Page 39 of Undead Gods


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The ox of a man next to her knocked her elbow. “Your turn, little lady.”

Ew.She smiled and followed the first player’s lead. Two cards. No win, no loss, no gems.

Elysia started observing the players rather than her pathetic cards. The furthest man remained hunched, hiding both his hand and his face. A woman with a pinched expression and brows permanently bunched had her knee bouncing beneath the table as if her body fought the urge to run away.

And then there was Scarzan.

His former smugness had been wiped clean, leaving his face unnervingly blank. The corner of his lips kicked up as he played a few cards, and he lifted his eyes to hers, daring her to notice the groundwork he was laying.

Elysia clamped down on the instinct to flinch or let any kind of fight rise up in her eyes, and instead lazily re-directed her attention to the cards he had played.Why is he looking at me like that?

Understanding settled like a weight around her neck.Shit.

Rocks was a complicated game. It wasn’t solely your own cards that mattered, but how the cards all played together andagainst each other. Scarzan’s cards took her lifeless throwaways and turned them into a play that scored him a gross amount of points. He was using her poor hand to taunt her.

The dread Elysia felt earlier returned as a terrible knowing. He was not playing simply to win the game, but rather to win her. Any magic induced delusion of gaining another secret from this man had gone silent. Her eyes shot between her cards to the other players, trying her damndest to dig herself out of this hole. But Scarzan pulled further and further away in the lead, leaving it impossible for someone else to win.

And so the rounds went, with Elysia making feeble attempts to play herself out and Scarzan boosting her cards to keep her alive. He was toying with her. He could just let her play out and still choose her as the prize as was the winner’s right to choose from the lot, but the game had become a hunt, and like any prey she began to think that if she could not fight, then she should run.

Elysia slid her eyes to the door and wondered how much the House wasreallygoing to care if she dared to break their sacred rules and escape from Scarzan’s clutches. It would be terrible to get away only to end up dead on the beach. Would there be men and women with hoops down their ears chasing her into the streets? She wished she had bothered to find out if the House’s servants were the pretty type of decoration for wandering eyes or the kind that hid knives and tricks in their sleeves.Both, of course, she answered her own question with an internal sigh.Gods, I’m an idiot.

She had never dared explain what was really happening when she lost herself in the thrall to Gage—that it was magic and not some unquenchable thirst for the poison of this city. He’d told her over and over again that she needed a lifeline, an anchor if she couldn't keep her head while out on jobs. She always blamed it on the sweet surge of excitement and curiosity thatmade her head swirl and feet feel light. Pointed out that plenty of men lost their heads from something similar in fights and such.

But right about now, she was wishing she had taken his advice to heart.

She’d never thought it was that serious.

Except now it was, and with each hand played, she realized she would not be unearthing any more life-ruining secrets or happening upon the perfect blackmail before the game’s end. A cloud of shame darkened within her chest.How could I be this stupid?Her magic had gotten the better of her, and it was no one’s fault but her own for thinking herself invulnerable. The shame burned, turning her thoughts to the shoulds and woulds of it all.I shouldn’t have pissed Gage off. He would have helped.

Sure, she’d barely smuggled herself out of stuffy apartments that she didn’t quite remember slipping into and donned aprons to slide out of kitchen doors of homes she’d rather forget, but in truth there had always been a part of herself that loved it. A part that laughed with its head thrown back and hands stuck to her hips with the invincibility of someone who had never been caught. It was the part of her that did not have to be Elysia Parker, daughter of the Crown, but was instead allowed to be something so very, very different.

She hadn’t blinked when Augustus Freer chuckled as he ordered the death of his first wife. Just like she hadn’t blinked when her father let it happen because no one would have cared about a murder that wasstopped. No, he needed something irrefutable. Like the bloody corpse of Freer’s wife to hold over the man’s head for the next twenty years.

She had not quaked when she hid a breath away in a wine cask from the bloodletters as they did their work.

She had not cried when her father repeatedly threatened to turn her into a bloodhound for the cursed folks of their land whenever she dared balk at his demands.

She had watched the life fade out of the men who had threatened her with an almost detached, clinical type of understanding. They had harmed women in unspeakable ways, they had wanted to harm her, and now the undead gods delivered them a mercy in killing them before they could further besmirch their souls.

It was important for her to remember that she was not a good person. Sometimes she almost forgot, but then there were nights like these to remind her of what she had known since she was child who could not stop her feet from finding others just like her. Those people were dead now. But she wasn’t.

The Crown was a jagged thing, dripping in blood that was not its own, but that was how it survived—it took that blood and made itself stronger. This was its lesson to all its children.

Her magic had bested her. But she would not be anyone’s prize this evening nor any other.

A man like Scarzan wouldn’t take losing lightly. He would take it out on more than one woman in this House. And she knew that. Somewhere deep in her gut, she knew he would lash out, violating the women of this House for her escape. But it didn’t change what she was going to do.

It couldn’t.

She sat loosely in her chair, with an almost girlish naivete in the soft lines of her face and the wide set of her eyes. Yet if anyone bothered to pay even the smallest amount of attention, they would realize her languid posture, her countenance—none of it matched her wine-drenched hair or the daggers she couldn’t quite kill from her eyes.

Behind her false serenity, Elysia realized she had never in all her schemes truly felt afraid until now. Not like this.

Her fear told her several things.

First was that it was pertinent for her to remember the violence beneath Scarzan’s sallow skin.

Second was that the crescendo of this evening’s song had not been the secret that so easily jumped from his arrogant lips. It was the now unescapable knowledge that she wanted to kill this man. Perhaps she simply had a sore spot for shitty fathers who peddled out their daughters for their own ends, but more than that, it was how when she looked into his eyes she saw everything that was wrong with her world. Beyond her disgust and vicious desires, she had the strange premonition that he was going to become a nuisance if he wasn’t handled properly.