Chapter Thirteen
“THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT. TO GRIND US DOWN. TO ENSURE WE ARE TOO TIRED TRYING TO SURVIVE TO LOOK UP AND DEMAND BETTER. TO CONVINCE US THAT THE ONLY WAY FORWARD IS INDIVIDUALISM AND THAT OTHERS MUST FAIL IN ORDER FOR US TO SUCCEED.”
—EXCERPT FROM TRACTS FROM A REBEL PREACHER
At the sound of her name, Dani jerks upright, drawing the pulse pistol and leveling it at me in one smooth, practiced movement. Her eyes go wide as it hits her just who she’s got a gun pointed at. A deep, new cut slices across her high cheekbone, still raw from being sutured.
“Val…,” she breathes, sounding almost awestruck. Her amber eyes are wide and glistening with tears as she takes me in, and she drops the gun, her body sagging in relief. “Thank the Heralds. I thought you were dead.”
“Same.” My heart is hammering in the back of my throat, and I have the strange impulse to cross the room to her.
Part of me knows that if I do that, if I get close enough, she’ll put her arms around me, hug me close, and I almost want to let her.
To feel the solid, real warmth of her body so I know this isn’t just another hallucination.
“I left the meet-up signal. You never showed.”
She shakes her head, wiping at her eyes. “I didn’t see it. I wasn’t even looking for it. Your lodgings were obliterated, Val. I figured not even you could survive a blast like that.”
My lodgings … “How did you know where to check? I never told you where I lived.”
There’s a beat that’s just half a second too long before she answers. A sickening feeling starts to creep over my skin.
“You didn’t have to. This is what you pay me for, right? My connections. My ability to know everything.” She flashes me a tight smile. “My gorgeousness and charm.”
I don’t return it. Dani has been my frontperson for almost as long as I’ve been working as the Butcher.
I’d never intended to have a partner in this business, but she’d been so young.
Like me. And she’d sounded so desperate, like me.
Orion and I had just shattered apart for good, and I was keeping my sisters in the dark about what I was doing.
I’d been lonely, crushingly lonely. Every breath just sharp enough to slowly shred at my insides.
It was just me and my knives and I’d given them all names because they’d been the closest thing I had left as friends.
So when she’d tracked the Butcher down and asked to help me, I’d said yes.
And she’d become my partner. I’d portioned out part of myself just for her, and I’d thought the Butcher finally had someone—just one person—on their side.
I’d been so relieved to see Dani, to have her safe and alive and unharmed, but now the rest of my brain is starting to catch up and realizing the pieces here don’t quite fit together. “What are you doing here?”
She glances around at the unconscious bodies and the desk stacked with record tablets. “Just … trying to dig up some information. That’s my favorite currency, after all.”
I study her. Noting how her eyes flicked to the side when she spoke, just for a second. How she keeps fidgeting, twitching her right foot almost imperceptibly.
Dani Morales is lying to me.
She knew where my lodgings were. If she saw them blown apart and destroyed, she must have gone there the night that airship job went all to hell.
Something that she’s never done before in the years I’ve known her.
And what reason would she have to do that unless she was worried I was in danger for some reason?
If Kilpatrick wasn’t the one who hired the Butcher for this job, then who did? Who contacted Dani with a fake story and the cash to buy my services?
Suddenly the question I asked myself back on that damned airship tastes a lot different—bitter—and I have to look away for a moment to swallow it down.
The door suddenly swings open, and Orion sweeps inside, gun drawn but safely pointed at the ground.
His eyes find me in the corner, and he visibly relaxes.
“There you are. For fuck’s sake, you can’t just run off like—” He stops short, taking in the bodies on the ground, Dani behind the desk with a pistol in her hand. “Wait, who is this?”
Dani looks Orion over, her gaze hard and glittering. “Well, if it isn’t the Skywayman in the flesh. Didn’t know I’d be meeting outlaw royalty today or I would’ve worn my good shirt.”
I expect him to bristle at her acidic tone—I definitely would if I were him—but he just smiles at her, all congeniality. “I’d say the pleasure is all mine, but I have no idea who you are. What a pity.”
“You didn’t tell him about me? I’m heartbroken.” If I didn’t know Dani any better, I wouldn’t be able to catch the thread of actual hurt running beneath her words. She lifts her chin. “I’m Dani Morales. Frontperson for the Butcher.”
