Chapter Four The Bear and the Bard #2
“You look well,” said Gavin. He was Lennox’s best tail, and the only person who regularly managed to sneak up on her, a feat that only days ago had made her smile. Now it just annoyed her. Dark chest hair peeked out of his loosely buttoned black tunic. He’d left his blue hood behind tonight, too.
“I am,” she replied evenly, keeping one ear to Lennox’s table.
The swelling had gone down enough to hide the bruises and dark circles with cosmetics, but no cream could conceal the bloodshot whites of her eyes.
That’s what the hood was for. Reya knew she’d been right to wear the gloves, even if putting them on had been absolute agony.
Showing up at the Bear and the Bard with such an obvious injury was practically an invitation to people in her line of work.
Reya glanced to where Zaim and several other Bluehoods were playing cards at a nearby table. The former gave her a faint nod, which she didn’t return.
“What do you want, Price?” Reya said, intoning his surname.
Gavin frowned, crowding her. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?” she bit out at his cajoling tone.
“Like it’s my fault you got the shit beaten out of you,” he said, voice hardening. “We did our jobs. You’re the one who went rogue.”
Reya’s laugh was empty, and she angled away from him, more to check on the man in black than to ignore Gavin, but it still pissed him off.
“Do you think Zaim and I weren’t also punished? Lennox thinks we let you get away.”
No one let her do anything. She took another sip of her drink. “You both look fine to me.”
He clutched her forearm. “Hey.”
Too slowly, she dragged her gaze from her drink to his grip. When she finally lifted her eyes to meet his, he was smart enough to look a little unnerved. “If you want to keep that hand, you won’t put it on me again.”
With a disbelieving look, he let go. “Just like that, then?”
Reya didn’t blame Gavin for the beating.
No, she’d made her own bed. But he could have come to see her in that bed at any point in the last five days, and he hadn’t.
Gavin’s controlled expression as Lennox had broken her fingers would forever be carved into her memory.
As for leaving her injured and out in the open like that on Lennox’s orders…
She never should have let things get this far between them, nor could she pretend that it would ever be the same. Sleeping with a man she regularly ran jobs with was a mistake she would own and never make again. She didn’t care how good Gavin was with his tongue.
Maybe she cared a little.
Reya took another sip of whiskey. Relationships were made of openness and unguarded intimacy, which was forbidden to people like them—her especially. Nor did she want those things with someone who wouldn’t fight for her.
“Did you know?”
He looked away, sounding frustrated that she would even ask. “Lennox told me the same thing he told everyone, but I knew it might be a magic-born after I spoke with my sources on the wall.”
Truth.
Reya suddenly wished she hadn’t asked.
Gavin was quick to add, “Do you really think she’ll make it out alive? They’ll find her, Red. Lennox would have at least given her a meal and a bed. She was better off.”
Reya knew he wanted to believe that. But no amount of wanting would make it true. She understood that better than anyone. What they were—he had to live with it just like her. “I hope that helps you sleep at night.”
Gavin sucked on his teeth as he searched her gaze for something he wouldn’t find again.
He dared to tug on a strand of her hair. “Come on, Red. Stop pretending like I’m dead to you, and finish that drink. Let’s go someplace quieter where you can tear me a new one, and I’ll be able to hear you. I can take it.”
She hated how she wanted Gavin even now, despite everything.
But she knew it was their easy familiarity she was grieving, the comfort of falling asleep in someone’s arms. Someone she liked.
That was where they’d both gone wrong. Reya would never show certain parts of herself to anyone, and no one could truly care for someone they didn’t know. She should have done this months ago.
“You were never anything to me,” she said, chugging the rest of her whiskey so she didn’t have to meet his eyes and decide if the hurt in his expression was genuine. Reya glanced over her shoulder again at Lennox’s table. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Gavin turned to leave, muttering something she didn’t hear because she was no longer paying attention. The man in black made no move to shake Lennox’s hand as he slid out of the booth and rose to his full height. Reya nearly dropped her glass.
Holy Mother.
