Release: Davlova: Book One (2 page)

I was relieved when I finally made it to Roxy Lane.

Anzhéla ran her crew from a theatre. They even put on shows. That’s how good of a front it was. Of course her little clan of pickpockets was only one tiny piece of her puzzle. I’d been working for her since I was ten. Nearly thirteen years, and I was only now learning how broad her reach was. Anzhéla was a powerful woman, whether the fools on the hill knew it or not.

The boy I’d sent this direction earlier that morning was asleep outside the door, curled in the shadows against the cool brick. I nudged him with my toe, and he came instantly awake.

“It’s you,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s me.” I hadn’t intended to be the one to bring him in, but there was no point in leaving him outside, now that I was back. “Follow me.”

I didn’t go through the front door of headquarters. Frey would have beaten me up one side and down the other if I’d been so stupid. I went past the building, feeling as always that the gargoyles on top were waiting to pounce on me if I looked up. I slid under the fence of a run-down hostel, then through a gate and behind a thorny rose bush that never bloomed. I lifted a drain grate that didn’t actually cover a drain. I had the kid go first, then followed behind, sliding down a narrow tunnel into a cellar. From there, I walked through an unlit, dirt-floored corridor, and finally I knocked our code onto a plain wood door—one, three, one—asking admittance.

Our den was all but deserted this time of day. The kid guarding the door was the only person I saw. I left the new boy with him and made my way alone through the cramped quarters of our den to the tiny room at the end of the hall. I climbed a short ladder to a trapdoor in the ceiling. I knocked the code again. Got a heavy thump in return, which meant the coast wasn’t clear. I waited, shifting in my boots. Now that I was off the street, down in the safety of my home, I suddenly had to pee. Not only that, but the smell of my mark’s previous whore, still all over my face, seemed stronger than ever. I resisted the urge to knock again. I knew better.

Eventually the trap door opened, and a hand I recognized as Frey’s—all those heavy silver rings on the long, graceful fingers—descended through the opening to help me up. I emerged into a dark storage space, staring into Frey’s humorless eyes. We were somewhere behind and to the right of the stage. Muffled music drifted through the walls.

“Took you long enough,” I said to Frey.

“Fuck you,” he replied.
He
even though I knew well enough there was no cock between his legs, just like I knew he wore a cloth wrapped around his chest to hide the breasts with which birth had cursed him. Frey had been born Freyja, but I’d seen what happened to flats fool enough to remind Frey of that fact.

“Why are you guarding the door?” Usually somebody lower in our strange little hierarchy did that.

“Everybody else is working the festival.” Frey flicked his hand across his forehead. It was a gesture left over from his days as a woman, when he’d pushed his long hair from his face. Now it was shorn within an inch of his skull, even though that meant revealing the strange bald spots behind his right ear that hinted at a neural implant.

I’d never had the balls to ask about that.

“I got word Anzhéla wanted me.”

Frey hooked a ringed thumb over his shoulder. “She’s waiting for you in her office.”

I stopped in the bathroom on my way, partly to empty my bladder, partly to clean up a bit. Kids new to the clan might show up in front of Anzhéla smelling like a street whore, but the woman had saved my life more times than I could count. I opted to show her a bit more respect than that. I scrubbed my face and hands and used a bit of water to tame my unruly hair where it had escaped from its queue. Finally, I made my way to the room on the second floor that had once served as a projection room, before the ban. Now, it was Anzhéla’s office.

No need for secret knocks and subterfuge here. Nobody who wasn’t trustworthy would have made it this far. I knocked only to let her know I’d arrived, but walked in before she could call out a greeting.

“I hear you need me.”

One might expect the head of one of Davlova’s biggest crime syndicates to be big and tough. One would have been wrong. Anzhéla looked like some kind of nymph, a few years past the bloom of her youth. She had thick dark hair, just starting to go grey at the temples, and tiny hands. Huge beaded hoops hung from her ears. She smiled when she saw me and leaned back in her chair to prop her booted feet up on her desk. “Got a job for you.”

“I was already doing a job.”

She wrinkled her freckled nose at me to let me know what she thought of that. Never mind that it was all for her. She had plenty of kids to work the streets. Apparently, this was bigger. “Talia needs a whore.”

“I thought Talia had whores.”

“She needs you.”

“I’m not a whore.”

“You are now.”

