Maid of the shadows (book 2 )

PROLOGUE

Azeck

I stared at the mold creeping up the cellar walls, counting the spores just to keep from screaming.

The air in this hole was thick with the scent of damp earth and my own rotting ambition. It was a far cry from the Rossi study, where the air smelled of expensive cedar and the kind of power that didn’t need to raise its voice to be heard. I should have been sitting there now, pouring a drink over the corpses of the boy king and the Vane girl. Instead, I was a rat in a sewer, hiding from the very world I was supposed to own.

“Elias, you bloody amateur,” I hissed, the words echoing mockingly against the stone.

He was supposed to be my surgical strike. My partner. Instead, he’d managed to get himself killed and leave me holding a bag of ashes. My gamble had been total, and for the first time in my life, I had misread the board. I had spent years as the “loyal companion,” the man the Rossis trusted with their ledgers and their lives, only to be cast out into the dirt because a dead man couldn’t hit a target.

But it wasn’t the Rossi boy’s survival that kept me awake in the dark. Caspian was a wounded dog; he would bleed out eventually. No, the real poison in my veins was the news of the girl.

Cassey.

Every time I thought of the name, I felt like I was choking on a silver spoon. I remembered her clearly—too clearly. She was the shadow in the corner of the room, the invisible hands that cleared my plates and kept the inkwells full. She was a servant. A nobody. A girl whose only purpose was to be overlooked.

And yet, the reports filtering down to this hellhole said she was the one holding the gavel.

They called her a bridge. They said she was walking through the ruins of the Rossi estate with her head held high, stitching the broken Aegis survivors to the Iron Saints as if she were mending a torn hem. She was preaching unification. She was taking the factions I had spent decades carefully turning against one another and forcing them to shake hands over the dinner table.

It was an insult to the very art of the game. I had studied the cracks in this city for a lifetime, knowing exactly where to twist the knife to make the Port bleed. And here was a maid, a girl who probably couldn’t even read a balance sheet a year ago, trying to heal the wounds I had spent my soul creating.

She was acting as if she had the blood. As if she had the right. She was playing at being a Queen of the Gutters, a Saint of the Towers, thinking she could erase the lines between the two with a few soft words and a shared enemy.

I gripped the edge of my makeshift desk, my fingernails digging into the rotting wood. My rage was a cold, steady thing now.

Let her build her bridge. Let her gather the wolves and the lions under one roof and tell them they are a family. Let her feel the weight of that makeshift crown and believe, even for a second, that she has won. It only makes my job easier. I don’t have to hunt them down in the alleys anymore; she’s doing the work of gathering them all in one place for me.

Cassey thinks she’s the glue holding the Port together. She doesn’t realize that a bridge is just a target that’s easier to see. I’ll let her finish her little masterpiece, and then I will find the one stone that holds it all up.

After all a bridge is the most easiest thing to burn.