1 #4
This night hasn’t gone according to plan at all. I should have listened to my roommate. She warned me about the royals, especially the “Naughty Prince,” as many people in the kingdom call him. “He’s the worst of the bunch,” she told me. “Obsessed with drugs and drink. A complete whore.”
But after going through the Academy, enduring countless suggestive jokes, and proving myself to people who didn’t consider me competition, I thought I could handle Vawn Molloi.
I guess I underestimated him.
I make it a point not to look at Vawn again for a long time.
I watch the exits, the balconies, the skylights, and the guests.
I keep an eye on the servers, the musicians, and the dancers.
But my gaze keeps traveling back to those three men in the darkened booth, the ones who aren’t drinking.
Why would they stay if they’re not enjoying themselves?
I sidle toward Renfrow and speak in an undertone. “Do you see those men?”
“The ones in the purple booth?” he confirms. “I noticed.”
“What should we do?”
“Can’t kick people out for sitting and staring,” he says. “Just keep an eye on them. They could be storygraphers from the Featherwhistle.”
“That city gossip chain? The one with notice boards on every corner of the Market District?”
He grunts and lowers his tone even more. “They like to run a story on His Highness every so often, and he’s giving them plenty of fodder tonight.”
I glance over my shoulder at Vawn and nearly curse aloud.
The girl with the piercings is astride his lap now, and judging by the strategic drape of her skirts and the way she’s moving, she’s sitting on his cock.
The prince’s head is tipped against the back of the couch, his dark lashes painting his cheeks, and his lips are parted.
As I stare, he grips the girl’s waist tighter and winces.
It looks like pain at first, but it’s not.
He’s coming inside her.
His eyes blink open, wide and dazed at first, but they narrow as they fix on me. His tongue traces his lower lip, and he bucks his hips upward once, teeth gritted, gaze locked with mine. Finishing himself off. Taking every last bit of pleasure while I watch.
Heat pools at my core, and the awareness of it is an embarrassment worse than the time I pissed myself in front of fifteen other cadets after eight hours of endurance training.
“Eyes front,” Renfrow growls, and I spin around, putting my back to the booth again.
I stare into the whirl of dancers, glimpsing Loxley and Tolgan writhing against each other. Guess I was right about Tolgan’s preference, and Loxley doesn’t seem to mind indulging him.
An abrupt movement at the club’s entrance catches my eye.
A tall, thin young man with light brown skin and a blue suit trimmed with pink embroidery has just entered.
There’s a club guard holding onto his arm, speaking earnestly to him, but the young man jerks his arm away and strides toward the prince’s booth.
I tense immediately, placing a hand on one of my knives. “Is that Lord Arbogast?”
“It is.” Renfrow moves forward to intercept.
Praxid Arbogast, distant cousin to the Mollois. He shouldn’t be a threat, but the families were once rivals, and he wasn’t expected here tonight. Renfrow is being cautious.
Praxid and Renfrow are half a dozen steps apart when I spot a needle-thin streak of red light, barely visible through the hazy air.
The young lord’s body jerks. He halts, his eyes fixed in horror. Then he topples forward, right into Renfrow’s arms.
There’s no outcry, because he’s not the only person to have stumbled or collapsed tonight. But he just arrived, and he didn’t seem drunk. That streak of light… It’s hard to know for sure, but it could have come from the table with those three watchers.
Renfrow holds the young lord upright and pulls him toward the booth. Praxid’s head lolls against the guard’s shoulder. His eyes are half-open, but the life inside them is fading.
“What is it?” Renfrow growls urgently. “Speak!”
The young lord’s lips move, his voice barely a rasp. “Dead. All dead. His family and mine. They’re coming to kill him too. Soldiers with strange helmets… I used every glyph I had to get here, to warn him…”
Only then do I notice his fingertips—burnt black, with scarlet cracks branching through the crispy skin.
Every fingernail has withered to a flimsy husk, ready to fall from the root.
It’s a textbook case of magic overextension, the result of keeping a glyph active beyond the limits of the accumulated energy in the extremity.
A glyph nearing its limit will produce a painful prickling sensation, a warning to deactivate.
Praxid ignored those warnings and spent magic beyond what his body and his glyph set could handle.
But that isn’t what killed him.
The young lord’s eyes are empty now, and Renfrow drapes him on the couch. Vawn has already pushed the girl off his lap and is hastily relacing his pants.
“What’s going on?” he exclaims. “Renfrow, what’s the meaning of this?”
“Your Highness,” Renfrow says, “we need to—”
But there’s another flicker. A seam of light in the fabric of the air. Headed straight for Renfrow’s back.