Chapter Nineteen After #2
In the corner, Cat pursed her lips but kept her eyes downcast. She reminded herself of the part she was playing—a mousy, desperate woman would not respond with a cracking retort.
But she could not help but wonder if a little powder might do her some good.
Cat Rose was not a young woman anymore, and the Lyrian sun was not kind to Meridian skin.
She sucked in her cheeks a little, trying to sculpt her face into something more pleasing.
“I am but thirty,” she said softly, glancing up to meet the Key Keeper’s shrewd stare.
The older woman scoffed. “And you look it.”
Heat flamed in Cat’s cheeks, but again she held her tongue.
“She worked for the Duchess before she fled,” Elisabeth offered.
That seemed to intrigue the Key Keeper, who quickly shut her ledger. Again, she looked over Cat, this time with a softer eye.
“Is that so?” she murmured, tipping her head. Then her tanned fingers swept in a flicking gesture, dismissing her employee. “Back to the floor, Beth.”
To that, there was no argument. Elisabeth was back at the door in a second. “Good luck,” she said with a fleeting smile.
Cat offered the same. “Be safe.”
When the latch clicked, she took a hesitant step towards the desk and smoothed her dress.
Cat did not know the Key Keeper personally but knew her reputation.
Like the Duchess, she was the madam of the Paradise Quarter, managing a great number of folk with efficiency.
But she also navigated within the bounds of Esperese law and bureaucracy.
As a businesswoman herself, Cat knew to be impressed. And careful.
“I can cook and clean. Whatever you need,” she said, keeping up her ruse. “I just need—a place to land.”
In her chair, the Key Keeper sighed a little. With her iron-gray hair, still shot with strands of jet black, and the burnished bronze color of her skin, Cat guessed she was of Itziman descent, hailing from the Southern Continent.
“I can imagine,” the woman muttered, tsking. “I suppose it just isn’t worth operating in Meridian ports. Too much trouble, too much risk, even if they still pay for the pleasure of our company.”
Cat nodded along, her head bobbing in a desperate way that felt embarrassing. “It does seem that way.”
“Well, let me look at you.”
The Key Keeper was shorter than expected, groaning a little as she rose to her feet.
Her maroon dress fell about her in intricate folds, the garment well-made despite the plain appearance.
It set off her deep brown eyes so perfectly that, for a moment, Cat thought she could see back through time, to the younger years of the Key Keeper.
When she had a different name, and likely served a different madam.
Certainly, she was beautiful then, as she was regal now.
Then she stuck her hands in Cat’s mouth, forcing her to stifle a sharp yelp.
“Good teeth,” the Key Keeper muttered, inspecting Cat’s incisors. It took all her will not to bite down.
At least the madam was fast, releasing Cat’s jaw to study her eyes, then her hands, before squeezing around her bosom and even her bottom with sure, quick motions. Holding steady, Cat wondered if this was what animals felt like when driven to market and weighed for slaughter.
“Not as bad as I expected,” the madam said, patting her on the arm.
Cat worked fiercely to keep her face straight. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“I can keep you in the kitchens, and if a place opens in the main house, I suppose you could try your hand in the evenings. But I’m not running a charity. This is a business, and the collectors in town treat us like it,” the Key Keeper said and returned to her ledger. “I’ve taxes to pay, Sara.”
“I truly appreciate it,” Cat said, dipping into a curtsy. She was careful to make her movements clumsy, more suited to a common prostitute than a Meridian lady. Even a fallen one. “How often do places open?”
The madam shrugged. “Shouldn’t be long. There’s a great deal of movement with the Meridian navy returning to the Lyrian Sea. Girls like you, moving on, seeking new work. Chasing old work.”
Cat felt like a sail catching the wind, finally on course. “I see.”
“I suppose most of your lads died. Heard about that even here.”
The madam paused in her work, quill frozen in hand. “Sounded like a massacre.”
“It was,” Cat said, a real tremor in her voice.
She did not have to act to summon the pain of such memories, and the fear of them too.
Governor Osprin’s brutal reign was impossible to forget.
But still a valuable card to play. “I don’t think your girls will be chasing long.
The new governor in Archenport made himself very clear.
Behind her glasses, the Key Keeper’s eyes darkened. “Clear about what?”
“He’s hunting every pirate in the Lyrian Sea, and anyone still aligned with them,” Cat warned.
