Scavenge the Stars (Scavenge the Stars #1)(31)

In the hallway, she looked into a mirror and realized she still wore her earrings. She pulled them from her ears, letting them clatter on the top of the decorative table. Her lobes were sore, unused to the weight. She rubbed them and thought back to the day Boon had brought her to a jewelry stall in the busy market quarter of the nearest Ledese city.

“Becoming a countess will be no small feat,” Boon had said. “Transforming you will be as complicated as alchemy. And alchemy is pretty damn complicated.”

She had eyed the gems and chains nervously, wondering how many pieces would have been the equivalent of her debt. Wondering if he was going to tell her to pick out some necklaces or a bracelet.

Instead, Boon had exchanged words with the proprietor before ushering her to sit on the stool in the corner. She had shifted uneasily for a minute until the proprietor, a hulking man with a ridiculous pelt of arm hair, had come toward her with a needle.

“No, no, no!” she had screeched, prevented from running away by Boon’s strong hands on her shoulders, keeping her on the stool.

“You’re honestly telling me,” Boon had said, “that you can withstand poisonous rockfish, a murderous ship captain shooting at you, and a lively jaunt with the riptide, but one little needle has you pissing yourself? Do you need me to hold your damn hand?”

Instead, she had sat as still as she could on the stool, refusing to even whimper as the needle went through, just to shut Boon up.

Later, her ears sore and bearing small silver hoops, she had moodily followed Boon through the rest of the market. He’d stopped by a stall selling sticky honey cakes and bought one for her.

“If you’re that squeamish about a needle, I doubt you’d be able to handle yourself with a knife.”

She’d licked up the honey running down her fingers. “I bet you’re wrong.”

Boon had lifted an eyebrow at her. “I’ll take you up on that bet.”

“If you lose, you have to pierce your ears.”

His laugh had been loud enough to draw stares from the crowd.

But, true to his word, he had begun teaching her how to handle a knife the next day. A proper knife—not a shucker, not a gutter.

She had stared at her reflection in its blade, and in that moment she saw herself in halves: the girl who was still finding her land legs meeting eyes with the one who had sworn vengeance on the man who had ruined her family.

She had vowed to become only the latter.

Boon had been easy on her at first, showing her the proper way to grip the hilt, how to position her legs, ways to slash and block. But as soon as he’d realized she was a quick learner, he hadn’t held back. He would come at her with that disarming grin and a barely perceivable restraint that prevented him from actually harming her. Instead he would make little nicks on her arms or legs, punishment for letting her defenses down or not moving the way he wanted her to.

The others had gradually come out to watch these sparring sessions, held in the patch of sparse grass behind the bungalow Liesl shared with her lover, Deadshot. After a month of losing to Boon, she had finally found an opening and swept the legs out from under him, pinning his arm and tipping his chin up with the point of her knife.

Everyone had held their breath as Boon looked up at her. His dark eyes had been difficult to read, but she had thought—or perhaps she only hoped—that she had seen an undercurrent of pride.

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You can hold my hand when you get your ears pierced.”

Boon had laughed while the others cheered. As she helped him up, satisfaction had curled in her chest, warm and hungry for more. To wear her victories like the hoops of silver dangling from her ears.

She knew, then, that she wouldn’t stop until they pulled this off. Taking down Mercado would be her greatest triumph.

Amaya returned to the main chamber. Walking through the estate still made her feel as if she were trespassing. She had no idea what to do with all this refinement, from the elaborately sculpted moldings on the ceiling to the black-and-amber polish of the marble floors. There were touches of gold everywhere, so much so that she had bitten a candleholder on her first day to make sure it was real. The estate had once belonged to an old duchess who died without any heirs, and it had been on the market for months until Amaya came along with Boon’s money in her pocket.

“Spend as much of it as you can,” he’d told her before she sailed to Moray, all the chests filled with coin stowed away in the hold. “It’s going to a good cause.”

He hadn’t come with her—he couldn’t, lest he violate his Landless sentence or was recognized by someone he’d once known—but he had sent three of his best crew members with her. She found them in the dining room, waiting to debrief now that the party was over. The room was just as absurdly elegant as the rest of the house, the walls a rich green and the table made of shining rosewood.

Liesl glanced up from her notes as she entered, a glass of red wine already before her. Avi, on her right, raised an amused eyebrow at Amaya. “Was the dunk refreshing?” he asked. She glared at him, but he just kept smirking.

“I bet it made quite an impression on the boy,” said Deadshot on Liesl’s left, her boots propped up on the tabletop. Another of the Landless Amaya had met on the atoll, she had gotten her name due to the pistols she always wore at either hip. She was of mixed race, Ledese and a nation from the Sun Empire, with dark copper skin and crimped hair that had been dyed red with henna. She wasn’t recognized as Landless in Moray—only in the Sun Empire, where she had committed enough robberies and heists to earn her an unsavory reputation.