Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
I raised an eyebrow at the balls on this arsehole. He’d just found out that he was sitting in a cell right beside a member of the most infamous gang in the entire city and he hadn’t even batted an eyelash.
Thirty-nine thieves? Pfft. He’d be laughing on the other side of his face come nightfall when my gang came to get me out.
“You know, you don’t have to be embarrassed,” I said, leaning against the bars to look at him, my stomach writhing as I pushed against the iron, fighting the instinct to recoil from the foul substance in favour of getting a closer look at my new cellmate.
“I know it can be intimidating to come face to face with a real-life legend.”
Someone had gone to town on him, that was for sure, and his muscular body was a mess of cuts and bruises from his session in the torture chamber.
There were a few burns too and he hissed between his teeth as he repositioned himself against the filthy wall.
I wondered what he’d done to earn that kind of punishment.
The guards had been pretty pissed at me when they’d brought me in here, but I hadn’t suffered more than a few kicks and shoves.
Maybe he was a real bad son of a bitch. Though I’d met more than a few nasty fuckers in my lifetime, and I couldn’t say he had the look of a killer in his eyes.
Nah, not a killer, but he was something alright.
I just needed to figure out if it was something I could make use of.
“ If you were a legend, I’m sure I would have heard of you before,” he replied dismissively and if I wasn’t mistaken, he wasn’t even bullshitting me.
He really had no fucking idea who I was.
And here I’d been thinking that my name was known all over this cesspit of a city from the dregs of the slums to the emperor’s table itself.
So that was my infamy bubble well and truly burst.
Cunt.
I pushed my hair back out of my eyes as I surveyed him.
It was hard to gauge from his position slumped on the floor, but I’d have guessed he was as tall as me.
He was powerfully built which made me think he either ran the streets like I did, or he held a job which required the use of his muscles.
But seeing as he’d neither heard of me nor had a look of rampant hunger and perpetual poverty about him – as proven by the untouched crust of bread in the corner of his cell – I was going to go with some sort of tradesman.
Lucky fucker probably had an Affinity which kept him in the good books of those upper Fae arseholes.
“You a blacksmith?” I guessed as I eyed the calluses on his palms. A man as big and strong as him didn’t just end up in his kind of physical condition through luck alone, and there weren’t all that many professions which he could hold to have earned that kind of strength.
“No,” he replied, looking at me in a way that made me feel like he was sizing me up too.
He didn’t offer me any further explanation as to his profession either, and my suspicions only grew.
What reason would he have for hiding it?
Then again, there was one reason which I could think of easily enough, though the mere thought left a bad taste in my mouth.
His earthy brown hair was carefully cropped short in the kind of way that suggested someone else had cut it for him and even in his injured state, he was maintaining a stick up the arse kind of posture.
People where I came from either let their hair grow endlessly or did as I did and took a pair of scissors to it ourselves when we had to, leaving messy, uneven strands – though I preferred to think of mine as roguishly dishevelled.
But if he’d been making use of a barber, that meant either he had money or. ..
“You’re a guard,” I stated, my lip curling back with distaste.
Just my luck to be stuck here with a damn lawman.
I almost suspected some kind of trap. Maybe he’d been put here to find out about me and the rest of The Forty.
But no one was so committed to his job to have endured the kind of beating he’d clearly taken.
So he was a guard who had done something worthy of this punishment.
Maybe that meant he wasn’t all bad, or maybe it meant he was the worst of the worst. There were more than a few royal guards who liked to take their tempers out on Fae from the slums after all.
There was one mean fucker in particular who liked to come swaggering down to the whore houses in my part of town and leave the women beaten and bleeding when he was done.
Nothing could be done about it. And that was the kind of thing which made us all hate them so much – not because they worked against our criminal inclinations, but because they abused their power and position as frequently as they could.
I eyed the view out of the small, barred window on the wall opposite my cell.
Not that I could see anything other than the sky.
Endless, open sky like the kind that always shone over Osaria.