Orion nods, but I can see the tension in his jaw as she talks about her work.
My work. “An important job. Must be hard to keep the schedule for the most in-demand assassin in town.” He says it like a joke, but there’s no laugh behind his words, no brightness in his eyes.
I feel a prickle of anger surge up my spine, but Dani jumps in before I can bite out a response.
“We kept busy,” she says with a grin. She flicks a glance over at me. “Since when are you connected to the Skywayman, ghoulie?”
“Surprised?” I raise an eyebrow. “Funny, I thought you knew everything.”
Orion’s gaze sweeps back and forth between us, and he holds his hands up, clearly confused. “Okay, what exactly is going on here?”
“It was you,” I say to Dani, ignoring his question, staring right into her keen, amber-brown eyes, daring—hoping—she will deny it. “You set me up on that airship job. You knew the second they saw me phase I’d kill everyone in that room, including Bloody Bill Kilpatrick.”
She hesitates for a second, like maybe she’s going to go for the lie, try to play innocent, but then she grimaces.
“Yeah. Sorry about that,” she says, although she doesn’t sound sorry in the slightest. “Trust me, I would’ve much preferred to kill him myself, but Kilpatrick closed ranks right when I was about to make my move.
I figured you, being who you are, could take him out and get clear without a scratch on you.
Killing folks kind of is your specialty, after all. ”
Orion shifts his stance subtly. He doesn’t outright point his gun at Dani—it’s not really his style to make a situation worse if he doesn’t have to—but he’s got it positioned in front of him, ready. “And what’s your specialty exactly?”
“Like I said, information.” With her free hand, she pats the stack of tablets she’d thrown on top of the desk. “In this case, I want Gold Town information. Every operation they run, every official they pay off, every shabby little closet in Covenant where they’ve hidden away a stack of cash.”
One of the Gold Towners groans and twitches, looking like they’re trying to wake up, but Dani steps over to them, slams her boot down on their chest, and shoots them dead.
Right through the back of the head. There’s even a twist of dark satisfaction to her mouth as she does it.
Like she’s been waiting to let this side of her out for a long time, simmering to a rage like a teakettle.
Orion blanches, turning his head away. “You two really do give off the same energy, huh?”
Her expression right now is so foreign that I don’t even recognize her for a moment.
Or maybe it’s not foreign. Maybe it’s just that I never really knew Dani Morales at all.
The thought lands like iron in my chest, which doesn’t make any sense because I’d already figured out she set me up.
I shouldn’t feel so surprised. Or hurt. This is how it goes in the dust, right?
You do what you need to in order to survive and carve out your own goals, your own space, and damn the consequences to anyone else.
Still. Cold weight presses against my rib cage.
There’s a roaring in my ears that’s maybe white noise or maybe it’s Trinity’s song or maybe it’s both.
“Is your name even Dani Morales?” My voice sounds quiet and raw.
“It is now. I changed it four years ago, right after the seventh night of the Month of Gratitude.” She looks up from the Gold Towner’s body, her jaw set and hard. “You remember what you were doing that night, don’t you, Butcher.”
I don’t at first. I frown at her, my brain flipping rapidly through my memories until it all comes rushing back to me in an instant.
“Big Haul Cruz.” The name slips out of my mouth on an exhale, hitting me like a cheap shot to the gut. How long has it been since I thought about him? Since the paper I was making made it easier and easier to erase his face?
“Took you long enough.” She shoots me a quick look as she crouches down and starts rummaging through the guy’s pockets. “He had a lot of people who believed in him. People who were left behind after you laid him out in that alley. Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to all of us?”
I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought past the payday. And if a few extra souls wound up headed for the Depths over the next couple of weeks as the Gold Towners cleaned house, it hadn’t registered through the haze of security that that cash had bought.
She snorts. “I figured not. Lucky for me, I was way too low-level for Kilpatrick to sniff me out while he was wiping out everyone else. I changed my name, covered my tracks, and then just kept my mouth shut and my head down.”
“Until you could make a plan.”
“Exactly.”
“And that plan apparently included me.”
That makes Dani pause. I see her shoulders rise and fall in a deep, slow breath before she finally straightens, dragging her eyes up to mine.
