“We don’t lie in the Red League.”
“Something tells me you lie about things every day, Killer.”
“Your funeral.”
“Or yours.”
De Rossi snorted. “Since you obviously think yourself the winner here, you should feel pretty confident about my side of the bargain.”
“Your side?”
“Yes, my side.”
“And why would you think you have anything worth bargaining here?” His lip was twitching in amusement. “I have you bound.”
“I’m slippery when wet. Now, humor me. Let me pretend I get a say in my death. All I want is for you to play a Red League game. Think of it as a time old tradition. You might know it as Heads or Tails; in the Red League we call it Guts or Gone.”
“Charming.”
“Gone, I walk away, you fuck off and leave me alone, go back to humping your brother’s leg and pissing in other gang’s chamber pots. Guts, I do what you want.”
“I presume we aren’t tossing a coin?”
“Not quite. Do you have a knife? No? Alright, use mine.” De Rossi flipped his weapon, pinching the blade between his fingers, looking for all the world as if he were going to whip it straight at him. Roland tensed, prepared to duck, but de Rossi merely tossed it underhand. Roland caught it easily. It was wicked sharp.
“You’re Guts.”
“And you’re?’
He grinned. “I guess that’d make me gone.”
The little rat was quick, but Roland was quicker, and he whipped the dagger, catching it on the back of the idiot’s boot. It sunk in through the heel.
De Rossi, unhampered, kept running as if he couldn’t feel it. So Roland used his other advantage. Being what he was, which he for the most part, just ignored as rumors—even if they were true—were quite useful in the moment now.
Summoning that place deep within himself, full of whispers and old words, he withdrew a few.
“Asise vankash,” he muttered.
The world went quiet.
Still.
And then the magic sucked him from the spot and spat him out. He hurled forward, launched at an unbelievable speed. Within seconds, he’d passed de Rossi, who was sprinting with singular focus, eyes trained forward, no looking back. His face wasn’t even pressed in the pain of having a knife stuck in the back of his Achilles heel. Roland couldn’t wait to shock him.
“Vankashe,” he said into the roaring wind ripping. The world froze. His feet touched the ground. De Rossi almost ran straight into him and the point of his raised sword.
“Piss stained udders!” The gangster cursed, eyes wide. The remnants of the magic had blown back the man’s hood, and the slicked dull auburn hair was falling in lank pieces around his face. There was red staining his cheeks, and sweat beading on his forehead. Up this close, those eyes were even stranger. Roland could’ve sworn they were dark before, like pitch. But now they were a crashing ocean blue, the darkest depths of a whirlpool. “You really are a bastard.”
“An unbelievably stupid thing to say to the man with a sword at your throat,” Roland said.
But de Rossi wasn’t having that. The idiot had a smile curving across his face. The look was bewilderingly familiar but it only made Roland want to slit his throat more. Which he couldn’t do, of course, so he pressed the sword a bit deeper into the man’s skin. Roland at least expected him to back up, but the man didn’t move.
“You’re a witchress.”
“Occasionally.”
“So what about your mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Tell me something else.”
“No,” he growled.
“Tell me something else...please? As interesting as your heritage is, I’m not sure you understand just how staggering available this gossip is. And, well, you showed me. Not told me. And if you want to be a Red League, you have to learn to tell the truth. At least just this once.”
“Fine. Marius and I are…” he resisted the panic welling in his throat. “We’re the same age.”
“Who?”
“The King, you little weasel.”
“Ah, I just assumed you meant a different Marius.”
“I will throttle you.”
“Only in your wettest dreams, Jorkie.”
“What did you call me?”
De Rossi only grinned. “So, you and your brother, not a large age gap as everyone thinks, then. Who’s older?”
His lips thin. “Unimportant. I gave you your truth.”
“I’ll find out eventually.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then you could be king, couldn’t you?”
“What do you think you’ll gain from continuing this line of inquiry? It’ll only make me want to stab you more.”
“I am told I’m quite stab—able.”
“You like this,” hissed Roland. “What is wrong with you?”
De Rossi licked his lips, a pleasing shade of pink, solid lines and feminine. He was a man with an odd but handsome face, but something wasn’t quite right about it; as if he himself were a caricature of what a greasy, good-looking gangster might look like.
“You know what, I know a secret about you, Roland, buddy ol’ pal, I’ll tell you one about myself. How does that sound?”
Roland scrapped the sword in a thin line across his neck, drawing blood close to the underside of the skin, but not hard enough for it to break out.
“I suspect you’ll tell me whether I want to know or not.”
“You ever heard of fire wraiths?”
“Yes.”
He chuckled. “Well, it looks like we’ve got two magical mommies. You and I should start our own gang.”
“And what the hell do you think that has to do with anything?”
“Because yes, you had me with your piece of paper. A nice touch, by the way. I could kiss my fingers it's so pretty. I can’t even imagine what you did to get it; the garbages you must’ve dug through. It makes me shudder.”
“Doesn’t matter where I got it.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not to me, not anymore. I’ll let you in, Roland. I’ll let you tag along. But do you know why?”
“Enlighten me, you fucking psycho.”
