Slipping a small key from his belt, he unlocked the door.
Fetching a silver flask from the breast pocket of his cloak—just as he’d done at the Widow Isabel’s, where he’d poured a healthy splash into his tea in case he needed to take a sip for politeness’ sake—he drank a few greedy gulps of whiskey. Licking a drop from his lip, he checked that the street was more or less empty before darting inside.
Served With Love was technically a tea shop, selling brews by the cup as well as bags of blended herbs, but the real businesswent on in the cellar beneath the cozy café. The shop was a front for a network of the Shadow Queen’s agents, a place where they laundered their money and harbored stolen goods with the aim of helping the mysterious, power-hungry ruler secure a stronger foothold in the world. Mal didn’t give a damn about their cause and whether they succeeded or failed, only that they paid better than most other places, and that as long as he got their goods safely to where they were supposed to be, they didn’t ask him too many questions about his personal life. Such as it was.
Tonight, the shop was quieter than usual. Only Alanna—who preferred to go by her chosen name, Guts—was working down below, unpacking crates of contraband by the light of a single lantern. Her ruddy-blond hair fell over her shoulder in a tidy braid, and she was wearing a crisp blue dress with white embroidery on the sleeves, no doubt having worked a shift up front before the place officially “closed” for the day.
Mal had known her since his days in Thrallkeld. She had once run an underground club in the basement of a crumbling stone manor where people fought for prize money, though she seemed to prefer dressing up and playing shopkeeper these days, as if something about selling tea to Mayfair’s citizens appealed to a girlish dream she’d had for her life.
As Mal descended into the cool, dim room, he called by way of greeting, “Think they killed that poor bastard yet?”
“Given that you had a hand in the planning, Mister Dangerous, he’s probably feeding the worms as we speak,” Guts answered, a little laugh in her voice as she pulled something heavy from one of the crates.
With training, Mal had won every fight he’d entered at her club, and when Guts moved up to Mayfair, she’d brought his old nickname with her.
“Well then, tomorrow we’ll be celebrating over dinner,” Mal remarked, a smirk on his lips as he recalled past dinners with hisemployers, no different at all than any other society gathering despite their dirtier hands. “Maybe you’ll get to see how far I can throw a piece of Fern’s dry chicken down May Hill.” He snorted softly. “Bet it bounces.”
Several of the shop’s usual after-hours occupants were out on a mission tonight. They planned to take out someone who knew too much about what went on at the tea shop—probably a nosy Warden, one of those noble knights forever locked in a battle against the Shadow Queen’s forces of darkness.
Bunch of moon-eyed idiots.
It was better, Mal had found, to simply accept the darkness rather than try to fight it and likely die in the process, as whoever his less-than-esteemed colleagues were murdering in the Wyrmwood tonight was finding out. In the dark, one could still live.
Too bad being a hero meant certain death; just look at the parents he had never known. Look at Rhun, the most storied Warden of all. He had been Wynnie’s husband, the man who had helped raise him along with Griff and Alys until he disappeared.
Too bad nobody ever asked for Mal’s opinions on these things. He knew quite a lot for his twenty-six years.
Too bad for whoever was bleeding out right now; Mal had plotted out the attack himself. As usual, he hadn’t been given a name, but he didn’t need one. He had the intended victim’s dates of travel, their course (the Wyrmwood’s best trapping grounds), and their number of companions (one), which was all he needed to make it look like a petty theft. It was one of those neat lessons he had picked up in Thrallkeld that made him so useful here.
Too bad they hadn’t asked him to do the stabbing. Years into his service, yet he wasn’t high enough in the ranks to carry out the job. And they had bigger, tougher thugs for that. Still, he was quick and efficient with his hunting knife and never hesitated. Just like Wynnie. Sure, she wasn’t his real mother, but he had listened to her all these years as if she were—listened and taken her lessons toheart, even when he knew Griff and Alys weren’t paying attention—and he had honed in himself a ruthlessness that made her proud.
Too bad for those on the mission, Mal and Guts would get first pick of everything in these crates. Even if it was all supposed to be loaded onto a caravan headed south toward the Shadow Queen’s hidden stronghold once the contents were inventoried.
“Find anything good yet?” Mal asked Guts, bumping his shoulder against hers with comfortable familiarity before he took a seat on one of the unopened crates and sipped deeply from his flask. The whiskey stung his throat like irony.
“Couple nice bits of crockery. Assorted poisons. Coffee. Some crystal flowers,” Guts listed off as she inspected some small packets of a shimmering, pale-blue powder. Her frown made it clear that she didn’t consider the coffee or flowers much good at all, that she found them about as appealing as the packets of poison she now held in her hands. “They’re dwarven make, though, the flowers. Probably fetch a small fortune from the right buyer. You going to help with any of this or just sit there looking pretty all night?”
Mal shrugged, pulling out one of Isabel’s cookies and taking a stale bite. He laid the rest on the crate so Guts could help herself. “Where are the flowers? I’ll take them if you don’t,” he said, starting to search around for them.
Guts flipped her braid over her shoulder, cut him a knowing look, and set the packets of poison aside. Then she pulled out a bundle wrapped in heavy muslin cloth from the crate and started to unwrap it with the air of presenting Mal with the spoils from another winning fight. A few of the amethyst petals had small chips and scratches, but most of the flowers were in excellent shape to his trained eye.
The part of him that loved shiny things wanted to tuck them into his tattered green jerkin alongside his flask, take them home to his shelf of other such glittering trophies nicked by his quickfingers here and there over the years. Amongst the flowers, there were even a few carved animals, the detailed grooves of their fur as realistic as only dwarven craft could be.
“How ’bout that,” Guts said softly, plucking one of the small animals from the meadow of muslin and petals and holding it aloft. It was a griffin. “Just like the mark tonight: Griffin. Must be a sign you did something right.”
She pressed the smooth crystal carving into Mal’s hand, but his fingers didn’t wrap around it like he meant them to. He couldn’t make out what Guts was saying either—something about how he ought to take this home. How he’d earned it.
The statue slid from his slick palm and shattered on the floor, but rather than curse and grab a dustpan, Mal grabbed his flask and drained it, willing the whiskey to burn every last feeling out of him. “Kage told you his name, did he? The boss sharing insider secrets with you now?” Griffin wasn’t exactly a common name, but still, he had to be sure before the nauseating wave of agony rising up inside him could completely devour him. “Griffin … Sayer, was it?”
It had been so long since he had spoken that name out loud to anyone.
“Dunno,” Guts said, uncertainty slithering across her face as she took in the crumbs of glass on the floor in combination with Mal’s shaking hands. “Some hero’s son, he said. I was eavesdropping from inside the tea cupboard when they were gearing up to leave, so I didn’t catch everything. Anyway, what’s it matter? It’s done.Youdon’t have to fight him. I’m more worried about you damaging the merchandise.”
He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Guts prompted again, “Mal?” No nickname, which was unusual. He wondered if she could sense it in him, the crack that had just opened to let a little of the pain he’d been drowning in for so long scream into the world again.
She was right. HewasMister Dangerous, and there wasn’t a damn thing to admire about it. He didn’t want any of this, this sudden, crushing guilt that made it a battle just to breathe. He’d had no idea that Griff was the target of the attack, or he would have insisted on going with them. Insisted just so he could slit every single one of their throats before they had a chance to raise a blade against the man who had once been his best friend, who still mattered to him even though Mal had done everything he could to strip Griff’s existence of any meaning in his life.
Griff and Alys were his world.