Sighing heavily, the Key Keeper nodded and pushed the glasses back up the bridge of her nose. She seemed already weary at the thought. “I’ll be here when my girls come scurrying back from Arcayo.”
The name of the island nation rang clear as a bell, resounding in Cat’s head. She suspected as much but still reveled in the confirmation. It was a heading. And proof beyond her gut instinct. Proof enough for Fell, at the very least.
“Certainly Nera can only hold so many skirts,” Cat mused, weighing the look on the madam’s face.
“If they stay on the island.”
Want rose up in Cat, gnawing at her insides, but she held fast to the ruse. “Where else would they go?”
The older woman only shrugged. “Somewhere in the Hook. You know the black flag as well as I do. It’ll be some island on no map, somewhere the crowns have not yet swallowed.”
“That number grows fewer and fewer every day,” Cat sighed.
And the illusion of Sara, a desperate and broken woman, sloughed off her as if she were a snake shedding its skin. She supposed that was not so far from the truth. Her back straightened and her hands went to the top of her dress, pulling it back into a more comfortable place.
“Thank you for your time,” she said.
Behind the desk, the Key Keeper looked perturbed, making to stand.
“I beg your pardon?”
A coin sang through the air, the silver catching the candlelight.
It landed with a clink, but the madam didn’t break focus, still staring at Cat’s face.
Her black eyes sharpened behind her glasses, her face turning to carved stone.
It was not difficult to imagine how such a small woman commanded the entire Paradise Quarter, and everyone in it.
“Worked for the Duchess, you say,” she muttered, whatever motherly kindness she bore disappearing with Cat’s ruse.
“Worked with,” Cat answered neatly. Her mind was already down the stairs, back out into the courtyard to find Fell and return to the Fledge. To continue onto the next step of a swiftly unfolding plan. But she lingered, letting the Key Keeper look her over.
“I see,” the older woman said. “If it’s the Duchess you’re looking for, I can’t help you. There’s been no word since Archenport was reclaimed. And frankly, there better not be. For a madam to abandon her own like that,” she clucked her tongue with derision, shaking her head.
“You would not say that if you saw the gallows of Archenport,” Cat replied, her mind a forest of nooses. “Besides, the Duchess doesn’t need anyone looking after her, least of all me.”
“Then who do you seek, pray tell?” The Key Keeper folded her arms around her middle, the key ring jingling at her waist. “Because you’re certainly looking for someone, Sara.”
She drawled the name, the deceit of it on full display.
Cat weighed another name in her mind. She had not seen Valerian Kane in a brothel in many years, and she doubted he would step foot in one within a crown colony. Besides, it was too precious a card to play.
“I never expected to see a song tower in a crown harbor,” she answered instead, watching the twitch of amusement cross the other woman’s face.
“I am a purveyor of flesh, not stone. What would I know of such things? I am but a simple woman.”
“Aren’t we all, madam?” Cat mused. How often she slipped behind such a mask, using the downfalls of her sex to their rare advantage. “For all the sighs under this roof, there are whispers too.”
With that, she drew another coin from her purse, this one flashing gold, stamped with the image of the Meridian lion. It joined the silver on the desk.
The Key Keeper eyed it, then Cat’s purse. Three more coins slid across the wood, and she smiled.
“You have your answer, I think,” she said, pocketing the money.
Cat hummed low in her throat. “The Arcayans paid to build the tower?”
The older woman leaned back in her seat, hands spread wide. “You are clearly no stranger to the Lyrian Sea, or the crowns that feast upon it. Everything is for sale, be it flesh or rum or sand or stone.”
The truth of it was undeniable, as real as the coins still clinking in Cat’s purse.
“May the sea always sing for you, madam,” Cat said, turning for the door.
“And you,” the woman called after her as she left. “I hope you find what you are looking for.”
I don’t, Cat thought, swallowing down a thousand different things to say.
Her face burned, cheeks suddenly red. Doom loomed over her from Archenport, the noose ever-taunting. But Valerian was doom of a different kind. And she did not intend to escape one predator just to fall to another.
Cat took the most direct route back through the main house, keeping her eyes forwards on the path ahead.
Even so, she glimpsed flesh and parted lips around every corner, undulating silhouettes rippling behind silk curtains, their shadows dancing on the walls.
Between the many candles strewn throughout the building, and the even more numerous bodies, the air was tight and humid.
Cat gasped in relief when she made it back outside, the night breeze a balm on her flushed skin.