“I barely knew anything about you at the time, ghoulie. I just wanted revenge. I needed a way to get close to Kilpatrick, and you were very convenient leverage.”
Orion huffs out a humorless laugh. “So you arrange a way to meet the Butcher—”
Dani shrugs. “Steal some paper, hire them for a job, turn up at that job, and there you have it.”
“—and convince them you can be their frontperson. Just like that, you’ve got a line on Kilpatrick.” Orion raises an eyebrow. “And an opening to take out his new hitperson as well.”
Dani swallows hard, her amber eyes on the ground.
“Yeah, that was kind of the plan. At first. But then I got to know you, Val, and you … you weren’t anything like I expected.
I figured you’d be this mindless, heartless killer, but you weren’t.
You were a survivor, just like me.” She tucks the high-caliber pistol she took off the body into her shoulder holster and then comes forward, stopping right in front of me.
Looking into my eyes. Shifting forward until our faces are so close that I can feel the tickle of her breath as she speaks in her soft, low voice.
“For what it’s worth, Val, I really did end up liking you.
Still do, actually. Even though you messed everything up—”
My eyebrows shoot up. “I messed things up?”
She narrows her eyes. “Yeah, you. Big Haul could’ve changed this whole town for the better if you hadn’t taken that job and thrown in with the first asshole who offered you a load of cash. Bloody Bill was trash—”
I launch myself at her, my hand going to her neck, and we tumble to the ground in a tangle of limbs. She struggles, but I manage to pin her against the ground, straddling her hips, Reason out and angled against her throat.
“I think you’re overestimating how much of a shit I give about this gang, this town, or your business,” I tell her, and my voice is the low growl of a magnastorm building on the horizon. “You set me up. You used me. You put my sisters’ lives in jeopardy!”
Dani goes very, very still beneath me, her hands held up in surrender. “What sisters?”
“My sisters!” I tighten my hand on her throat. “I thought you knew everything about me. Did you miss that little piece of information somehow?”
She flicks a look over at Orion, who nods and says, “They’re playing you straight. Two sisters—Halle and Kelda. Gold Towners took them when they blew up V’s lodgings.”
Dani sucks in a sharp breath, looking back at me, her stupidly big, wide eyes like concentrated gold. “I didn’t know—”
“Bullshit! You knew where I lived! You told them—”
She cuts me off, her voice hot with vehemence. “I wouldn’t tell a Gold Towner the goddamn time of day. You’ve got to be a special kind of naive if you think I’m the only person in all of Covenant who could suss out where you live.”
She watches my face very carefully, and when I don’t say anything or dig the blade in any deeper, she plunges ahead. “I’m not a monster, ghoulie. I’m not in the business of letting innocent people get hurt.”
“But they did. They did get hurt.” How long had I been so blind? Letting her in, letting her get close only for her to plunge her knife so deep it’s scraping my spine. “I’m surprised you didn’t turn me over to the chapels. Tell them you’ve been working with a saint.”
“I’d never do that.”
“Why not? You obviously don’t have a problem with breaking a promise.”
Her lips press together in a thin, bitter smile. “Technically, I never promised you I wouldn’t kill Kilpatrick. Or set you up to do it for me. So I’m actually one-for-one on promises I’ve kept.”
I bare my teeth, bending low enough that my breath brushes across her face. “I don’t care about any of this. I just want my sisters back.”
“I don’t know where they are. I’ve been all over the Old Clock Tower already; I haven’t seen them.” She tries to swallow around my grip and manages it only barely. “But I can help. I can find where the Gold Towners are hiding them—”
I press my blade down a little harder, cutting her off. “What makes you think I would trust you now?”
Orion eases forward, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy, V. Maybe Miss Information here can come in handy. She’s already started looking through their records, and there’s got to be something here that mentions where they like to keep hostages.”
He’s right; there probably are records in this maze of rooms and hallways, and that’s the whole reason why he brought me here.
But now, with betrayal burning hot in my chest, that doesn’t seem anywhere near good enough.
I don’t want to paw through drawers and drawers of records, looking for clues. I want answers now.
And I want to stab things.
On the far side of the room, the other Gold Towner grunts and shifts, starting to wake, and my lips peel back in a savage grin. Looks like I get to have both wishes at once.
“I’ve got a better idea.”