A Man Without a Mirror
I have no money, I rent in the Foot, and you don’t know my name. What about that signals a good husband to you?” the nameless man—mirrorless and wifeless, too—scoffed as he wiped down his bar.
Business in the Den was slow this morning, Iksha bless.
Most common folks were working now to earn tomorrow off, eager to attend some tournament the castle was throwing.
For all that the man once named Mose had integrated, he still hadn’t mustered the energy to care about the royals.
All he cared about was paying rent, filling his stomach, and finding his wife before some drunk vomited a sludge so toxic onto him that it killed him.
“Well, you’re kind and you’re handsome, and having no name makes you mysterious,” Jinna said. “Plus you have all of that… ink on you.” She poked his tattooed hand.
The man had learned that these people found tattoos exceptionally scary, so he took to thinning his glamour enough for them to see the tides of black ink on his arm. He still hid that his tides moved, shadows shifting across his skin with the winds of his emotions.
Jinna danced her fingers across those still shadows. She sat at his nearly empty bar with a glass of lemonade, badgering him, again, about running away together to get married.
Teenagers.
“Am I just a big, sexy statue to you?” he asked, snagging her glass to refill it. Down the bar, a drunk mumbled for the same. The nameless man poured him his seventh beer of the hour. At a blinding nine in the morning, he was on schedule to pickle his liver by noon.
“You’re also… humble. Don’t you want a wife?
Why can’t we just get married?” Jinna whined, plopping her head on the bar.
She worked as a night lady at the Den, where the man shelled drinks.
The night manager threw him the job simply because of his height.
Apparently, part of his role was to deter bad behavior by being big and scary.
Given the number of sins he’d witnessed in the two weeks he’d been here, he didn’t think he was very effective.
“I’m looking for my wife, not just any wife,” the man corrected.
Jinna stuck her tongue out at him. Truthfully, she was very pretty.
Her parents had immigrated north from Uhmer when she was a baby, and her Micrean was seasoned with their accents.
Her hair was dark and thick, hanging down her back nearly to her legs, and her eyes had that tricky shine of a nineteen-year-old who thought they had their life figured out.
She’d chosen this work for the money, so she could buy citizenship for her family.
Judging from her packed night schedule, she was well on her way.
“Why not just have two?” Jinna shrugged.
“I might have two one day,” the man said, twisting his mouth. “Then again, the attention two wives requires excludes one from work, while the cost of them demands it.”
“I could be affordable,” Jinna lied. Then she snorted, and the man laughed with her. “But why not? I am not joking. Marry me and let us leave this place. Right now, even.”
“You are nineteen,” the man pressed. “I’m too old for you.”
Jinna rolled her eyes, as she did every time he told her that. “And how old are you? Thirty-five? That is younger than most of my clients!”
The man rolled his eyes back at her. “I am older than them, too.”
“How old are you?”
“Old.”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Older.”
“Forty.”
“Double it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Actually, multiply it by thirteen or so and then—”
Jinna grabbed his rag and threw it at him. The man snickered and snatched it out of the air.
“Old men don’t have good reflexes,” Jinna said.
The man saw a bit of his wife in her—whip-smart, snarky, smooth. If he hadn’t been already completely devoted, and if Jinna could wait a decade or two, he’d let her have him.
They met on his first night of work, when she’d strode up to him wearing only her crossed arms and told him she needed a man tossed through a window.
Half curious, he’d followed her to her extravagant room, expecting to find a drunkard waving a broken bottle around, as was the cultural dance of this place.
Instead, he’d found a dead man lying face-down on the rug.
She’d said he’d refused to behave so she “knocked sense into him.”
Well, she’d knocked something into him.
The dead bastard had the nerve to be important, and Karin Korsts, the Den’s co-owner, would probably have had Jinna’s profits for the rest of her life if she’d found out.
So instead, the man had made Jinna swear to never tell a soul what she was about to see.
When she’d shakily agreed, the man had struck his finger like a match and burned the body to ash in seconds.
They’d thrown the blackened rug into the hall and had a drink.
Jinna had been accompanying him on his day shifts ever since, but the marriage proposals had begun only a few days ago. She was a patient mistress.
