Bex and Calin watched him go. Their bodies loosened, just a little, when they could no longer hear his steps. Calin closed the door, and Bex looked down at Tes.
“Well,” she said, “I’d get to work, if I were you.”
* * *
Truth be told, Lila had never spent much time in pleasure gardens.
Not that she scorned pleasure—she enjoyed a fine wine, a sharp knife, the things Kell could do with his mouth when he put it to good use—but once a thief, always a thief. She didn’t trust the kindness, the closeness. Someone placed a glass into her hand. Someone grazed their fingers down her arm. Someone’s body whispered against hers, and every time, her muscles stiffened, and her nerves told her she was being robbed.
Music spilled out of a large chamber, a quartet of instruments perched on a stand, spelled to play without players, but the rest of the room was full of people, some playing cards, and others smoking, and most enjoying the company provided by the Veil. The light was low, and it fell on the masks, picking out the occasional gold of a host drifting among the tapestry of black and white, and making all of them glow.
A woman’s hand grazed Lila’s back, and she had to resist the urge to stop the bones, or check her pockets as a voice purred with feline grace. “Avan, res naster.”
Lila turned, and found another white-dressed figure, albeit wearing far, far less of it, her face hidden behind its own gold mask.
“Avan,” answered Lila. “Can you point me toward the library?”
“Why go there,” she teased, “when you can stay with me?”
“What can I say?” said Lila. “I have a love of books.”
She could almost see the woman pouting behind her mask, but then she wrapped her arms around Lila, and turned her around, pointing down a hall.
“That way,” she said, giving Lila a playful nudge, her embrace retreating like a tide.
She made her way down the hall, which was lined with doors, all of them closed, gold masks hanging on the wood. The first two turned out to be locked. The next opened onto a pair of men playing cards. Someone had just lost a hand, and was stripping off his shoes. The other seemed to have lost several—he was barely clothed. Neither seemed to notice Lila as she let the door fall shut. She continued, searching room after room, discovered all the markings of a pleasure house, and none of a rebel group. She reached the end of the hall, only to discover it did not end, but turned onto an alcove, and a final door, unmarked by mask, or glass, or sign.
She put her ear to the wood, and heard nothing from the other side. She tested the handle, and found it unlocked. The door swung open onto a large and well-appointed library, the walls lined with books, a large wooden desk in the corner, a pair of chairs set before an unlit fire.
Lila stepped inside, and closed the door behind her.
A clock on the wall chimed, and she took in the time. Ten.
Lila studied the books on the wall, then went to the desk, and opened drawer after drawer, searching for something, anything, to tie this place to the Hand. She was still searching when the library door groaned open, carrying the ghost of music and voices from the house. Lila turned, and saw a man.
He was tall, and broad enough to fill the doorway. His brown hair was cut short on the sides, but it rose over the top of his black mask. He was dressed in a navy coat with silver buttons. Her gaze went to his hands. They were scarred.
“You’re early,” he said. His voice held the rumble of thunder.
“Better than late,” said Lila lightly.
“Indeed.” He did an odd thing then. He was still standing in the open door. Now, as she watched, he reached up and ran one hand down the side of the frame, as if testing the wood, before stepping forward into the library. He pulled the door shut behind him. And locked it.
The small sound of the bolt turning might as well have been a warning shot.
“You know,” he went on, “I hoped you would come.”
Lila frowned. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “I never forget a face, but since I can’t see yours … have we met?”
The man continued his slow advance. “No,” he said. “We have not been introduced. But you’re no longer as anonymous as you once were, Delilah Bard.”
He flexed his hands, scarred knuckles going white as he said her name, and Lila reflexively reached for her power. Not the air in the room, or the candles on the wall, but the bones inside his body, to halt his progress, to make him stop.
She pulled on that magic—and felt nothing.
No flutter, no promise, no sense of a will warring with her own. She reached then for the wooden floor, for the air, tried to spark a flame inside her hand. Nothing.
Warded. The room was warded.
“I hope you weren’t planning to rely on magic.”
She imagined the man’s mouth drawing into a grim smile behind his onyx mask as he said it. Lila forced herself to match that imagined smirk.
“Believe it or not,” she said, drawing a blade, “I have other tricks.”
“Is that so?” He continued forward, close enough now that Lila would have to either attack, or step back. And she wasn’t about to step back. “Show me,” he said, but Lila was already moving.
She leapt onto the desk and over it, slicing down toward the man’s mask. He raised his arm, and the blade came down on that instead, steel ringing against steel as it cut the coat, only to hit an armored plate. His other fist swung toward her head, but Lila was already twisting out of the way, slicing the blade along his side.
She felt it bite through cloth and skin, but the man didn’t recoil. He didn’t even flinch. He simply turned, with shocking speed, and, before Lila could lunge back out of his reach again, he struck her, hard, across the face. Hard enough to crack the mask, which fell away. Hard enough to fill her mouth with blood. She rolled back and rose again, but her ears were ringing and her good eye blurred, and for a terrible second, she couldn’t see, her attacker nothing but a vague shape coming toward her.
It didn’t escape her notice that he hadn’t drawn a weapon, and that he held his hands as if they were the only ones he needed. This was a man experienced in hurting others.
“Well?” he asked. “Already out of tricks?”
Lila’s fingers tightened on the knives, searching his clothes, the way they fell, trying to find the points that weren’t armored. The man, meanwhile, turned his head, and studied the clock on the wall instead of her.
As if she weren’t even a threat.
Lila was offended, but the disrespect gave her the opening she needed, and she took it, springing toward him, angling the dagger toward his throat.
At the last moment, the masked face turned back toward her. At the same time, his hand came up, and caught the knife by the blade, wrenching it forward.
Lila should have let go.
Afterward, she would play the fight back in her head, over and over, and every time, she would regret that moment. She should have let go, but she didn’t, and when the man pulled the blade forward, he pulled her too, off-balance, and as he did, his other palm came to rest against the side of her head, and slammed it down into the wooden desk.
And everything went black.
IV
Two horses tore across the bridge.
They bore no royal markings, but anyone with a passing knowledge could tell they were bred well. Their coats were lush—one grey, the other white—and their hooves glinted as they galloped, as if they had been shod in gold.
Of course, Alucard had not bothered to tell Kell where they were going, only that it was on the coin.
“What coin?” Kell had demanded, swinging his leg over the grey mount the guards had brought him.
Alucard had let out an exasperated sigh. “From the dead thief, on Maris’s ship,” he’d said, as if that answered everything. “It gave the time and place, where the Hand would meet.”
Kell bristled—he did not know which bothered him more, that Lila had not told him about the coin, or that she had told Alucard instead.