We had three kinds of weather here; hot, really fucking hot and sweat-your-balls-off-and-light-your-arse-on-fire-if-you-sit-on-the-sand hot.
The sky was paling to a soft kind of sapphire now, so I guessed it was closing in on sunrise.
I’d have to wait for nightfall again before the thieves would come for me, which meant I had time to kill.
“You got anything to say to that?” I pushed, eyeing my new friend again. “You gonna try and deny it? Seems to me like I’ve called it right. You’re the chewed up, spat out remains of a royal guard.”
“And you’re a criminal,” he grunted, giving in to my request for some kind of conversation. “Of the worst kind, if what I’ve heard about your pals is true.”
“They’re not my pals,” I replied in disgust. If he’d heard of The Forty, then he’d have heard of our brutal and merciless reputation too, and he would be a damn fool to believe that such men and women cohabited like a bunch of merry besties, all living the life of our dreams and getting on like a house on fire.
The Den was a viper’s pit, infested by the worst of Fae kind, and any idiot worth his salt should have known that full well without needing a guided tour of our depravity.
“They’re my gang. Honestly, it’s like you’re trying to piss me off with this nonsense.
You admitted that you know who they are even if you’re still trying to convince yourself you’ve never heard of me .
Which means you know full well what they’re capable of even if you’ve only heard a few whispers here and there. So just cut the shit.”
“Well, your gang are a bunch of cutthroats,” he said with a sneer, looking me up and down in that holier than thou way which all of the guards had perfected so well.
For a group of Fae who had supposedly sworn an oath to protect all of Osaria’s people, they sure were a judgemental, superior bunch of motherfuckers who did little to nothing for the sake of those of us living outside the royal circle – especially those of us dwelling within the slums.
“Not true. We don’t kill our marks,” I said casually, shifting so that my shoulder was leaning against the bars of my cage and continuing to ignore the way the iron made me feel like I might puke at any moment.
I knew well enough how to fake it and I wouldn’t ever let anyone see when I was rattled.
Besides, iron or not, for some reason this Fae intrigued me and I wanted to know a little more about him.
I was willing to offer him something about me in return, and what I’d told him really was the truth.
Egos didn’t like us killing the people we stole from.
It drew way too much attention that way.
So I wasn’t lying when I said we didn’t kill our marks, for the most part.
I didn’t anyway. At least not intentionally.
Generally speaking. And none of the thieves had admitted to killing anyone at all in nearly three weeks.
Six if you discounted Egos killing Tyros - which in a way, you could, because one of our own dying wasn’t the same as a mark taking the hit.
And Tyros had turned out to be a lying sack of shit who’d tried to sell us out to the Royal Guard, so his death had been more like justice than murder.
I’d stood back and watched as Egos ripped him limb from limb, and I hadn’t felt a single ounce of pity over his fate.
If he’d had his way, all of us would have been wrapped up in chains and awaiting the hangman’s noose already.
“That’s not what they say about you in the palace,” he muttered, clearly not believing me, and that might have actually been smart because I was a silver-tongued son of a bitch and lies were my third favourite thing in all the world. Coming only after food and fucking.
“You worked in the palace?” I asked, a groan very nearly escaping my lips as I tried to hide my eagerness for information on that most forbidden of places.
Every day for as long as I could remember, I’d looked upon the palace walls with the greatest sense of longing. It was my dream to breach the iron gates, scale the stone parapets and steal the crown jewels right out from under the emperor’s nose.
I’d look so fucking good in a crown.
I’d dress myself in riches then go find myself a nice girl to worship my cock while calling me her king – after eating my body weight’s worth of palace-worthy food, of course.
“I did,” he said with a faint frown which let me know he didn’t like the interest I held about the place.
But shit, wouldn’t I like to learn what he knew about the inside of the palace.
Those white walls had been equally calling my name and mocking me tirelessly for as long as I could remember.
It was the only place in the kingdom I had yet to conquer with my light fingers and empty pockets, and one day I was certain I’d find a way inside. Maybe I just had.