“You’re very pretty, and belligerently persistent,” the man told her. “You don’t need to chase old men.”
Jinna’s brow creased. Her bewitching eyes left him to float to the empty staircase behind the bar that led up to the other levels of the Den. Then her gaze found him again. She pushed herself across the bar, not even trying to get him to ogle her chest this time, and grabbed his arm.
“This is no place for someone like you,” she said.
“You’re too nice and it will get you hurt.
Right now. We can leave right now. I know people who could get us out.
Please.” This was the first time she’d ever sounded so serious about it, and the man’s chest tightened.
Begging him to run away with her like that, she really did sound like his wife.
A wife he was still searching for, he reminded himself. He couldn’t leave until he’d found her, no matter how beautiful Jinna was, no matter how earnest she looked. There was no place dangerous enough for him to abandon if there was even a chance she might be there.
“I’m old, Jinna. I can handle myself,” the man said, then leaned on the bar and grabbed her hand, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Just as Jinna opened her mouth, no doubt to worry about him, Karin Korsts’ heels clicked down the grand staircase behind him.
She almost never descended from her secret offices somewhere in the heavens of the building, and usually wore gloves when she had to move amongst her filth.
Today, though, she walked her naked fingers across the twisted metal banister as she sauntered down the steps.
Her dress was tight and sapphire blue. In his time here, the man had learned that it was downright erotic to glimpse the lines of a woman’s stays beneath her dress.
He could’ve counted each seam in Karin’s, if his eyes hadn’t first been hooked on the tall split up her dress.
Now, if anyone reminded the man of his wife, it was her.
Not the icy severity in her eyes, or her iron grip on her workers, but her smooth, dark skin, that wry glint in her gaze, the glistening of her silver jewelry, the cut of her dress.
What little modesty existed in his wife’s home world, she openly mocked.
The man was just happy to be in on the joke as she breezed around their home in the gauziest of blush fabrics.
The soft moaning of public foreplay died to whimpers as Karin slid into the seat beside Jinna, who stilled as if the blood in each of her limbs was freezing ounce by ounce.
Karin was terrifying. A few weeks ago, she allegedly snatched up a gaggle of drunks from the front yard and sent them down south to be experimented on.
Karin’s two-toned eyes assessed the man. They ran up his one golden arm, down his tattooed one, across his wide shoulders, and did a double lap over his face.
“Do you have any interest in working nights?” she asked him.
“I already do—”
“Not like that.”
The man’s cheeks heated. Oh.
“No, I don’t,” he said quickly. He didn’t have any problem with it in principle. He just wasn’t flexible enough.
Karin hummed. “Make me a nectar of Virya, salted.”
The man did as she said, salting the rim of her glass and sliding the wedge of lime on the rim, then he slid the drink to her. Karin assessed its color. She took a sip and her eyes thinned. The man felt like he was on trial.
“Good,” she said. “Sadly, I don’t make millions off good drinks.”
Before the man could ask what she meant, the front door burst open and Valosians swept in.
The workers scrambled in an instant. Most were foreigners, which meant at any point Valosians could snatch them up off the streets, throw them on a boat, and sail them wherever.
The boat didn’t even have to be going to their home country, just anywhere but Micrea.
Usually, the Den was safe from that, though.
Until today.
The man reached over the bar to grab Jinna, but Karin placed a silver-laden hand on the girl’s shoulder. The way it pressed her into her seat, the man would’ve thought it was an anvil.
He knew he should flee, but he wasn’t leaving without Jinna. The second he flinched left, however, a trio of Valosians blocked off the exit. When his head swiveled right, he found the same. He was just as trapped as she was.
“What’s happening?” he asked, baring his teeth at Karin.
She didn’t seem to mind the growl in her bartender’s voice.
“Let me give you a lesson in money. You are an investment. You have yet to return your cost. I gave you an opportunity to increase your value, yet you refused. So now I am passing on your debt to Sir Belchin, who will increase your value, whether you like it or not.”
Karin threw her locs over her shoulder as a new man stepped into the bar. He was nearly elderly, decked in a red-and-gold doublet with a massive codpiece. A flop of fur he called a wig was splayed atop his slippery skull.