Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(166)

“Why?” Valyn demanded again.

She opened her mouth to speak, shut it, then returned her gaze to the window. “For the same reason anyone else met her. For the same reason Laith did.”

“But…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head in confusion. “You’re … Oh.”

The sniper’s chin was set in a rigid line. She refused to respond.

Talal spread his hands. “All right,” he said matter-of-factly. “She was a whore. You paid her for her services.”

Valyn turned to Laith. “You … knew Amie. You ever hear anything about this? About her going with women?”

The flier shook his head slowly. “She always seemed happy enough with the cock—”

Annick rounded on him in a flash, drawing her knife and putting it to his throat before the rest of them could so much as twitch. The flier held up his hands slowly. Idiot, Valyn cursed himself. Fast was fast, regardless of the weapon.

“All right,” he said warily. “All right. Annick—just relax.”

“She wasn’t happy with it,” the sniper hissed into Laith’s stunned face. “Not with your coin, not with your ’Kent-kissing cock. But she was poor, and so she took both and put a brave face on it.” It was more words together than Valyn had ever heard Annick utter. Her face was flushed with anger, the tendons of her neck straining beneath the skin.

“All right,” Laith said slowly, nodding. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“You didn’t realize, because you didn’t care. Whenever you got drunk and needed a hole to stick it in, you’d take the ferry over. It didn’t matter who. You f*cked her sister as many times as you f*cked Amie.”

The flier took a deep breath, then shook his head slowly, deliberately, careful not to slice his flesh on the knife. “I did care,” he said, “but maybe not in the right ways. There are a lot of kinds of caring. I didn’t love her, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like her. I paid her for sex, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t gentle with her. You cared about her more; I can see that. Believe me, though, when I tell you I want to find whoever killed her as badly as you do.”

The sniper stared at him for another tense moment, then nodded, slid the belt knife back into her sheath, and sagged back into her seat. Talal let out a long, ragged breath.

“’Shael on a stick,” Gwenna muttered. “The whole f*cking lot of you are insane.”

For a while they just sat there, Annick staring blankly out the window, Gwenna lost, now that her fury had no direction, Valyn struggling to make sense of the new information, to fit it in with everything else he knew or suspected. For the hundredth time, he wished he could talk things over with Lin, but Lin was dead. The four soldiers in the room were his Wing now. He wasn’t sure he could trust them, but he was certain he couldn’t trust anyone else.

The leach was the first to pick up the thread of the rapidly unraveling conversation. “I have some experience keeping secrets, and I, for one, believe Annick. She couldn’t have predicted Shaleel’s arrival or Yurl’s accusation. The emotion we just saw is difficult to fake.”

“What are you?” Gwenna asked, “a professional masker?” For once, there was more weariness than challenge in her voice.

“I’m a leach, and a leach learns to lie early on. He learns it, or he dies. I may be wrong, but I believe what Annick tells us.” He eyed the others, as though welcoming them to disagree. When no one spoke, he pushed ahead, his voice quiet but firm. “But we still need to sort this out, and we’ll sort it out quicker if we work together.”

The sniper hesitated, then turned back to the room. “Fine,” she replied brusquely. “Let’s work.”

Valyn caught Talal’s eye, nodded his thanks, then turned back to Annick.

“Did you see Amie that morning?”

“For about an hour,” she responded. “We took our normal room in a boarding house a few doors down from Manker’s.” The confusion and desperation she had shown moments ago were gone, like strong currents frozen under the winter ice. She may not have killed Amie, Valyn thought to himself, but she’s still dangerous.

“Not the building where Lin and I found her?” he asked carefully.

“No. That’s all the way across the harbor.”

“Did she say what she was going to do when you left her?” he pressed.