Blood Heir (Blood Heir Trilogy #1)(56)
Ana threw one last glimpse at the gleaming marble statues of the four Deities and wondered how they could ever stand to look upon such a godless place.
The cold autumn air that stung his face was a blissful release from the hot, cramped chambers of the Playpen. Ramson slipped through the crowds, his eyes trained on Ana’s chestnut hair, the slim silhouette of her black dress as she walked briskly. He called out to her, loudly enough to attract the attention and giggling of several drunk revelers.
He caught her wrist. By instinct, he turned, pulling her into the darkness of a small alleyway. She made a noise in her throat and grew still. “Ana,” Ramson panted. Something in him twisted like a knife at the sight of her: arms crossed, shoulders hunched, as though she wanted to fold herself away.
She was unbelievably na?ve—yet something in the way she viewed the world, as though it were carved of white and black, reminded him of the way he’d been before Jonah’s death. And somehow a small part of him wanted to protect her.
Ramson found himself reaching out and gently tilting her chin toward him.
She stepped back, snapping out of his hold, and ripped her mask off. It landed facedown in the wet garbage of the empty alleyway.
She was crying. Tears had carved dark streaks of kohl down her cheeks, mingling with her powders. For a moment, she stared at him, and he wanted to pull her close. “That,” she whispered, “was beyond inhumane. I don’t have the words for it.”
The heat coursing through his veins dissipated, and Ramson suddenly felt cold. “It was,” he said hoarsely.
She turned her gaze to him, eyes burning like embers. “How could you associate with those people? How could you watch them do that and not feel anything?”
For all these years, he’d taken the coward’s way out, refusing to sink to a level as low as the brokers under Kerlan’s command. Yet standing by and doing nothing was another form of evil, he realized as he dropped his gaze to the ground. And fate had rewarded him in kind, anyway.
Ramson was silent.
Ana took a deep breath. She swiped angrily at the tears on her face and seemed to collect herself as she lifted her chin and straightened. “I just need some time by myself.” Her tone was impassive and flat, the same as the first time she had spoken to him back in Ghost Falls. Somewhere, somehow in her life, she had learned to mask her emotions. And she was almost as good as he was.
Looking at her, eyes blazing, shoulders squared, standing tall and regal in her evening dress, he thought she burned like a beacon. Something stirred in him—something that drew him toward her like shadows toward the light.
Ramson stamped out that inkling of desire. “All right,” he said, shrugging. “I have some matters to take care of.” Stay safe. I’ll see you back at the inn. Yet he said none of those words as he turned abruptly and walked away, leaving her in the darkness of the alleyway. The Ramson Quicktongue of Novo Mynsk, Portmaster and Deputy of the Order of the Lily, gave no reassurances and made no promises.
Ramson stalked through the streets that he knew like the back of his own hand. He’d grown up in the city as a petty thief, running errands for the Order and learning everything he could about the cruel, crooked world he had been given to work with. In time, the red-shingled rooftops of the dachas had become his safe haven, and the shadows of the grimy alleyways had grown to welcome him like an old friend.
Ramson stopped by a pub. He spoke with several hooded patrons before slipping cop’stones beneath begrimed wooden tables and shaking hands, arrangement made. He then set out for the Dams.
The Dams was less of a dam than it was a vast meshwork of tight alleys and underground tunnels that separated the poor from the rich in Novo Mynsk. It was the nest of all gangs and crime networks. An open-air sewage funnel ran along the edge of the Dams, lending the area its wet, rotting stench that clung to one’s clothes if one stayed too long. It was also a convenient place to dump victims. Every few days, a body would bob along the foul green stream—corpses of nobodies or criminals that the city guards and Whitecloaks alike chose to ignore.
The streetlamps had all been smashed long ago, and the remaining shards of glass on the ground crunched beneath Ramson’s polished shoes. The moon hid behind clouds that promised snow—the First Snow—in four days, and Ramson was grateful that the stink of sewage had dissipated in the cold. He walked briskly, navigating the crooked twists and turns with no more hesitation than a man would pace through his own backyard.
He stopped suddenly, at the corner of an alleyway no different from any other. Ramson leaned against the wall and melted into the shadows.
He waited.
Minutes passed. The darkness pressed at his eyes. A small creature scurried through a pile of trash behind him.
And then he heard it: the faint clop-clop-clop of hooves, and the squeak of carriage wheels. He knew the exact carriage that was coming this way, and he knew the passenger it carried.
Of all the crime lords that ruled Cyrilia, Alaric Kerlan was the biggest and the baddest of them all. His wide-reaching network, his insurmountable wealth, and his league of highly trained brokers and gang members made him the most feared. It thus stood to reason that Kerlan’s men could stroll through the Dams clad in silks and tossing gold, and the other gangs would bow them forward and scurry after them to help pick up the coins they dropped. Alaric Kerlan’s wrath was the last thing one wanted to incur.