the thinnest of threads.
The ballots were still being counted.
One of the candidates was dead.
The other had openly murdered his mother in public.
And if Levi and Enne didn’t escape before the whiteboots swarmed this casino, then each of them would face the gallows.
“Let’s go,” Levi urged, once again pulling Enne forward. Now that Bryce and his power was gone, the guests had burst through the ballroom’s doors and raced for the exits. Harrison had also slipped out and disappeared within the crowd.
Before he and Enne moved to join them, Levi took one last look at the ballroom. Dozens of bodies littered the floor, discarded like the party favors and the Fool cards. Vianca’s body stared at the violence around her with eyes wide open.
Thishad always been her legacy—blood and betrayal.
