Elysia shoved open the office window and stuck her head out. No impossibly slippery and soot-covered Kavian roof could have ever prepared her for this. Pulling her head back inside, she danced in place, shaking her hands out.I can do this. I have to do this.She was still standing there, putting off the inevitable, when a key caught in the front door.
Shit.
Elysia threw herself out the window, hanging off the roof as she weaseled the window back shut. The last dangling bit of her was just disappearing out of sight onto the roof when voices grew louder. The cold metal was frozen with ice and snow, leaving her with damn near nothing to hang onto.
Hands and feet steadily turning numb, Elysia considered the tree branches around her. If her hands grew so frozen they couldn’t grip, her safest bet was to launch herself at a tree and hope for the best.
Voices carried out through the bare crack she had left in thewindow, recognition startling her to the point her body jerked. Elysia scrambled to gain purchase as she slid toward the edge. Bare feet catching against the sharp metal edge of the roof, she scooted her ass back up. Her feet were already painfully numb, and she knew they were going to be a bloody mess before the night was over. As if her feet weren’t already scarred enough.
Elysia gripped the roof tighter this time as she listened and waited to hear the voices again. Because if her ears didn’t deceive her, then she was about to unleash her holy wrath.
Familiar, addictive anger coiled tighter and tighter in her chest. Hot and heady, she wanted to fly in through the window and kick her beloved sister in the cunt. The woman had expanded toBellia?
Elysia growled silently, her frozen fingers flexing against the roof. At least she wouldn’t feel it when she punched her sister in the fucking face. And if Gage knew about this, she’d chop his balls off. It was one thing to supply weapons, it was another to send her overly confident and underprepared sister into danger. And after she was done with Gage, she’d kill Beatriz for getting her friends involved in this shit. Leashing her anger, she listened, taking in the details of Beatriz's new game plans.
She called it twenty-one. A game of magical roulette where every spin was a gamble. Spot seventeen promised a beauty elixir that erased every line and blemish, but slot nineteen would fix the contestant with a body-wide green rash that smelled like fish. Each spin completed offered the contestant more money, but they had to reach certain spins to keep their cash. Make it to spin five and keep ten thousand. Make it to spin eleven and get twenty thousand, but only spin nine? Back to ten thousand. The grand prize for completing all twenty-one spins was a hundred thousand in Bellian currency. The closer you got to winning, the more dangerous the game became, and considering the contestants had to sign a waiver allowing for death and injury, the stakes were certainly high. Beatriz finished her spiel by remindingMaspan that the game would be updated monthly, keeping the prizes fresh and the game new.
Elysia wanted to bang her head against the roof. How in the realms was her sister producing this kind of design inKava?The kingdom where even if you had magic it didn’t work correctly.
Beatriz wrapped up her presentation, and Elysia could practically feel her sister’s smug certainty all the way up on the roof. Everything about her closing remarks screamed she knew this was a done deal.
But there was that second voice again.
Yes, she was going to kill her sister for getting Remy involved.
If her sister wanted to run her harebrained magical black market in a city where it could get her executed, that was her choice. But Remy Peraldine was better than Beatriz’s bullshit, and it boiled Elysia’s blood to think Beatriz had somehow bullied her into helping with this mess.
Yet it was Remy’s voice that rang out smooth as silk, finessing the finer details of the deal. Soothing Maspan’s jagged complaints as if she could just run her manicured fingers over their edges and dissipate them into the evening air.
Elysia began to struggle to hold on to the roof, blood dripping from her frozen bare feet. She cringed as she watched the dark red droplets bead and fall, hoping against hope that they didn’t splatter against the window. Straining to listen over the wind to the now quiet murmurs, Remy reviewed numbers while Maspan gave grunts of affirmation.
What her sister didn’t realize was that dealing with Maspan was less roulette and more certain death. If they had bothered to study their mark, then they would have known this was a man who had dealt far longer in blood and broken bones than he had sky-high clubs, and he hadn’t gotten to where he was now without relying on old skills.
The wind shrieked through the trees now, and the eerie sense of foreboding pulling on her navel grew stronger than Elysia couldbear. That man didn’t have any intention of paying for something he could simply take, and she wasn’t about to let her sister and oldest friend die in the middle of the godsforsaken Endless Forest over the dumbest game she’d ever heard of in her life.
Elysia relaxed her frigid muscles, lamenting the enormous tear that occurred as her dress caught on the ice as she slid back down to the roof’s edge. Hunkered down in a dangerous squat, she gripped the roof’s edge and waited.
The clinking of glasses. Liquid splashing over rims. And finally the toast.
“To my club’s newest centerpiece.” Maspan’s deep tones carried easily out into the night.
Elysia dropped silently into a dead hang, ramming the window upward with her bleeding feet and sailing inside. She was almost standing when Maspan’s giant fist slammed straight into Beatriz’s face. Her sister crumpled, flying back into a cabinet before sliding down to the ground, dazed but still conscious.
Her gaze flicked away. Elysia knew she couldn’t help her now. Vision narrowing to the beast of a man in front of her, the sweet clarity of a fight flowed through her. This arrogant piece of shit had planned to kill people she loved. Any lingering remorse over the Reyezes’ requests disappeared as she ripped two blades free, ready to face the man in front of her.
Maspan straightened, and Elysia dropped into a slide that delivered her perfectly to the back of his knees. Blades in an X, she sliced efficiently, bringing him down to the floor.
Elysia staggered to her feet, memories of practicing with Gage flitting through her mind. How he’d forced her to learn how to butcher animals—to practice the unique force and angle required for a throat versus knee. She’d had to learn the feel of slicing through tendons and cartilage rather than the softness of flesh.
Because of those lessons, her mark crashed onto his palms, bleeding out from the backs of his legs. She could hear Remy and someone else beyond the rush in her ears, but she wasn’t done. Elysia stomped on his wrist, forcing him to drop the knife he hadpulled out, and crouched down to where he made guttural noises as he shuddered. Elysia watched curiously as his teeth shortened and lengthened.
“You’re a shifter,” she said quietly without emotion. “I’ve never seen someone shift.”
Rage filled his eyes, but she didn’t care. Her blade caressed his face as she whispered. “I’ve met the face of death, and now you’ll meet him too.”
One more quick draw of her knife, and her mark had been dispatched. Elysia pulled a coin out of her pocket, slipping it in between his teeth. Religious she was not, but she knew it was tradition, and she wanted to be sure this asshole got to meet Grim and Aidan.
The girls were squawking, but Elysia’s skin still vibrated and the violence inside her was turning hollow. Slowly, she wiped her blade on her no-longer-beautiful dress. She looked at her feet, not yet feeling the true extent of pain she knew she would once she came down.
