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She and Tristan would fight about that. The fighting would annoy her even more than usual. They’d been getting along so well lately, ever since they’d narrowly escaped the Wilson compound. Reaper had bluffed that he’d poisoned Tristan’s brother and that only he held the antidote. He’d also lunged at Lila with a knife. Tristan had shot Reaper, not realizing the gun held bullets, rather than tranqs. He’d killed a man and condemned Dixon to death with one shot.
Luckily, Dixon had only been given an anesthetic. A harsh one, but it hadn’t killed him.
Reaper’s death had amped Tristan up, though, had made him nervous and fidgety. It weighed on him but not as much as his split-second decision to save Lila’s life at the expense of his brother’s. Though he claimed he didn’t regret it, he still hadn’t come to terms with it.
He hadn’t come to terms with Lila, either. Sleeping in bed together, curling up in one another’s arms, was a welcome change from their perpetual arguing, but Lila still didn’t know how to feel about it. Highborns were much more casual about sex than the poorer classes, and he obviously didn’t know how difficult their new normal was for her. To be so near someone and not have sex was torture.
It was even worse when you’d begun to develop feelings for them.
Lila slipped on her mesh hood and rounded the corner, the fabric stifling in the heat. A woman in a derby hat hopped up from a wooden chair when she saw Lila, the bulge of a tranq gun peeking out from both their pockets. Without a word, Samantha opened the front door of the mechanic shop, half medieval church, half dilapidated building. At least, it had been dilapidated before Tristan threw himself into restoring it with nervous abandon. Now the lights that spelled Mechanic had been fixed, the front door painted, the graffiti-covered plywood behind the iron-barred window taken away in favor of a glass pane. New thick drapes waved behind it.
The purple feather in Samantha’s hat bowed as Lila entered, and the scent of grease and oil filled Lila’s nose. The shop functioned as a mechanic’s business during the day. As a consequence, a tangle of cars and trucks and motorcycles filled the back, parked so close that only a professional could pull them out again.
“The trucks all look nice, Shirley,” Lila said, pitching her voice a bit lower than natural. She jutted her chin toward the row of blue Cruz trucks, recently painted.
“Thanks, Hood.” The old woman sat on a stool under a sign that read Clean up or Suffer. Part of her ear and a few fingers had been severed, not that she seemed bothered by it. Shirley was more than capable of fixing a motorcycle engine and holding a knife with what fingers she had left. And according to Sam, she could hear a mouse fart across the room with her one good ear.
“Maria, come here,” Shirley said, tugging at the neck of her coveralls.
The fifteen-year-old had been earnestly sweeping the garage when Lila came in, keeping her head down as she ducked between the trucks to catch every speck of dust and dirt. Likely before she’d come in as well, for the floor looked cleaner than Lila had ever seen it.
Maria immediately raced to Shirley. Her eyes never rose from the floor, and her loose gray dress twirled around her legs when she stopped. A healing gash peeked from her collar, for Doc had cut out her slave’s chip, the ID and homing beacon that bound slaves to their masters.
The girl sniffled and gripped the broom like a shield, her shoulders tense, her eyes raw and red. As Peter Kruger’s daughter, she should have been a princess of the Holy Roman Empire, but had instead lived with her twin brother as a slave under the spiteful hand of Chairwoman Wilson.
Shirley shook her head at the girl’s speed. “Maria, I didn’t mean you had to run. You can walk when you feel like it, remember?”
“Yes, madam. Sorry, madam.”
“Maria, this is a friend of Tristan’s. Her name’s Hood. She’s one of people who helped your daddy get to Germany.”
Maria bowed low. “Thank you, madam.”
“We’re going to get your brother back,” Lila vowed. “We won’t fail again. I promise.”
“Thank you, madam.” Maria’s shoulders rose as she gripped the broom.
Lila and Shirley sighed simultaneously. It was difficult talking to Maria. She only said a few phrases, never failing to attach a madam or sir to the end. Worse than that, her shoulders rose higher and higher the longer you spoke to her. It was a bit like conversing with a human hourglass. When her shoulders reached her ears, you had to let her go. If you didn’t, the shaking would begin.
“Your hair is different,” Lila said. “I like the red.”
“Thank you, madam.”
“It does look good, doesn’t it, Hood?” Shirley said. “She wouldn’t choose a new hair color, so Zoe recommended this. Maria let him do it. I nearly had a heart attack, thinking it wouldn’t look natural, but it looks quite good. You made a good choice, didn’t you, Maria?”
The girl stared at the ground. Her shoulders had reached her ears. They’d run out of time.
“Okay, go on, then,” Shirley said. “Go on back to your sweeping if that’s taken your fancy.”
Maria scooted away and swept faster.
Lila studied her face, her body. Most slaves eavesdropped continuously, whether from curiosity or because they spied for another family.
Maria didn’t seem interested, though. She didn’t seem interested in anything.
“Hood, if they don’t kill that bitch Wilson soon, I’m going to break into Bullstow and do it for them. I can’t stop the girl from cleaning. We tried to explain that she doesn’t have to do slave’s work anymore, but she doesn’t seem to understand what that means.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know what normal girls do.”