The All-Gods did not make men like that anymore.
Evidently because they’d already outdone themselves with this one.
Every considerable inch of him promised violence.
Even the establishment’s hardened criminals parted for him as he made his way to the exit.
He could probably lift Reya with just one of his hands.
Hands that were no doubt rough with calluses.
She nearly groaned at the thought. Maybe it said something about her that she wanted to be thrown around both at work and in her personal life, but she liked what she liked.
A vision of him caging her in with his arms, her back pressed against a wall and her thighs around him, had her biting her cracked lip.
Being injured was such an inconvenience.
Reya didn’t bother waiting for an invitation before she slid into the place the man in black had just vacated. The bench was still warm from his body heat, almost too warm. Sweat slicked down her leather-wrapped thighs, and she fought the urge to cross her legs.
Like he’d been waiting for her to appear, Lennox leaned back, one arm resting across the back of the booth.
The movement shifted his emerald tunic, revealing an ancient-looking medallion with a gilded crest set against a ruby face.
She’d asked about the medallion only once, and he’d threatened to send her on a job in the Winterlands if she ever asked again, which meant it was a good story.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said with a smile she hadn’t seen in years, lips curling up higher on his right side.
Gone was the crime lord, and in his place was the man he’d buried, someone Reya wasn’t entirely sure was real anymore.
“Can I get you a glass of something? We’ve got spiced blackberry mead. Your favorite.”
“No, thank you. My tab’s already running pretty high. Besides, that crap Pia is pushing is hardly potable.”
He chuckled, waving over a passing server. “It’s from my own stores.” He gave her Reya’s drink order before taking a sip from the rich amber liquid in his own glass.
Meanwhile, Reya watched the man in black disappear in her periphery.
“We should order you some food as well. You’re still looking rather hollow-eyed.” He raised his glass to the arrival of her own a moment later. She lifted it to her lips, nostrils flaring, and he nodded his approval.
“Am I about to meet my maker?” she asked.
He gave her a serpentine smile. “You know death by poison isn’t really my style.”
It wasn’t an answer, though she doubted Lennox would poison her, especially not somewhere so public and when he ostensibly had no cause.
He’d made sure she was well acquainted with the tells and side effects of all sorts of lethal liquids and fungi.
Now she was rather adept at using them and even had some immunity, an advantage she’d built up over years of exposure training.
Like all her pain, she’d turned it into a weapon.
Of course, there were unbeatable poisons—all of them rare and ungodly expensive.
Once, Lennox had shut her in a wine cellar and told her to find and drink from the bottle that was safe.
Reya had been certain the vintage she’d chosen was clean until the moment it had shattered at her feet and she’d collapsed atop the jagged glass.
There was a long and complicated word for the paralytic in Old Rhiterran, but most called it Twilight.
Tasteless and odorless, it didn’t leave so much as a film behind.
Her body had been frozen on the floor, but she’d been aware of everything that had come next. At least until the poison had worn off.
Always, there was a price to be paid for her failure.
Tonight, she wasn’t taking chances. Reya lowered the glass and set it on the table between them. Again, that look of pride.
“I’ll even strike the day from your term of repayment,” he added. “Take the night off.”
He must have felt at least a little guilty for what he’d done to her if he was giving her back a day. Either that or he was so confident of victory that he decided giving her this boon was practically a mockery. Probably the latter. Regardless, she would take it.
“Is this what you call taking a night off?”
“Those who don’t mix business and pleasure aren’t doing it right.
” Like her, Lennox was all casual finery tonight, the only imperfection the slight bruising on his knuckles where he’d beaten her, and he wore the discoloration like regalia.
In Lennox’s mind, two kings sat enthroned in Rhiterra: the one who ruled in the mountain palace and the one who ruled in the shadows beneath, holding court in this den of the damned.
The only difference between them was good breeding. And with enough time, even that could be forged. Every noble family in the empire can be traced back to a criminal or a penniless farmer, Lennox had told her once. We all come from nothing. It’s what a man is willing to do that makes him a king.