Chapter Six
Mavis spent the morning luxuriating in the triumph of her newly secured engagement—or rather, she attempted to.
Her sleep was fitful, with worries about Arden Ryskamp’s sudden appearance making it difficult to drift off while fragmented dreams of his dark-blue eyes, crooked mouth, and confident hands ensured that anytime she did manage to fall asleep, she woke up shortly after with a sheen of sweat on her skin and her traitorous heart threatening to beat its way out of her chest.
If you get in over your head again, you bring the rest of us down with you.
Rafe’s words from the night before shadowed her every thought, no matter how she tried to ignore them.
Mavis was up just after dawn, making her way out to the suite’s quiet living room, pale morning light filtering through the large windows. Rafe and Leif were still asleep and, knowing them, they would sleep another couple of hours at least.
Mavis didn’t mind the quiet, though.
Growing up in Strall’s Low City, quiet was a luxury she’d seldom been able to afford.
There had been no escape from the merchants hawking their wares on the street just below the apartment she’d been born in, from the drunken shouting of people stumbling home from the pub in the hazy hours between midnight and dawn.
The noise outside the apartment was preferable, though, to the cruel words her father would spit out on the rare occasions he came home, or the clatter of cabinets and drawers opening and closing as he searched for the money her mother tried in vain to hide from him, or the way her mother would cry when he left.
She yawned as she crossed the room toward the double doors that led to the balcony, then stepped outside and pulled her dressing gown tighter around her to ward off the early-morning chill that offered a welcome reprieve from the balmy Garlin summer.
It would only be a matter of hours before the beach filled up with families picnicking or couples taking a stroll along the shore, but now there was no one at all to be seen, only seagulls searching for scraps of food left behind and the mellow lapping of the waves against the sand.
She inhaled deeply, savoring the salt-tinged air. She’d been a good many places over the last five years, but Garlin ranked among her favorites. Yesterday, when she’d told Thaddeus she would be sad to leave, she’d truly meant it.
Looking down at her new ring gleaming in the sunlight, she knew her days here were numbered.
It was difficult to say how long the rest of the con would take—it varied, in her experience, depending on the gifts and investments she could squeeze out of her mark and how stubborn they were about ending the engagement—but she expected Thaddeus would crumble quickly once she went from perfectly mannered debutante to embarrassingly needy nightmare.
He had one obstinate woman driving him mad already—he would surely be eager to rid himself of her should she become a second.
She, Leif, and Rafe would go back to Strall afterward, as they always did, but they wouldn’t stay for long. They’d deliver their earnings to Minstead, Leif would visit his and Rafe’s mother, Rafe would find some way to busy himself so he didn’t have to, and Mavis would visit with the urchins.
It was an entirely new crop of children now than the ones she grew up with, but their faces were achingly familiar—hungry eyes wide as saucers as she told them about the places she’d been and adventures she’d had, grubby hands eagerly grasping for the sweets she always loaded her pockets with, big dreams they were eager to share with her about what they would do when they grew up: sail a ship across the wide sea, dance on pointed toe in the High City’s famed Elevern Theater, open a bakery that sold only sticky cinnamon buns.
Had she ever had a dream like that? If she did, she couldn’t remember it now.
And it hardly mattered, she supposed, just as the new urchins’ dreams wouldn’t matter in a few years’ time, when they realized that they would never be sailors or dancers or bakers.
Every one of them had signed the same contract she, Rafe, and Leif had.
All any of them would ever be was Minstead’s, to fulfill whatever role he gave them until they paid off their impossible debts.
Mavis knew she was one of the lucky ones, but when she was in Strall, with those urchins, that knowledge gave her little comfort.
How many of those children would count themselves lucky in a decade’s time?
Rafe and Leif were perplexed at her insistence on visiting the urchins—they avoided the children like they carried some kind of plague, though Mavis had heard plenty of the urchins talk about Rafe and Leif like they were folk heroes—but even though her visits always ended with Mavis feeling frayed and raw and angry, she couldn’t help but go back again and again.
This trip to Strall would be no different.
