AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She stepped out of the shower and blew her hair dry quickly. Then she returned to Tristan’s room, dropping her damp towel before his watchful eyes. She pulled on a pair of scratchy black trousers, a long-sleeved gray t-shirt, and a black sweater—servant’s clothes, for colors weren’t allowed among the workborn unless you had a contract with a highborn family. A pair of cheap, worn boots completed the look. She tucked her boot knife into a sheath near her calf.
She shoved her mesh hood in her front pocket, something she’d need as soon as she stepped outside the apartment, for few of Tristan’s people knew her face or her identity. So far they’d stayed quiet, but Lila didn’t want to risk any more of them finding out.
Just another risk. Just one more thing that could result in exile.
She stared at her canvas bag in the corner of Tristan’s bedroom, filled with a few other similar outfits and toiletries. She wondered if she should even bother taking it along.
Where would she go after her mother kicked her out?
Would she flee to Burgundy like so many exiled highborns, just in case her blackmailer leaked her story? The country refused extradition orders. She’d be safe there. Then again, perhaps she’d stay in New Bristol, continuing this thing with Tristan until it eventually faded, staying until her blackmailer got her arrested.
She deserved the arrest, didn’t she?
Perhaps not for her hack, but what had happened in the warehouse.
“Leave it,” Tristan said, following her gaze. His fingers trailed down her back, soft against the knit of her sweater. His arms closed around her waist.
She snuggled back into his warmth, stealing a few more precious moments. “I should take it with me.”
“Should is one of the most insidious and hateful words in the English language,” he said, kissing her neck. “You can always take it back to the compound later. It will be fine here.”
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
She gave him a long kiss. Then she picked up her satchel and left the damn bag behind.
Chapter 2
Lila plopped into the driver’s seat of her Cruz sedan and shoved a pair of false license plates into her satchel. They’d kept her off her matron’s radar for the last two weeks. She’d known her mother’s spies would be out, looking for the hole she’d crawled into.
But no one had found it, nor had they found the car she’d taken.
She turned the heater up to full blast, a balm against the chill, then twirled the radio dial to a jazz station. A mournful trumpet called out in long, solemn notes as she backed from her spot in the parking garage and drove away from Shippers Lane. Dirt and mud and cigarette butts filled the gutters. The occasional plastic bag and scrap of paper flitted across the streets in the dim, waking morning.
Smoky diners, pawn shops, and cracked apartments soon merged into the well-lit cafés, bookstores, and boutiques of the better sort of poorer classes. Lowborns, those citizens of New Bristol who ran at least one business, owned many of them. Perhaps more than one, cramming each store into a little complex, mimicking the highborn estates.
Lila rushed through a green light and lifted her eyes to the skyline. Above the grit of the workborn and the lowborn loomed the twelve highborn estates with their sprawling mansions and skyscrapers, far taller than any lowborn would ever be allowed to build, no matter how rich they’d become over the generations.
Now that the Wilson family had fallen to the Randolphs, their tower would topple. It watched over the city like a scornful monarch, gripping her crumbling throne while the peasants swung axes at her door.
New Bristol had swung harder and harder with every passing day. Celeste Wilson and her son would soon hang, serving as an example to anyone who might do business with the Holy Roman Empire, the twin kingdoms of Italy and Germany. The pair’s arrests had cast the rest of the Wilson family to the poorer classes. Those who could not afford to purchase their marks from the Randolph family would work as slaves. Those who could pay would take jobs as workborn wherever they could find them, even if it meant traveling out of state.
At season’s end, the New Bristol High Council of Judges would announce Suji Park as the next highborn matron. The family would then wall itself off from the poorer classes, erect a similar tower in their compound, and replace the Wilsons as highborn.
Such was the newest verse of the same old song.
Lila stopped before the southern gate of her family’s compound, her engine running as a saxophone trilled on. The mansions of the fifteen heirs peeked over the stone wall of the estate, dwarfed by a crowd of maples. Toward the center, Wolf Tower loomed tallest of all the buildings in New Bristol, a glass marvel that glittered as the sun rose. Other skyscrapers and office buildings surrounded it, containing the executive offices, administration personnel, and management for all Randolph holdings throughout Saxony.
A lone saxophone drifted into an announcer’s smooth baritone. “That, of course, was the Robby Walsh classic ‘Rainy Moon.’ In the studio this morning, we have General Ancrum and General De Silva to discuss the Slave Freedom Bill, a piece of legislation rumored to be bouncing around the halls of Bullstow. Ladies, good—”
Lila switched off the radio as Sergeant Nolan knocked upon her window, her blackcoat waving in the chilly wind. Behind Nolan, the door to the gatehouse hung ajar. Her rookie leaned against the glass with curious eyes. The surface steamed with every breath.
“Morning, chief,” Nolan said, touching the brim of her cap. “Nice to see you back.”
“Nice to be back, sergeant.”
“We missed you in the security office. Commander Sutton ordered us to spend two hours at the gun range this week. I suspect Sergeant Jenkins has her ear.”
