PROLOGUE
“Do you want to know the secret to survival?”
Aina’s eyes snapped up from the sticky wooden table and widened at the man who sat across from her. The bar’s dim light glinted off his smile. Fast-playing flutes, rowdy drunks, and dancers stomping their feet across the floor nearly drowned out his next words.
“You count and you look,” he whispered. “You count everything and you look at everyone. Are you paying attention, street child?”
Her frown deepened. Every underage person in this bar was a street child, but she still disliked being called one. It marked her as dirty, poor, without a future. She was dirty and poor, but the idea of a future hadn’t faded from her mind yet. A high collar framed the man’s pale face as he took her in. Perhaps he was going to offer her a job. Something about him smelled rich, maybe the scent of cologne. He was probably one of the industrialists made wealthy by steam and steel.
“Thirty-six people were in this bar when you entered, making you the thirty-seventh.” He leaned closer, his gaze fixing on her as adamantly as a noose around the neck. “The door opened once inward, and twice outward, because the wind pushed your hair around your cheeks the first time, but not the next two.”
She blew a strand of wet hair out of her eyes and tried not to shiver, but she was soaked from getting pushed into the Minos River by some boys who’d robbed her. She wanted warm clothes and a bed to sleep on. She didn’t want to play this man’s game. Crossing her arms, she turned away to ignore him, but he continued speaking.
“That means there should be thirty-six people in this room, but did you count? There are thirty-five. Where is the missing link?” He barely paused for a breath. “You don’t know. He’s planting a bomb in the rafters. Don’t look up; you’ve only got twenty seconds. I have a job you might be good at. If you come work with me, everyone here will die, but we’ll survive. If you don’t, you’ll die without ever knowing what you could become. Do you want your life to end at twelve years, Aina Solís?”
“How do you know my name?” Her fists clenched, a chill crept down her spine. Plenty of bombs went off in Kosín, but what if this were just a lie to get her to follow him?
“Twelve seconds left.”
“The Diamond Guards—”
“The Diamond Guards won’t risk their lives to save a street child. Eight seconds left.”
Her mouth snapped shut. The options were few, but she was cold and hungry, and this man had a job for her.
She stood on shaking legs and walked out, the man’s presence behind her like a reaper waiting for its reward. In the last three seconds, they ran. The chill night wind bit her skin through her wet clothes. Her sprints elongated, and her lungs seared.
An explosion shattered the night. Aina fell into a pile of snow in a shadowed alley. Bits of wood from the building landed next to her, making her flinch and bite her tongue as her ears began to ring. Screams and the distinctive crackle of flames sounded behind her.
The man helped her up. She took a step back, crossed her arms, and narrowed her eyes at him. He was younger than she’d first thought, hardly eighteen or nineteen. Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t figure out what.
If he meant to hurt her now, she could try to run, or fight back like she’d had to do so many times on Kosín’s streets.
“Why did you help me?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I wasn’t the only kid in there.”
His smile faded slightly. “Because good things don’t usually happen to girls who come from nothing.”
Aina cast her eyes downward. She was already well aware of that.
He withdrew a dagger from a sheath inside his jacket. It was the sleekest blade she’d ever seen, with an onyx-black handle. A sharp breath stole through her at the sight. He waited patiently, holding it like a gift as she reached out to touch the handle with the tips of her fingers.
“Learn how to use this knife, and I’ll make you into something.”
SIX YEARS LATER
1
The baker’s final words were smothered by a whimper.
“You know how they say you should watch out for the quiet ones?” Aina’s breath fogged the blade of the dagger she held. “They were right.”
She took her time with the blade, heedless of his screams. Screams went ignored in Kosín’s slums. A gun would have been faster, but she preferred knives. In the hands of a trained killer, knives left less room for mistakes.
By the light of a single flickering candle, she’d waited in silence for the baker to return from the casino where he’d spent all his earnings. He’d entered and stumbled drunkenly toward his bed, where she’d pinned him.
The house smelled like salt and dough, and now blood. The coppery scent no longer bothered her like it had when she first became an assassin. The baker’s screams died, leaving the house ghostly quiet as he dropped to the bed with his throat slit like a red smile. Silver moonlight reflected on his blank, glass-like stare. There was no pulse at his wrist, no breath from his lips. Another death at her hands like all the others, and while she’d grown to feel nothing after a kill, this one was different. She’d known this man.
When she was younger and begging on the streets, she’d sat in silence outside his bakery, hoping that someone would drop a piece of bread into her hands. When the hunger finally made her dizzy, she tried stealing bread from a customer. The baker had beaten her with a rolling pin until she blacked out in the snow.
He was better off dead, and she hoped every moderately hungry person in the vicinity would steal his bread tonight. She no longer needed it.
Standing, she wiped the bloody dagger on her scarf, but there was nothing to be done about the mess on her arms and torso. She pushed open the cardboard door and stepped into the street, wearing the baker’s blood like a medal.
He had sold her boss’s information to the Red Jackals gang, filling his pockets with kors for gambling, but guaranteeing his death by her blade. She didn’t know what the information was, nor why the baker had sold it to the Jackals. Her boss, the Blood King, never told her more than she needed to know in order to slit a throat, and she wasn’t stupid enough to test his patience by asking for details. Everyone in the south of Kosín—everyone but the baker, apparently—knew that crossing the Blood King was a death sentence.
The slums’ springtime scents of piss, sweat, and blood filled the early evening air. Smoke from the factories spilled down the hills into this southern part of the city known as the Stacks, home of the poor and the faithful who hid their religion and blood magic practice. Houses of mud brick, corrugated metal, and rain-beaten cardboard lined the slanting roads, pressed so close together, they were nearly stacked on top of each other. Children kicked balls across the mud with scrawny dogs barking at their heels, but they all scattered when she neared them, covered in blood. Slurred yells reached her ears as she walked the curving streets and passed groups of men huddled around fires. A small part of her was tempted to return to her old ways, to buy industrial glue from the men on these corners and inhale it until she passed out on the sidewalk.
But eyes watched her from dark corners. The Jackals had been tailing her since she’d entered their territory tonight. She avoided the shadows, staying in the center of the street with her head held high to prove she was fearless even though her heart pounded in her throat.