De Rossi actually tipped his head back and laughed. Hard. “Because one of the characteristics of fire wraiths is what we crave. It’s one of our weaknesses and one of our best methods of survival. See, like the flame, we ache to consume. We want to burn to be the best, to be the strongest. And so when we see it, when we have it, say, within sword distance, we want it. Even if we shouldn’t have it. Even if we should walk away. Because we can sense what it is that makes you powerful, we can read your abilities when we try.
“And now, Roland, I want you. And even better, I want you to do something for me when this is all over. Even if that means bearing you at my side.”
“And what is that?” he asked warily.
Those blue eyes glowed, vibrant against the dark bruises beneath the man’s eyes. “I want you to find someone for me.”
Chapter 13
Tiana tripped to the Trough laughing to herself and playing with the knife between her fingers. She hadn’t even noticed the damn thing jammed into the obscene wedge of her shoe. She was unbelievably light headed. If anyone told her anything in particular at that moment, she’d laugh herself silly.
Oh, she had the best luck in the world. Not only did she have the time to entangle herself with the prince and Captain of the city guard, but she’d managed to rope him into interactions with her alter ego; her brother.
Oh gods, and not even just a prince! A king!
Maybe.
The lines of her life were forcing themselves into blurs and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
And gods, the power, like a drug, like her own personal strain of dust; she was intoxicated by the sheer magnitude of what Roland was. She couldn’t even help herself now, not truly, for it was some innate part of her, something so far and so well wo
ven she hardly noticed until it mattered most.
Like now.
Now she craved. The fire wraith in her wanted oh so badly to consume everything Roland was. She wanted to be near him, even now. She wanted to steal it from him, own it all. She was only lucky enough that her magic was diluted down to what it was, otherwise she would’ve drank him dry and laughed with his magic staining her soul.
Her mother, that strange, disappearing woman, a half fire wraith, had met the young, handsome, powerful, virile Phillipe de Rossi, a gangster with a new world at his fingertips, and she wanted much the same thing. What she’d taken from him; offspring.
So why had she thrown them back?
Tiana still didn’t know. Likely never would. She hardly expected to ever see her mother again. Hardly even had the decency to conjure the memory of her face. Somedays she wondered if her mother had done that on purpose, erased herself, or whether Tiana had to spare herself.
She wondered if Killian remembered.
They never talked about it.
They never talked about much.
She kicked the barn doors open and was immediately welcomed into the revelry.
“KILLER!” they chorused, and the power darted through her head.
“Someone help me get off these goddamn shoes!” she crowed, much to the joy of her gangmates.
Asha, who stepped like shadows, had already manifested at her side, Opie slouched behind, cigarette in his mouth and two pinned behind his ears on either side of his head. Tiana considered his face quickly, but said nothing.
“New knife?”
Tiana tossed it to her second, who plucked it out of the air as if it had been gently handed to her.
“Same knife.”
“Feels different.”
“Yeah, because someone else threw it.”
“You let someone else touch your knife, you dirty slut,” chided Opie, popping one of the new cigarettes before he’d even spat the old out.
“Can you get anything from it?”
Asha looked up at her through her lashes, the pads of her long, dexterous fingers brushing over the hilt. “The read isn’t strong enough. Were they wearing gloves?”
“You know, I didn’t think to check.”
“Who was it?” asked Opie curiously.
“Fresh meat.”
“You let an initiate throw your knife? Getting ballsy, bossman.”
“Name?” asked Asha, handing the knife back as Tiana went by her to seat herself into a chair.
“Nothing you’d know. Joining us soon though.”
Tiana tossed the knife to a nearby table with a clatter, unbothered by the fact Asha couldn’t glean anything off of it. She already knew exactly who had been handling her knife. She unclasped her half cape and draped it over the back of the chair. Then she turned her attention to her shoes.
They were quite the feat, the things on her feet. With a thick five inches of sturdy heel, it gave her the height of a much taller man. They were also a bitch to take off.
“Positions?” grinned Opie, putting himself at one foot. Asha knelt obediently at the other. Loyally they both clasped their hands around the heel and the toes.
“Count of three,” Tiana said. “One, two—”
Opie ripped his boot off, howling, “Three!” nearly robbing Tiana of her leg with it. The idiot yanked so hard he fell on his back, laughing, cigarette almost swallowed which turned his merriment into some questionable coughing.
Asha removed her boot with far more grace and it was only her that Tiana thanked.
“Keeping the contacts in?” asked Asha.
“Can’t be arsed,” replied Tiana, still aware of the itch the blue lenses left in her eyes. They weren’t a perfect fiction, but she was glad she’d started wearing them t, knowing it’d be soon Roland would come looking for her. And she’d been right.
Relieved of her shoes, Tiana stood from the chair and ripped the top layer of her outfit off, revealing the padded armor beneath, which not only broadened her shoulders, but filled her out from her slight figure.
It was a struggle to release herself of this one, but once she did, she was panting and red in the face, droplets of sweat rolling down her temples.
Asha handed her a glass of cold vodka and water, which she chugged, hissing as it went down.
