Chapter Two
LOLA
Enzo’s eyes meet mine. “We’ll both shoot on one, two . . .”
“We can’t shoot them,” I say, images of the bullet hole in my nursemaid’s forehead flashing through my mind.
“Yeah, the lady’s right, you can’t shoot us,” my victim pipes up.
“You shut it,” I snap, shoving the pistol harder against his head.
“What?” Enzo says, exasperated. “Why the depths not?”
“Because that is something my father would do.”
Enzo purses his lips, mopping a hand over his face with his free hand.
“You know what else is something your father would do? Use every single bit of information he can get out of these two goons to track us down. Who we are, what we’re up to, what we look like.
You want to put us all in danger because you’re afraid to pull a trigger? ”
I glare. “I’m not afraid to pull a trigger.”
“Then pull it.”
“We are better than him, Enzo,” I retort. “We don’t have to sink to his level.”
“What if I want to, though?”
I hold his gaze, jaw hard. Frustration blisters from him in our heart, a twisting that’s become all too familiar the past four months as he’s tried to give me a looser rein, let me take the lead sometimes, and treated me more like one of his Tentacles and less like the prisoner I was for so long.
He sighs. “What do you propose we do instead?”
“We don’t have to kill them to keep them quiet,” I say.
“It’s safer for all of us if they’re dead,” Jade adds, eyes darting back and forth between Enzo and me. “St. James’s men have been showing up at more and more of our heists. They’re catching on to our patterns. He’s not going to give up looking for you.”
Enzo nods. “Jade’s right.”
I can’t compromise the Tentacles, but after all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through, I also cannot be like my father, like Hildebard, like Ostena .
. . willing to trample people to death on my way to my own goals.
For so long, I refused to see the rubble in my wake because I wanted to believe in my own goodness.
But Nic’s words from the tournament echo in my ears now, as close and as soft as though he’s whispering them against my cheek.
Claiming you haven’t hurt anyone just because you haven’t allowed yourself to see that hurt is humankind’s favorite self-deception.
The man beneath me wrenches my leg sideways, sending me skidding to the floor as he rips a blade from his belt.
Enzo lunges, finger flexing on the trigger.
“No!” I shout, leaping to knock the pistol from his grasp as the man’s blade grazes my ribs.
“What the depths?” Enzo says, but I’m already wheeling around, planting my heel in the man’s groin. He yowls, and I tear the blade from his hands and point it at both him and his companion.
“You don’t want them to talk?” I say to Enzo, chest heaving. “Then steal their speech soullight. All of it. Just please don’t kill them.”
“Their speech soullight?”
“Between the two of them they probably have sixty years’ worth of words left. Should last you until at least next week.”
But Enzo doesn’t laugh. He’s staring at the men, eyes distant like he’s looking far away to some other time, some other place. “I’d rather shoot them,” he says softly, and in his heart, a deep terror yawns wide enough to swallow us both whole.
“There’s already been too much blood. Please, Enz.” I glance at Jade. “This can work.”
She grimaces but doesn’t protest.
Enzo grits his teeth, then nods once and crosses to the men, pressing thumbs stacked with empty voratium rings to the bare skin at their throats.
It takes a full minute to draw out all their speech soullight, and it fills up every single empty voratium ring Enzo has, two heavy voratium chains, and a chunk of voratium from his pocket.
“The guards are coming back,” Soren’s voice comes across the radio again. “Everything all right, boss?”
“On our way.” Enzo’s words are stiff, and he won’t meet my eyes. As soon as he’s done with the speech, he drags out what must be strength soullight, and the two intruders collapse. Then he turns away. “Come on.”
We bolt back into the laboratory to retrieve the diffuser.
The door to the stairwell slams open behind us, and shouts echo down the hall.
“Go dark!” Enzo leaps out the window, rippling into noncorporeality, and I use my tattoo to vanish as I climb onto the sill behind him.
“I’m out of space in my tattoo!” Jade cries.
I whirl as both guards leap after her. One catches her ankle, and they hit the floor in a heap.
Not on my watch.
I pull a handful of explosive-infused voratium pebbles Jade gave me earlier with the fancy boots and gloves.
I hurl them in a fistful at the guards’ shoes.
Fireworks explode around their ankles, and they whoop, lurching back, pistols skittering across the tile as Jade scrambles to grasp my hand.
Using my tattoo to turn us both back into shadows, I pull her with me through the window, tumbling to land on the grass next to Enzo, and together we dash to where Isla is parked on the north curb.
Footfalls stomp behind us, and gunshots fire as we land in the back seat where Arden and Soren are already waiting. Tires squeal, and soon we’re hurtling through the city.
“You two all right?” Enzo asks as I release Jade and we regain our physicality.
