Phineas chuckled. “I could say the same to you.”
She cocked her head. “Maybe. But I’m not the one whose business depends on such secrets. I’m not the one who stands to lose a substantial amount of power should such secrets appear in, say…” She hummed as if thinking over the possibilities. “The daily paper for all to read? What would happen to your thriving underground then, Phineas? How could you possibly steal secrets when every soul in the city knows yours?”
Silence strummed between them, its final note snagging on their tension.
“And so the hound becomes the wolf,” Phineas said at last, his voice oddly uneven, like he couldn’t keep his vocal cords together.
“Don’t kid yourself. I’ve always been the wolf. You just failed to see my teeth.”
Phineas rested his chin on his hands. “Do you think I never noticed how often you returned to me with blood on your hands? If there is one thing I have never been ignorant of, my dear, it is your capacity to become the monster I know you are.”
She bristled. “That’s the difference between you and me, Phineas. I might become a monster, but you have always been one.”
“Keep telling yourself that. The day you realize it’s a lie, come findme.” Phineas flicked a finger out, the end of which curled with a hard black claw. “I’ll teach you how to sharpen your claws.”
“The deed, if you will,” she growled.
He considered her. “All right, I’ll bend,” he said. “But just this once. Don’t expect me to roll over for you every time.”
She didn’t. She knew, despite the value of the secret she’d uncovered, this was a one-time thing. “But this time, you will.”
Phineas swept his long black hair over one shoulder and from his desk drawer pulled a document. The official House Alakar seal—complete with roaring lion head—glimmered at the top of the page. At the bottom, in his hasty scrawl, Phineas wrote,I, Phineas Wraw, proprietor of the gambling den known as the Siren’s Hair, officially sign over all rights of ownership and profit to—
His hand paused, something cold and slick returning to his lips. “Which name would you prefer I write down? This is a legal document, you know. Using a false name could render the exchange obsolete. Shall I put Théa—”
“You won’t be putting any of my names on it.”
Phineas raised a brow. “Oh? And what name will I be writing?”
“Suri’s.”
Something sharp and hostile flashed across Phineas’s face, but it was gone so quickly she wasn’t sure if it’d been real. And yet when Phineas once again retrieved his pen, his fingers gripped it a tad too tight, and the next lines on the page came out thicker than the ones before, the tip pressed to the paper hard enough to poke through. Still, he finished the sentence as promised.—Suriadne Ender, effective immediately.
Rolling up the parchment, he tossed it to Nes. Her lips tight, she stowed it in a bag at her hip.
When she didn’t move to leave, Phineas asked, “Was there something else?”
She bit her tongue to keep from asking after Keifer Harrow. She yearned to see Phineas’s reaction when she told him his contact had killed himself with her blade, but she had not come to satiate her owncuriosity. She had come both to steal from him and to have him willingly give her what she needed.
This second part was tricky. She’d been confident in the information she had on Phineas, enough to blackmail him. However, the rest was merely speculation.
Phineas had let Damari into the city—the same way he’d brought Nes in years ago. And then Damari had begun stealing large sources of magic all throughout the city. Nes had thought she was the only citizen who knew about the magic in the Prime trees. But she wasn’t. Phineas knew, too.
Phineas hadn’t just let Damari into Gadore; he’d helped her, too, by telling her all the places she could find magic.
“You brought Damari into the city,” she said, “and then gave her all the information you thought she’d need so she could take out the King’s Guard—where to find pure magic, where the most guards would be—thinking if she could kill enough of them, then maybe you could finally get some of the survivors in your pocket.”
Phineas’s only response was to lower his eyelids as if bored.
“But Damari betrayed you, didn’t she?” Nes continued. “When she chose to steal magic from your stores? That’s why you’ve camped out here in the Bark. You want to protect your one remaining source of magic in the city. You suspect she’ll come here looking for more.”
Phineas reached for the ends of his long hair, petting them like they were a fur coat and not the hair on his own head. “Even if all that were true, it has nothing to do with you. As you have so graciously reminded me several times, you don’t work for me anymore.”
“Which is true, but while working for you, I learned a lot about you, Phineas,” she said. “And if there is one thing I know, it’s that you don’t take kindly to betrayal.”
“If I wanted to hear the obvious, I’d go listen to the forecaster on the docks proclaim the current weather.”
“You know Toran and I are after Damari. Help us and you can get your revenge.”
