Kohl might only be twenty-four, but the tales of his reign over the south of Kosín were enough to have spanned several lifetimes. She’d studied him over the years, learning how to be merciless herself. He ensnared children like her whom no one would miss, frightening street kids who were already used to terrors, then offered them the chance to become the frightening ones themselves. She’d latched on to that chance like she gripped her knives.
But she wasn’t a scared child anymore.
“You look tired, Aina.” He took a step closer, making warmth rise on her cheeks. “Late night?”
“No more than usual,” she said with a shrug. The box of coins inside her jacket jostled, and her heart stopped. She shook the ones in her hand to mask the sound, wondering why he’d brought her to his office. There was always a risk he’d sent his Shadow, Mazir, to spy on her. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck.
His eyes locked on hers, and she held the stare. No one else in the Dom would dare to meet his gaze, but the unspoken rules of the hierarchy had never seemed to apply to her.
Kohl nodded, breaking eye contact, and walked around the desk. His back faced her for a moment. Did he trust her enough to turn away from her? Could she really kill him, or had she simply gotten used to calculating ways to put a knife through flesh? Did a jeweler not contemplate how to cut and shape a precious gem?
“Do you remember a few years ago,” Kohl’s voice broke into her thoughts, “we sat in the train station’s tower, and I told you what an assassin and an arms dealer have in common?”
“It was the middle of winter and my fingers were about to freeze off, but you wouldn’t let us leave.” She grimaced. “Assassins and arms dealers are nothing but the providers of a service, and therefore we have no reason to feel shame for the deaths we cause.” The words trailed off. Her years on the streets had wiped all sense of shame from her mind regardless, and she knew better than to question Kohl’s many lessons—he seemed to enjoy giving his employees cryptic advice and watching them work it out for themselves—but something about this particular bit of murderous wisdom still made her uneasy.
Then he turned and smiled, making her forget all her moral qualms. She was safer without them anyway. More deadly.
“I have a new job for you,” he said. “After my cut, you’ll get fifty thousand kors.”
Her breath caught. She clenched her fists to keep her hands from shaking. This job would earn her more than one hundred times what she’d gotten for killing the baker. It would be more money than her parents combined had ever earned and more than what anyone in the Stacks expected to see in a lifetime. She’d worked the past six years to keep herself off the streets, and a job like this would practically guarantee that she’d never return.
All she had to do was kill a person.
“That’s a lot of money.”
“It will be the biggest haul our tradehouse has ever seen.” His voice became smoother, in the controlled and calculated tone he always used when speaking of money. “Why do you think I chose you?”
“I don’t care. Where is the fish? I’ll gut him right now.” She spoke so fast, the words tripped over each other.
“That’s precisely why.” His whisper rose the hair on the back of her neck. “You don’t ask questions. You don’t miss. When you decide to kill someone, you don’t stand there dawdling and playing with your knives. You just do it.”
She shrugged. “Point me to him.”
“It doesn’t hurt that you’re almost as good as me.”
Shifting her weight to one foot, Aina tried to control her temper. Kohl placed his hands on the edge of the desk and said nothing, each passing second of silence putting her more on edge.
“Kouta Hirai.”
She raised her eyebrows. Few names held more weight in Sumerand, let alone the capital of Kosín. About a hundred years ago, the Hirai family had come from Natsuda and monopolized the trade of mining tools. Spades, shovels, wedges, pickaxes, pry bars, sifting implements, and anything else needed to mine were entirely manufactured and sold by them. Twenty years ago, they bought the mines as well and grew their fortune with diamond sales to magic practitioners and mining tool sales to Steels. After the war, once diamonds were prohibited for use in magic, the family’s two young sons, Kouta and Ryuu Hirai, led the country to become the leading exporter of diamonds worldwide. They were surrounded by bodyguards at all times and lived in the most protected part of the city, Amethyst Hill. They were untouchable.
“He’s high up. And the person requesting the kill?”
“Higher.”
Her breath slowed, and she grounded herself by touching the hilts of the scythes strapped to her thighs. Glancing around the office to buy time, she took stock of all the items she’d seen over the years. The clock on his desk ticked down the seconds. The room had little in terms of decoration, only a few gold-wire sculptures and an iron teakettle. There was the stain on the mats where her own blood had dripped when a mark had nearly bested her.
Kohl had bandaged her himself.
“If you’re stupid enough to get stabbed on the job, maybe you shouldn’t be here at all,” he’d muttered under his breath, then handed her a vial of painkiller he’d swiped from a clinic.
He’d clenched his hands into fists as she took it, drawing her attention to the tattoo on his inner forearm: a marking of his original gang, the Vultures. It stood out starkly on his alabaster skin. The black bird of prey’s neck was broken, hung by a string of diamonds that trailed to Kohl’s elbow.
Something had softened in his eyes when she’d winced in pain. Then he’d tossed the roll of bandages on the floor and walked out.
She could never quite tell if he wanted her to live or die.
“This won’t go unnoticed.” Her voice finally came out in a whisper. A piece of hair that had fallen onto her forehead itched with the sweat rolling down her skin, but she refused to move it. Kohl didn’t trust people who fidgeted. Kohl wouldn’t flinch or hesitate. Kohl would get the job done.
He came to stand in front of her, close enough that she heard his breaths. One hand rested on the handle of the flintlock pistol at his waist. When he looked at her like this, she wondered whether he saw her as beautiful or not. She’d prefer if he didn’t—it would confirm she’d succeeded in hiding any part of her that wasn’t a ruthless killer. She wanted him to see her as an equal he could respect and care for, not a pretty plaything.
Her rounded cheeks, the curve of her jaw, her narrow shoulders, had all gotten her into too much trouble as a child. When she’d begun working with Kohl, she’d made sure to cut away the softness and the curves, and turn them into sharp edges instead, so no one would ever think she was weak enough to take advantage of. Years of inhaling glue on Kosín’s sidewalks had left her copper skin dull and gaunt. She kept the dark waves of her hair, a mark of her Milano ancestry, in a rigid ponytail that hung to her shoulder blades. Her weapons hid any remaining weakness—a brace of diamond daggers strapped to her chest, scythes at her thighs, her palms hardened with calluses, and a small brace of blades between the knuckles of her left hand that protruded whenever she punched someone.
But no matter how tough she looked, she knew Kohl only ever saw her as the scared girl he’d saved from a bombing and turned into a Blade. He’d never take her seriously until she was as fearsome and unwavering as he was. Maybe her dreams of being Kohl’s equal were a childish fantasy rooted in the mind of a girl who’d found food, a bed, and a roof and convinced herself anything was possible. Maybe she was just a grunt who’d prided herself on selling diamonds behind her boss’s back but would never amount to anything more.