“There’s so much blood.”
Even on her tiptoes, Sophia couldn’t glimpse over the heads. So she shoved her way to the crowd’s front, stomping on toes in her boots, until she stumbled into a puddle of red.
A man’s body lay crumpled on the floor.
His head lay beside it.
Delaney shakily stood over the body. She gazed into the crowd with a terrified, empty expression—as though uncertain where she was—until she laid eyes on Sophia. She lunged forward and grabbed Sophia’s wrist, smearing blood on it.
“I found him like this,” she whimpered. When she looked at the red on her hands, she heaved. “And I just looked for his card. It isn’t on him.”
“Who is it?” Sophia asked. She didn’t recognize the man, and she hadn’t seen so much blood since Charles’s death, impaled on the Luckluster bannister. The sight of it all was making that night rush back to her in painful bursts.Jac. She hated how he was nowhere except during the times she hurt.
“It’s Creighton, the manager,” Delaney choked out. “He was another player. And he was the only one I thought might know how to kill the Bargainer.”
At that moment, Poppy had managed to squeeze to the front of the onlookers. She froze in sight of the gory display, and her whole body recoiled. She clasped her hand to her mouth, ghostly white, and she ugly cried over the stranger as though she knew him. Sophia guessed that Poppy had been near her father when he’d been shot, and no matter what the girl had told her, Poppy was definitely broken.
Delaney moved, but she was also in shock, and so Sophia reached Poppy first. She grabbed her by her narrow shoulders and twisted her around.
Sophia shushed her. “You don’t have to look.”
“Muck,” Poppy wailed, her head buried in Sophia’s shoulder. “I’m the girl who something terrible happened to. That’s...that’s who I am now.”
Sophia stroked her blond hair. “I think we’re both those girls, then,” she whispered hoarsely.
Delaney squeezed Poppy’s shoulder. Her gaze looked someplace else.
“Did the Bargainer do this?” Sophia asked her.
“I doubt they would use a blade.” The comment forced Sophia to look back at the corpse, exactly where the head had been severed. The arterial artery still sputtered out onto the carpet.
“Then we’re leaving,” Sophia said forcefully. “There’s nothing to find here,”
Probably because there was nothing to find at all.
LOLA
Lola did not approve of cabarets.
The Sauterelle was as loud as it was dirty, with a sugarcoated stickiness to the floor from spilled cocktails and its stage lights blurred in the clouds of cigar fumes. Even the private table Arabella had paid for had crude words scratched into its top and lemon wedges and cherry stems crammed in between the booth cushions.
Lola scowled and stirred her drink with the straw. It was a Dead Cat Bounce, the snooty, South Side equivalent of a Gambler’s Ruin—only you ordered it when you had hit a losing streak, not a winning one.Cheer up, urged the whiskey,it can’t get worse than rock bottom.Lola disagreed.
“You don’t like it?” Arabella asked. Lola didn’t hear her at first—she was sitting to Lola’s right and this place was mucking loud—so she had to ask her to repeat herself.
“I’m not in the mood,” Lola grumbled, which was the truth, but only part of it. Lola didn’t handle liquor well, and—call her shatz—she didn’t think it wise to lose her wits around the most notorious legend of New Reynes.
Besides, someone needed to look after her brother.
Justin scowled even deeper than she did. He somehow looked worse now that he’d bathed, all his bruises and scars more obvious without the grime. Now twenty, he resembled their older brother so much it hurt for Lola to look at him.
“I’ll take it,” he offered eagerly, reaching for Lola’s drink.
She slapped his hand—the one handcuffed to hers. “No, you won’t.”
He leaned back and pouted, and Lola considered reminding him for the dozenth time that the Doves had sent him to die. He didn’t care, though. They were his purpose, his family, and she was just the person who made him “weak.”
So rather than look at him, she studied Arabella, who twirled her long necklace of black pearls around her finger, her gaze fixed on the vedette on stage. Even if Lola didn’t trust Arabella, she had somehow stopped fearing her. Which was ludicrous, since Lola was Arabella’s target.
