He raised his bottle in a salute.“That you do.”Leering, he raked her with his gaze.“Offer’s open if you ever want to try a real man instead of your pretty boys.”
“Why,” she drawled, “do you know a real man I might be interested in?”
“Cute.”He chuckled, unbothered.“The fans love you.”
“Always have.”
“Today’s purse was… five-hundred silvers?”
He knew it was.“Something like that,” she allowed with a shrug, as if she didn’t much care.
He pointed the bottle at her.“What if I told you I could offer you a gig for one-hundred times that, for just twenty-four hours of your time.”
Cha had to fight to keep her ears from visibly pricking up at that princely sum.Good thing they weren’t pointed like a fae’s.Folding her arms, leaning back against the massage table, she crossed her ankles and shook her head.“You can offer me a thousand times that and the answer is still no.I’ve gone legit.”Though, a thousand times that would be, um,a lot.Math wasn’t Cha’s strong suit, but a lot of zeroes was always good when it came to money.
“No, you haven’t.The day the Bandit goes legit is the day I give all my coin away and become a monk.”
If only.“You’re splitting hairs.Dy has definitely gone straight and I’m dead in the water without her.Same difference.”
“Dy only went legit because that wife of hers keeps having babies.”
Cha raised a brow.“So?”
“So, twenty-five thousand silvers will feed a lot of babies, for a very long time.”
“It’s not only a matter of feeding the babies.”Cha had argued herself blue in the face with Dy over exactly this.When Dy was still speaking to her, that was.“Phinny wants a steady family life, her wife home every night, and a partnership she can count on.Not Dy running contraband while half the human principalities want to toss her in jail or hand her over to the fae for even worse punishment.”
“Ironic,” Otto snorted, draining the bottle, “since Phinny was Goldilocks’s biggest fangirl, back in the day.”
“Yeah, well, chasing the rainbow and sitting happily on the crock of gold are two different things.”
“Phinny’s not getting to play with her crock much with Dy out on the commercial lines six days a week on cargo runs.”
Cha blinked at him, then gave in and grabbed another ale for herself.Since she clearly wasn’t getting rid of Otto anytime soon, she graciously tossed him another.Company was company.“I’m losing track of the metaphors, here.What’s your point?”
“We both know that you can talk Dy into it.The pair of you go way back, long before Phinny shook her bodacious ta-ta’s at our blushing sorceress.”
That much was true—at least the going way back part.Cha and Dy had met in school, two black sheep who quickly discovered a shared love of shenanigans.Like all humans capable of wielding or manipulating magic, they both had a bit of fae blood in their families.With Dy’s sorcerous ability to alter or even create entirely new ley lines combined with Cha’s extraordinary ley-riding skills, they’d begun a tidy business of smuggling minor contraband to the other students.They eventually escalated to acquiring more expensive magical supplies their instructors needed or coveted.What started as mischief turned into a lucrative career, one that provided excitement, made them decent coin, and garnered them enough enthusiastic groupies to get them both laid consistently.That was all either of them had wanted for a good run of years.
Until Dy fell in love and got married.Something Cha still couldn’t quite wrap her head around.
“I can’t talk Dy into anything anymore,” Cha said.“And that’s if Phinny even lets me onto the property.”Which she wouldn’t.Not after the chicken incident, and that was nearly two years before, not long after their fifth kid was born.Granted, Phinny had been dealing with some postpartum crankiness, but that had been the straw to shoot her clean over the edge into banning Cha from the property.You’d think Cha getting Dy arrested in Obsidian that time would have been the deal-breaker, but no: it had come down to the death of a single chicken.Though how was she supposed to have known Phinny had put out her prize hen to hunt the newly hatched bugs on a day Cha happened to stop by and Katu was feeling peckish?
“Ah.”Otto nodded sagely.“You got old and soft.I should’ve realized.”
“Screw you.”
“Lazy, with the cushy tourney circuit.”
“Hey, I work hard, asshole.”She resisted the urge to suck in her stomach, which did feel a bit softer these days.Too much ale.Too little incentive to keep in shape.
“You work too hard for five hundred silvers when you could have a hundred thousand.”
Cha looked at the bottle in her hand, wondering if she’d misheard the number via the wishful haze of strong ale.“Say again?”She might not be great at math, but she had a good memory for payouts and this one had just gone up substantially.
“You heard me.Fifty thousand for each of you, twenty four hours of your time.Boom.Done.Danglethatin front of Dy and she’ll listen.”
Maybe.Maybe not.And Cha would still have to get past Phinny.Still, that was a lot of coin.Knowing she’d likely regret it, she set aside her pride and good sense and succumbed to temptation.Wouldn’t be the first time.“What’s the job?”
