Chapter Thirteen #4
“When I was young,” she echoed, like the concept was amusing.
She leaned back on her hands and tilted her face up toward the sun, eyes closed as she spoke.
“My life now is so far beyond what I ever could have dreamed for myself as a child. This town alone is so beyond anything I could have imagined. The apartment I grew up in with my mother could fit in my hotel suite tenfold. I am always warm, always fed, always safe, and that, to my younger self, was unfathomable. Don’t you dare act like this life that I have built for myself is something shameful or sad.
You were born with everything and still let it slip through your fingers, and now here you are, trying to rebuild your fortune by doing exactly what I’ve had to do just to survive.
You have no room to judge me for learning how unfair the world can be far earlier than you did, for righting the scales as best I can. ”
Arden was frozen stock still, crushed beneath the weight of her words.
He wanted to protest—he was nothing like her, he wasn’t the spoiled brat she painted him as, but the words died on his throat.
He tried to imagine her as a young girl, in the small apartment she described, hungry and cold.
Arden hated her for what she’d done to him, but in that moment a stray thought burrowed deep beneath his skin: If hurting him and all the men who followed in his footsteps had brought her here, kept her safe and healthy and alive, was it worth it?
Still . . .
“You aren’t acting only to feed yourself. You’re working for someone else. If not Rafe and Leif, who?”
“Don’t.” The single word came out sharp, and her expression changed, shifting from anger to steely resolve, but there was a flicker of sadness as well.
Arden knew he was standing on the edge of a cliff, that she was trying, in her way, to warn him back to safe ground. He should have heeded her warning, but he didn’t. He jumped.
“I just want to understand,” he said.
She looked at him then with a rueful smile laced with pity. “I’m not for you to understand.”
That was true—Mavis was an enigma, and he should have kept it that way.
It was easier to hate her, safer to mistrust her, better to view her as an ice-hearted seductress without shame or morals.
But when it came to Mavis, Arden couldn’t help himself.
He wanted to understand her. He wanted to unwrap every layer of the personas she’d crafted, the masks she hid behind, until he knew who she was at her core.
When Arden spoke, his voice was soft. “I’m asking all the same.”
He expected her to refuse him, to tell him to focus his curiosity on Oriana, where it should be, but instead Mavis hesitated, glancing behind her, as if hoping the starting pistol would sound and bring a reprieve from the conversation, but it didn’t.
When Mavis looked back at Arden, her chin lifted a fraction of an inch, her eyes level.
“Does the name Uriah Minstead mean anything to you?”
It did, but it took a moment for Arden to recognize why.
“The Low City kingpin?”
“That’s the one.” Mavis nodded. “Gambling dens, taverns, brothels—if there is an illicit business in the Low City, Uriah Minstead is making a profit from it.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Arden admitted. Many of his friends frequented Minstead’s establishments when they felt like stepping outside their High City safe haven.
Arden might have joined, but by the time Uriah Minstead’s businesses gained enough notoriety to cross the border between the High and Low Cities, Arden hadn’t had money to waste in places like that.
“I told you that my mother died when I was eleven, and I haven’t seen my father since then either,” she said.
“I didn’t see him much before she died, unless he was trying to weasel money from her or needed a bed to sleep off his liquor in before returning to the club.
When my mother died, he had no inclination to suddenly act like a father, but he did owe five thousand solas to Uriah Minstead in unpaid gambling debts. ”
Arden saw where the story was going, and his stomach turned. Surely, no father would do that. Mavis seemed to read his thoughts, a brittle smile stretching over her lips.
“Yes, five thousand solas was what I was worth to my father, though I suspect he’d have handed me over just to be rid of the hassle.
He was far from the only parent in the Low City who made that choice.
There were dozens of us—Minstead called us his urchins.
We picked pockets, ran small cons, delivered messages for him.
Any odd job that needed doing, we were there to do it, repaid with a warm bed, a full belly, and safety we couldn’t find anywhere else. ”
“Safety,” Arden repeated, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice.
Mavis shook her head. “You said you wanted to understand, but the first thing to know is this: The truth is complicated, and so is Minstead. He isn’t a good man, but he keeps his urchins safe. I doubt I would have survived until now without his protection.”
She might have meant that, but it didn’t make him feel any less angry.
He still wanted to hit something, and while he had never been someone prone to violence, he wished Mavis’s father were there if only so he could have someone to hit.
He could imagine a young Mavis, abandoned by the father who should have given his own life to protect her rather than selling her off for five thousand solas.
“That doesn’t make it all right.” Arden struggled to keep his voice even. “You were all alone.”
At that, Mavis’s smile became less brittle, more sure, akin to the smile that had haunted his dreams for the past five years. “No, Arden. I wasn’t alone at all.”