“Maybe it’s not Families or street lords or wigheads who own New Reynes. Maybe it’s one person. Maybe all these legends are the same story.”
—A legend of the North Side
JAC
Most tourists flocked to New Reynes in the summer for the warm weather and the beaches, but Jac had always preferred the City of Sin in the fall. The pubs served spiced cider in copper mugs, and the trees wore every color from saffron to gold. This year, however, it’d been hard to focus on usual fall festivities with all the chaos surrounding the election. Now, only days away, you couldn’t even turn on the radio anymore without hearing about it.
“Turn that off,” Jac grumbled to Sophia, who switched off the news station from where she perched on the desk.
“Don’t you want to hear it?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. The First Party controlled all the media outlets, but lately, even their cheerful optimism about Harrison’s victory had lost some of its usual confidence. Levi had told Jac that Harrison needed the Torren empire for his victory, so what happened if Jac couldn’t give it to him?
“I don’t,” Jac answered, turning his attention back to the map of the Casino District mounted on the wall of Liver Shot’s back office. Even with all the dens the two of them now controlled, they’d still chosen this one as their primary base. It had a central location and familiar faces.
“You are not a failure,” Sophia told him, standing up and resting a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
He grasped it with a weak smile. “But I will be.”
“Even if we can’t give Harrison the votes,” she murmured, “we’ll still win.”
Like the news, Sophia, too, had lost some of her confidence. The endless curfew had hit them exactly where it hurt most: their bottom lines, and now their war with Charles had devolved into a waiting game of seeing who would bleed out of voltage first.
At this rate, it would be them.
“Are you and I looking at the same ledgers, or...?”
“All that matters is that Charles is hurting, too,” she said.
Jac laughed mirthlessly. “Can he hurt?”
Sophia grimaced and dug her coin out of her pocket. She flipped heads. “Twenty-seven.” She pulled out a collection of knotted necklaces from under her shirt and examined the dull beads, checking to see if there was any luck left in them.
“Twenty-seven?” Jac echoed. “What happened to your one-hundred-flip streak?”
“Until we set this all aflame, we’re still selling drugs, and I’ll never feel good about that.” She sighed. “And without trying to cut off any of Charles’s monopoly on Lullaby, we won’t, well...”
Jac stiffened. “Three seconds ago you were telling me we’d win. Now you’re saying it’s hopeless unless we start to sell Lullaby?” He didn’t care how desperate they were; he refused to stoop to such lows.
Sophia took both of his hands in hers and turned him away from the map to face her. He didn’t like the look on her face. “I’m saying...” She bit her lip. “We need a plan in case we lose.”
He dropped her hands. No, no. They hadn’t come this far to make contingencies.
The scar on his arms gave a phantom itch, and he craved a cigarette. But he’d already had one this morning, and he’d been trying to limit himself to one per day.
“We could go somewhere else,” Sophia said. “It would be starting over—”
“You gave up everything for this,” he breathed.
Her green eyes welled with tears, and she blinked them away and hugged her arms to herself. “Yes, well, Charles won’t let this end peacefully. And before, I never had to consider losing you.” She sniffled and laughed. “You’ve made me soft, and it’s disgusting.”
He snorted and wrapped his arms around her. “You aren’t losing me.” But despite his words and how much he cared about her, too, he struggled to imagine leaving New Reynes. Leaving Levi.
You haven’t spoken in two months, he reminded himself. But that didn’t stop Jac from thinking about Levi every time he tallied their profits, every time he saw the Iron tattoos on his arms. Levi had saved him countless times, but he couldn’t save Jac from this.
But there was another option. Another deadline that drew closer.
Just because Jac had torn up Charles’s invitation didn’t mean he’d forgotten it. Tomorrow was Jac’s last day before the deadline expired, and he dreaded to think how the war would change when Charles stopped playing nice.
