Ace of Shades (The Shadow Game #1)(7)

“What do you want?” Levi growled.

“I don’t want anything,” the captain said. He was obviously lying. Everyone wanted something.

Grady set Levi’s Snake Eyes on the table, bubbling in its champagne glass. “Anything else I can get you, Levi?”

“Nah, thanks, Grady,” he muttered, forcing a smile. He still had one hand on his gun.

“What about you, um...sir?” Grady eyed the captain hesitantly. Grady was a good man, but he wasn’t a respectable one. Whiteboots always made him tense. “What can I get for you?”

“Nothing for me.”

Grady returned to the bar, where he yelled at an old man on a stool trying to order his fifth glass of absinthe.

“You know him?” the captain asked curiously, as if he still expected Levi to be capable of small talk at a time like this. Levi had a grim suspicion he was about to be blackmailed. Or worse.

“He’s an old friend,” Levi said curtly.

“That’s why you’re not like the others. The other lords don’t have friends,” the captain said matter-of-factly. “They have victims.”

Levi was mucking tired of hearing how he wasn’t like the other street lords. Tired of hearing each and every way they were better than him.

“How old are you?” the captain asked.

“Eighteen this October,” Levi said stiffly, even though that was four months away. Better to seem older than be treated like a child.

“If you live to October. Have you ever considered that you might be in over your head?”

Levi clenched his fist beneath the table. He thought about it every night, during the hours when he should’ve been sleeping but couldn’t. He didn’t choose to start this scam. He didn’t choose to involve the most dangerous people in the city. Ever since he started working for Vianca, he hadn’t had many choices at all.

“Who else knows?” Levi murmured, the quietness of his voice betraying his fear.

The captain rubbed the scruff on his scarred chin. “I’m not the smartest man. So tell me, if I figured it out, who else might’ve, too?”

Levi caught his breath. He was referring to Sedric Torren, the twisted, perverted don of the Torren casino Family. The kind of man who could clear a room with the snap of a finger. The kind of man who could ensnare his prey with only a smile. The kind of man Levi didn’t want as an enemy.

Sedric Torren was Levi’s final investor. Once Levi paid Sedric back, he’d be done. Clean. Safe. But it’d taken Levi weeks to scrape up the nine hundred volts for the captain, and he owed Sedric ten thousand.

If Sedric did figure out the scam, would he wait for Levi to pay him back, or would he kill him to make a point? Conning a Torren was flirting with destruction.

The captain stood. “I’d prefer not to keep hearing your name.” Then he nodded at Levi and left the tavern. No blackmail, no coercion. Just a warning.

Levi let out a breath of relief. He supposed he was lucky—he could’ve been arrested, or worse. But he didn’t feel lucky. The whiteboot captain didn’t bother arresting criminals he considered dead men walking.

I’m almost done. I’m almost safe, he reminded himself. The only person I have left to pay is Sedric, then I can finally focus on the Irons.

With all the time he’d been spending on Vianca’s scam, his gang was slowly crumbling. Their income was tight, their clients were irritated and Levi hardly recognized some of his own kids. But Levi refused to fall with this scheme. He had a destiny to forge and an empire to build.

Levi stood to leave. As he made his way out the door, he tried not to notice Grady’s face fall at the full drink he’d left behind on the table.

Levi headed to the newest abandoned house Chez and some of the other Irons had made their own. As he put more distance between himself and Grady’s tavern, his shoulders relaxed, and the tightness in his chest loosened. Walking always cleared his head.

Around him, the white stone shopfronts and gambling dens gave way to the signature black scenery of Olde Town, the most historic neighborhood of New Reynes. With the buildings so tall and the alleys so narrow, there was little light here, which was why Levi had claimed it when he founded the Irons five years ago. It was nearly abandoned—nicknamed the “stain of the city,” it was the sort of place you didn’t want to find yourself, no matter the time of day. There was an art to navigating its maze of alleys, of slipping oneself into its endless shadows. Here, it was always night. And sleights of hand were easiest in the dark.

When he reached the Irons’ hideout, Levi paused, running his hand across the wrought iron bars bolted over the windows. He knew every inch of Olde Town. Because you own it, he told himself, convinced himself. But did he really own it anymore?

Levi cracked his neck, mustered up some bravado and knocked on the door. Chez unlocked it.

“There’s a missy here to see you,” Chez said, crossing his heart, as gangsters always did for their lord. As Chez usually did for him, though his sign of respect was often forgotten lately.

“What? Who?” Levi hadn’t scheduled any meetings today.

“A real prissy one. From one of the territories.”

Before Levi could ask if he was joking, Chez skulked off to the living room. Levi followed, ripping his arms out of his jacket. He didn’t have time for this. He needed to figure out how to deliver ten thousand volts to Sedric Torren before Sedric Torren delivered him.