“Isn’t that what you’ve always been doing?” he challenged her. “I’d rather you just say it and stop pretending like you have power over me.”
“Fine,” she snapped, stepping closer. “I know exactly who you are,Jac Mardlin. I know you have a thousand volts on your head. And even if I don’t know what game you’re playing, I know you’re a spy. And whatever phone call you think you’re about to make right now, you won’t.”
He’d suspected she’d known his name, but it still made his heart stutter to hear her say it. Sophia had always been a bad idea waiting to happen. Jac had once liked bad ideas—when their consequences used to entail hungover mornings or awkward, half-clothed stumbles out the door. But lately, bad ideas meant execution.
“Why is that? Will you pull a gun on me?” he asked, drawing his own out of his pocket. It was a crowded street, so he kept it close, tucked beneath the flap of his jacket. He had no intention of shooting her, but he had every intention of making it out of here.
“You won’t kill me,” she answered matter-of-factly.
Then Sophia reached into her pocket, and Jac clicked off the safety. “Put your hands where I can see them.”
She did so, but she’d already removed what she wanted—the coin. She flipped it again and murmured, “Heads.”
“Why do you keep doing that? What does it mean?” His voice came out harsh and biting, and he realized how fearful he sounded. He didn’t mess with superstitions.
“It means I won’t get hurt tonight,” she said. “Listen, I didn’t bring you along with me to threaten you. I wanted you to see what we’re up against.”
“Who’s ‘we?’” he asked.
“You came here for a job—I know that. I don’t know if it was for Pup or someone else, but it’s clear you’re not here by choice. If itwereyour choice, you wouldn’t be anywhere near the Torren empire. You hate it. Every time I’ve watched you light your cigarette outside Liver Shot, I’ve wondered if it would be the time you lit something else instead.”
She took a step closer to him, close enough that Jac felt nervous about hurting her accidentally. Putting his gun away meant relinquishing the last bit of control he had in this conversation, but he’d never really had any power to begin with. She’d seen right through him. About everything.
Still, he held it. Better safe than sorry.
“That’s why I wanted to bring you. Because I have a proposition.” Sophia took another step closer. “After I tell you what it is, I want you to take the night off and think about it. If you still want to make that phone call in the morning, then fine. But at least consider what I’m offering.”
“I’m not interested,” Jac told her flatly.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say,” Sophia insisted.
“I know I won’t like it.”
She was close enough to reach out and touch him now. Jac swallowed hard.
“I know your secret,” she whispered. “So it’s only fair that you know mine. I’ll give you a hint,Todd.”
Jac waited for her to finish her statement, then it slowly dawned on him that she already had. And all at once, he knew what she was going to say. Her brown hair, her wicked smile, her matching coin. He should’ve realized it the moment he saw her and Delia Torren in the same room. He should’ve realized it the moment he looked at Sedric Torren’s obituary photograph on the desk in Liver Shot’s office.
“Your name,” he said hoarsely.
Sophia leaned forward and rested her hand on his—the same that held his gun. Then she moved her lips dangerously close to his ear. “My real name is Sophia Torren, and I want you to help me bring this empire down.”
LEVI
Levi lay on the hard marble floor of a hallway, the tiles and the doors alternating black and white. A familiar chill crawled up his spine, and he remembered that there was something unnatural about this place.
But he also remembered it was only a dream. And so Levi stood up and crept to the closest white door, filled with an instinct to explore.
When he pushed it open, he was home. At least, at the time, he’d still thought of this place as home. Their house was modestly small, not unlike the many others that trailed up the winding roads overlooking the beach. Inside, however, his family kept their many treasures. Old portraits of dead kings were tucked, secretly, into the pages of books. Amid typical trinkets—bouquets bought from the local market, wooden coasters, a cheap cigar box—hid more expensive collectibles, concealed within the clutter of plain sight. There was an heirloom family brooch swathed within the bundle of roses on a side table. The key to their grandfather’s home was glued beneath the third coaster. A map of a distant city was rolled up beneath a cigar.
In this memory, Levi was ten years old and resting a broken leg after colliding his bike into a motorcar—one of the first he’d ever seen. He’d chased after it to get a closer look...and he’d gotten one. As punishment, he had to spend the whole summer indoors, waiting for himself to heal. And his favorite place to do so was here, in his mother’s studio, watching her paint.
A long time ago, his maternal grandfather had worked for a railroad company as an engineer, and he’d traveled the world with his family, designing new lines of public transport in all the major cities and kingdoms. His mother had collected stories from all the places where she grew up and the people she’d met, and it was her sentimentals that Levi knew to look for, knew to ask about.
She bent over her easel, a brush perched in her fingers. She painted stories as well as she told them—flourishes of color and texture that Levi knew to be auras, even though he’d only ever seen one. Because he took after his father, his split talent for glimpsing auras was weaker. What his mother could sense about the world—the essences of every person she encountered, every emotion they felt—was so far beyond his own abilities, he could only look on her art in awe. Levi had spent most of his childhood trapped within that house, but it seemed to him that his mother had experienced everything, and he thirsted to see more of the world through her eyes.
“Which story do you want to hear again?” she asked, tucking a coarse curl behind her ear. Her brown skin was freckled from always sitting by the window, occasionally staring out of it for hours on end. Levi sometimes suspected she felt as trapped as he did.