“Bugger that,” she muttered, rubbing her chest over her heart, her breasts still throbbing under the tight bandages she wrapped there each night before she stepped on foot into the Trough. Some layers, she wouldn’t take off here; so layers, they’d never know about.
“Oi, Tiana!” hollered one of the other Red League, holding a mug of ale up to her. “Welcome back, Sheila!”
“Oh fuck off, Ricky. Still don’t understand the concept of twins, do you?”
“I’d just prefer it if you were Tiana; she’s got better tits!’
The raucous roars which accompanied this were part indignation and part joint hilarity.
“Well she ain’t got better tits than you!” Opie shouted back, grinning as he chucked the boot he held into a heap atop the other. “No one has better tits than you—come rub em’ in my face, big boy. I’m a dying man!”
Asha rolled her eyes, accepting the armor Tiana handed to her without a word, neatly folding it as she walked to the adjoining room.
“Great, now that we’ve got the jokes about my sister out of the way, anything to know?”
“Asha’s honeyboy is out again,” said Opie, considering his fouled cigarette and dusting it off, then popping it in his mouth with a grimace.
“Roland?” asked Tiana casually, pushing her hair back from her brow in an attempt to put it back into its usual slickness. “Was he not out before?”
“Please don’t tell me you didn’t notice the princely thorn in our side wasn’t out and about pricking us more lately? Some blokes saw him stalking about real surly like.”
“I didn’t realize you were also in love with him, Opie.”
“Not in love. It’s purely physical.”
“Is it?”
“Completely. See, I’ve only heard stories. He’s never had the privilege of chucking me in the tank and having his dirty way with me. But, if we ever encountered one another I think we’d spend ninety percent of the time ripping each other apart. We’re just so similar. So perfect; two sides of one beautiful ass coin. ”
“The other ten percent?”
He lit the cigarette and sucked it back, sighing. “Well, three percent to a shootout—with me on top—and then the rest would be clocked to me burying him.”
“Do you always speak in innuendos?”
“Can’t say I know what you mean.”
Tiana scoffed and sat back down in one of the chairs, pulling the bottle of vodka over and the decanter of water. “How’re the collections going?”
“No water, thanks,” Opie said, waving off her off and merely taking the glass straight. Tiana shrugged and poured herself a liberal amount of vodka, no water as well. “I got the Draggins to toss up a few extra, and then now I’m worming my way into the bed of the Whores of Seventh.”
“Why do you want anything to do with the Seventh?”
“Besides their pretty faces?”
“Yes.”
“Figure if I control the tail, I control the dogs.”
“That’s actually quite smart, Opie.”
“Oh, I’m well aware. Not just a pretty face, Killian.”
“Speaking of, what happened to your face?”
Opie opened his mouth to answer, but Asha did for him, coming up behind his chair.
“Opie got a little handsy with some merchandise.”
“Hey! Not my fault,” he snapped at the second. “I didn’t know it’d just blow on me.”
“You still have blood on your nose.”
“Aye, and I’m keepin’ it there, so don’t you get any ideas. It’s mine.”
“Opie.”
“Hmm?”
“What did you do?”
Opie scratched the back of his neck.“It ain’t a big deal, bossman. Just a scratch.”
“Opie, half your face is purple.”
Self consciously Opie brushed the underside of his eye, wincing at the swelling. There was crusted blood coating the bags under his eyes, and one of the piercings through his eyebrow looked as though it had been torn clean off. It wasn’t unusual for the Red League to get roughed up, especially Opie, who liked the sound his own mouth made when it opened. This, however, looked different. Opie was quick, lanky, and his grin as cutting as his cunning mind. There was a reason Tiana kept him around, it was hardly for the sake of only affection, but not everyone felt that way about his company, and Opie had been in the game long enough to know how to duck.
“I kinda like it this way. Adds some color to my complexion.”
“Opie…”
“It’s nothin’! Honestly, killer. It’s nothing. If I knew you’d fuss, wouldn’t’ve stopped by.”
“Don’t make me ask again,” Tiana warned lowly.
Opie sighed and left his empty glass on the table, rubbing his good eye. He mumbled something incoherent.
“Speak up, shithead,” advised Asha.
“You’re making a big deal about nothing!” snapped Opie at Asha. “You’re gonna rile him up and he’s gonna think the worst!”
“Oh, I’m already thinking of it.”
“Screw you lot. Fine! The midget punched me.”
“The midget—do you mean Pene? Opie what the hell were you doing in that part of Blood Alley?”
“Wanted to see where you lot were going, obviously,” he said sulkily, crossing his arms.
“Opie you had no business—”
“Yeah, yeah. The bearded bitch said the same thing,” he muttered. “Gods! I was curious.”
“That wasn’t why she punched you,” said Asha, picking up the bottle of vodka and putting it to her lips. Tiana pushed her glass under the woman’s elbow for a refill. Which, after a good glug, she obliged.
“Sticky fingers?” Tiana asked her.
Asha shrugged. “Ask his face.”
Tiana sighed. “Opie, we talked about this.”
“Nuh uh, bossman. You talked. I listened. I told you well and good what I do and who I am. Showed you my truth just like you asked.”
Deception: Rogues of the Red League, Book 1 Page 10