I held up a blouse to my chest, posing in the mirror with the too-large garment. It’d never fit on my stick-thin frame. I imagined wearing the plush fabric anyway. The dye alone would’ve cost the vampiress who owned it a fortune; its forest-green color put my faded dress to shame.
Razira stopped scrubbing the tiled floor to take the blouse and place it back where it belonged. “That’s not your color, dove,” she chastised gently.
She would call me dove to remind me our servant garb made us practically invisible. Gray suited us. No one expected a dove to fight back.
“Oh, but it’s so pretty,” I said.
Razira shut the guest’s wardrobe firmly. She handed me my discarded feather duster, tilting her head with a meaningfully raised brow.
I took it with a heavy sigh. “She left behind two vials of poison, one dagger, and a packet of some kind of powder.” Some of my grandmother’s less creative guests hid their contraband on the mantles just above eye level. Out of sight, out of mind—like the servants didn’t have to climb onto a stool and dust up there routinely.
“So, she’s sloppy. She’ll be dead before sunrise,” my mentor predicted. And, by Aetherius’s light, she was right.
I shuddered to remember Razira as she was. She often wore a head scarf to hold back her black locks. In springtime, she’d weave flowers into tiny braids that hung around her ears, pops of color to add some life and hope to this place.
She’d been in her twenties when my mother was murdered, but she had the face of a woman who’d seen enough horrors to stain even the most resilient soul. Shadows had haunted her brown eyes and darkened the gaunt hollows around her cheeks.
I made my way to the foot of the bed, where a simple wooden chest rested. I lifted the lid, fingertips skimming the edges of the wooden lining as my old mentor had taught me. Everything she’d done was in service to the new path she’d shown me: how to murder the creatures that subjugated us without getting caught.
We emptied the chest of the underclothes and other small items the vampire guest had stashed inside. Razira dropped her voice as she bent, feeling around the bare inside of the furniture. “Promise me you won’t tell any ofthemwhat I’m about to show you.”
“I promise,” I’d said immediately.
“Most chests on this level have a false bottom. Servant’s stashes, we call them. You can hide any tool you need in them.” She turned her head, eyes narrowing as they locked on to mine, a silent message flickering in their depths. “The duke has a chest like this in his room, too.”
The warmth of a single tear rolled off my nose and plopped onto the wooden planks as it lifted with a soft click. I pulled it open, revealing the false bottom of the chest. Various bottles of cleaning supplies lined the secret space.
“I thought you died,” I mumbled to myself. When Razira had claimed the duke’s death as her own doing, I’d assumed that would be the end of her story. So, how…
I shook my head sharply.It doesn’t matter how we got here. Only that we’re enemies in this competition.
I split up the items of my slayer’s kit rather than hiding it all in one incriminating pile. I gnawed on a ration bar as I stacked up the rest in the servant’s stash. If discovered, hopefully the bars would end up in the mouth of one of the overworked human servants.
I dumped out a container of cleaning chemicals and replaced its insides with consecrated water. Then, I went to the cabinet and selected a couple of pretty bottles filled with blood wine. I replaced the wine with rupture and put the bottles back, hiding the poison in plain sight.
Next to the vanity, I rearranged the tiny medicine cabinet to make room for my healing serum and added my clean syringes.
That only left my knives and stakes. No one would batan eye at a contestant having blades, but my pair of blessed stakes were troublesome. I rolled them under my wardrobe for now. The shaded nook was full of dust bunnies. No one thought to clean under there with any regularity.
It took me about an hour to hide everything. When there was a knock on my door shortly after I finally sat down, I almost pretended no one was in. I went to the powder room and startled at my reflection.
Sneering at Ilyana’s likeness, I wiped away the mess of tears and fixed my makeup to make myself presentable. I went to the door and opened it to reveal a cheerful Felicity. Fingers tightening on the knob, I resisted the impulse to slam the door closed again.
“Illy!” she exclaimed. “It’s all right if I call you that, right? You never did introduce yourself, but your reputation already precedes you.” She breezed on as if she hadn’t even asked a question. “The girls are having a little gathering to get to know one another. Or catch up. You know how older vampiresses are. They don’t see each other for centuries, but they’re thick as thieves the moment they’re back together.”
There was so much to unpack in what she’d just said. I opened my mouth; closed it, second-guessing whether I should question referring to ancient vampiresses asgirls; and settled on saying, “Ilya.”
She cocked her head. “Hmm?”
“That’s what my friends call me,” I clarified stiffly.
She smiled wide enough to show the edges of her fangs. “Ilya, then.”
“Also, I can’t join you and thegirls.” An answering smile twitched at my lips at the irony of the word. I had an urgent message to send before sunrise.
And the idea of socializing with bloodsuckers makes my skin crawl,I refrained from adding.
The brightness of her expression faded. “Oh. That’s quite the shame. I’ll send your regards, of course. Do try to make time to talk to them at the opening ball. You know what they’re saying about the first trial,” she said. I nodded as if I did. “Half of us will soon be gone. You should at least memorize the idiotic things they have to say before they die.”