“Yeah,” I say, breathing hard.
Enzo grimaces, still avoiding my eyes. “Good. Let’s get back to the Brig.”
“Nearly there,” Isla says from the front seat as she swings the motorcar into Waterside.
“Actually,” I say with a nod at Jade, “Jade and I had plans tonight, remember? Can you drop us here, Isla?”
Enzo nods. “Oh, right,” he says, “of course.”
Isla pulls to the curb. Jade shoves open the door and clambers out.
I glance back at Enzo, reaching out to touch the side of his face as that still-yawning terror bleeds through our heart. “Thank you. For not shooting them.”
His smile is feeble. “Anything for you, Louse.”
I give a mock-scowl. “I’m going to let that one slide. Just this once.”
“You do that.” He shoos me out, and the motorcar squeals away.
I shuffle to Jade, who waits in the shadows beneath an awning. I check my watch. My stomach bottoms out when I catch sight of the time.
“You’re going to be late for your gran,” I say.
But I’m not worried about her gran. It’s nearly midnight, which means I have only eight minutes to get ten blocks south to a nightclub called Luxuria for an appointment neither Jade nor any of the other Tentacles know about.
Luckily, this has become something of a regular occurrence for us—me using Jade’s visits to her ailing grandmother as a cover to search for the answers the Unbreakable Lie won’t let me get from Enzo.
So, despite the fact that Enzo has instated a rule that none of us can go out on our own, Jade doesn’t bat an eye at my urgency to separate.
“Gran will get over it.” Jade grins. “Thanks for saving my ass. And good use of the poppers.”
“I want more of those. They were incredible.”
“Sure.” She shuffles away. “Meet you back here in an hour or so?”
“You got it.” I toss a wave in her direction and jog down the street. Once I’m sure she’s no longer looking, I drag in Enzo’s magic—finally available now that he’s gone—to render myself noncorporeal and plunge into a full-on sprint.
The blocks whizz by, and exactly six minutes later, I turn onto the road where casinos and nightclubs and cabarets blare music into the night, their lights dusting the clouds in gold and red.
The Liar’s Den stands tall and dark and empty, as it has since the day after I won the tournament, when rumors spread like wildfire about its sudden closing and the disappearance of its violet-eyed owner.
What was once a dazzling spectacle on the shore has become nothing more than a shadow.
A husk. I hate the way grief curdles in my veins when I see it like that.
Like it’s not the casino that died, but rather the man who ran it.
But he’s not dead. He just didn’t want me.
And now he’s gone to who knows where, and I still have no answers.
I cross to the other side of the street, picking up my pace until I cannot see the Liar’s Den anymore.
When Luxuria comes into view, my heart skips double-time.
Its deep blue lights reflect on a sidewalk still damp from an afternoon rain, and music thrums from the live band performing within.
Keeping a firm grip on Enzo’s magic, I slip past the bouncers, ease among writhing bodies on the dance floor, and skirt around to the exclusive rooms in the back.
Then, steeling my nerves, I mist through a set of burly men and the locked black door behind them.
The music cuts away to a distant murmur.
I tiptoe down the stairs and flit through a second door. A wide, empty room opens up before me. Well, empty except for one tall, broad-backed man facing away from me. The man I came here to see.
Turning my attention to my bracelet, I pull a trail of magic from Nic this time.
It rushes in, lush and cold, and my heart throbs at the way it feels like his fingertips dragging through the marrow of my bones, like the taste of his breath filling my lungs, like the thrum of his laugh pumping in my blood.
But the magic isn’t distant, the way it’s been these past months. It’s present. Close. Vibrant and terrible and so achingly familiar I want to cry, and the sudden nearness of him has my whole body trembling.
Could he be upstairs, here in Luxuria somewhere? Does he sense me, too? Does he care?
Gritting my teeth, I shake my head. It doesn’t matter where Nic is or why. He made his position clear. He has no answers for me.
So I swallow the lump in my throat and focus my attention on the task at hand.
In the very instant I release Enzo’s magic to become corporeal, I weave together a disguise with Nic’s. My hair darkens into strings of rippling shadow. My face whitens like a ghost and smudges like mist. My eyes blacken, irises eating away the whites. My leathers unfurl into a silken ebony gown.
“Hello,” I say, pitching my voice deeper and glamouring an ethereal edge to it as I stride toward the man.
He turns, and the single buzzing bulb overhead illuminates the familiar lines in his hardened leather skin, the pale blue eyes that match the exact shade of my own, the iron gray hair curling around his ears.
Magnus St. James, the most feared crime boss in all the world— and my father—smiles when he catches sight of my illusionary face. “Good evening, Nocturne.”