And after their business there was done . . .
Mavis didn’t know where they would go next.
She was never part of that decision, but she was sure Rafe and Leif had some idea already, some hazy plan that would take shape as things with Thaddeus wound down, that Minstead would give his stamp of approval to, but one thing was certain: There would be another name to call herself, another personality to craft from thin air, another man to con.
The thought of it grated, though if she were to be honest with herself, the novelty of their con had long faded, if it had ever been there at all.
Oh, it had been exciting the first time she’d entered a Luster ballroom and used her bracelet to pretend at having powers.
There had been a thrill in becoming someone else, living a life more glamorous and magical than she’d ever dared allow herself to imagine.
She’d had more fun than she should have, letting Arden court her, letting him fall in love with her—no, not her, never her.
But all of that quickly left her when she left him, and she had never felt the same way since.
Now, eight cons later, she was thoroughly exhausted.
Not that it mattered—the Lusters might have the privilege of viewing work as optional, but Mavis had no choice.
She, Rafe, and Leif owed Minstead a debt, and if they tried to run before it was paid off, there was nowhere on this earth they could run that he and his goons wouldn’t find them.
So it would be another con, and another, and another, for the rest of her days.
Pushing that depressing thought away, Mavis shoved away from the balcony and made her way back inside the suite, to the bellpull that hung by the door. She gave it a firm tug, and when Gretchen, one of the hotel’s maids, arrived shortly after, Mavis asked her to ready a strong pot of coffee.
“I’ll bring it up, Miss Lindcourt.” Gretchen bobbed a curtsy.
“No need to bring it up,” Mavis told her. “I’ll be down in the lobby in a moment—I’ll drink it on the beach.”
If it struck Gretchen as an odd request, she didn’t show it, instead giving another nod, another curtsy, and hurrying away.
The Abalone Hotel rose from the white Garlin beach like a sandcastle, the marble gleaming in the bright morning light as Arden approached.
It towered four stories high with rows of arched windows and carved columns that made it look as if it had been lifted from the rubble of one of the ancient cities in its entirety and dropped on Garlin’s pristine shore.
Arden knew Garlin was a relatively new city, only settled two centuries before, but classical architecture was all the rage in Strall as well, a city that was only slightly older.
Before Arden was forced to break the truth of their financial situation to his staff, the housekeeper—Mrs. Maples, who had been with the Ryskamp family since long before he was born—had suggested he update the facade of their house in order to keep up with their ever-fashionable neighbors, the Ulsters, who had recently commissioned life-size marble statues of the entire family dressed in chitons and laurel crowns, an homage to the ancient gods who gave their Luster ancestors magic thousands of years before.
Arden was so distracted by the building that he almost didn’t see the figure standing at the shoreline ahead of him, the gentle waves lapping over her bare feet as the dressing gown she wore fluttered in the breeze, offering a glimpse of her pale, slender legs.
In one hand, silk slippers dangled from her fingers.
In the other, she held a white porcelain cup by its gold handle, tilted at such an angle that it was clearly empty.
Five years had added a softness to her body that suited her well, but Arden still recognized those legs before he even saw her face. He remembered the feeling of them wrapped around his hips and forced the memory away before his body could betray him again.
She must have heard his approach because she turned toward him, wild copper hair unbound and windblown.
He said nothing as her eyes scanned over him, letting himself be measured and assessed, wondering how she saw him now, in the bright daylight.
Was she, too, searching out what had changed over the last five years and what hadn’t?
He doubted she cared enough to remember him as clearly as he remembered her.
There had been eight others just like him, after all.
He was nothing special to her, just another in a long line of fools.
The idea irritated him more than it should have.
“We had a deal to stay out of one another’s ways, Mr. Ryskamp,” she said finally, her voice huskier than it normally was, as if sleep still clung to it. “And yet mere hours later, here you are, accosting me on a beach.”
“Accosting is a bit dramatic, no?” He raised an eyebrow. “Who’s to say I’m not simply enjoying a walk along Garlin’s famous beaches and our meeting is a simple coincidence?”