I sat down in the chair across from her, a chair I’d sat in a thousand times, and tried to think through what she needed. Yes, I turned tricks from time to time, but I’d never really considered myself a whore. I was a thief who knew how to take full advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. There was a difference, no matter how small. I always had the final say in who I served and who I didn’t. And Anzhéla had never told me it was something I had to do. Never.

“Talia has whores,” I said again. “A whole house of them. That’s why they call it a whorehouse.”

“Don’t be crude. And don’t argue.”

I ducked my head, stunned into silence. It was as much of a scolding as I’d had from her in years. I tried to figure out how to get the answers I wanted without pissing her off. “Fine. You want me to go to Talia’s? You selling me to her?”

She took her feet off of her desk and leaned her elbows on it to gaze at me. When I looked up, I saw a hint of compassion in her eyes. “I don’t sell my boys. You know that.”

“Then why me?”

She looked down at the blotter under her arms, toying with the pendant that hung between her breasts. She was deciding how much to tell me. “Talia has a client,” she said at last. “And I have a client. It just so happens that my client has a particular interest in her client, and her client has a penchant for exotic male whores.”

I sighed and put my head in my hands. Most of the citizens of the city of Davlova had brown eyes, dusky skin, and sleek, dark brown hair. But not me. My skin was only a bit lighter than the norm, but my parents’ unnatural mixture of genes had granted me the dubious benefit of thick, black, kinky hair and bright green eyes. They made me stand out, which wasn’t exactly advantageous for a thief, but it was apparently enough to make me seem “exotic” to some flat.

“I’m not a whore.” As if saying it enough times could make it true.

She sighed. “Misha, I know you turn tricks.”

“I pick the mark, and I have Jabin or Jimbo nearby if I need them. It’s not the same thing.”

“But you know how to be fucked?”

I felt myself blush, but she wasn’t being coy, so I swallowed hard and answered her. “I suppose I do.”

I expected her to press, but she didn’t. Not yet. Instead, she stood and walked over to the buffet on the side of the room. I heard the clink of crystal. Her long lacy skirts swished around the ankles of her steel-tipped boots as she crossed back over to me. She set a glass of amber liquid down in front of me.

“Drink.”

The glass felt unusually cold against my skin. I lifted it and sniffed. Not the sour ale or the crabapple wine those of us in the trenches drank. Not whiskey, either. This was something elite and expensive. Something I didn’t even know the name of. It tasted like cold steel and made my lips numb.

Anzhéla returned to her seat and leaned on her desk to study me. “This is a big fish, Misha. A
really
big fish. I have a client who wants information, and he’ll pay well for it. We’ve been looking for an in for two years, and we finally have one. You’re perfect, not just because of your looks, but because you have a good memory and you can talk without sounding like gutter trash. Plus, you’ve never been arrested.”

I reached up instinctively to rub the nape of my neck, where the guards tattooed hash marks for each arrest. My neck was still clean. No blemishes there for this man to see while he fucked me. Nothing to tip him off that I was a criminal.

“I can’t force you to go,” Anzhéla went on, pushing her advantage, “but I’m telling you: this is our chance, kid. The one we’ve been waiting for. The one that will take us from the trenches to the hill, like we’ve always dreamed.”

“All I have to do is fuck him?”

She held her hands up. “We’re not talking a one-night stiff here, Misha. This guy’s looking for a regular, and if you can convince him to let you fill that role, you’ll have access.”

“To what?”

“His house? His secrets? I don’t know for sure. What I know is, this man has enemies, and they’re willing to pay for information. Whatever information you can find that may benefit them.”

I took another sip of the liquid. It made my extremities tingle, but it seemed to make my vision crystal clear.

“This first night will be a test, Misha. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what he’ll do to you. If it’s too terrible, you can walk away tomorrow, I swear to the sky. But if you can hold strong...”

I’d have a ticket out of the trenches. Away from the alleys full of refuse and wretches. Away from a life of thieving and whoring to make ends meet.

Anzhéla watched me. Beautiful, as always, but with wrinkles starting to halo her eyes. A bit of sag in the flesh of her neck. She could have a man killed with a snap of her tiny fingers, but that wasn’t how she did things. There were plenty of stories on the street of clan kids being beaten or murdered by their den-marms, but not here. Not with her. She may have handed out a bruise or two now and then, but only when it was deserved.

A big fish. The one we’d been waiting for. And I was the one she needed to see it through.

I downed the rest of the liquid in one swallow. It was time to earn my keep.

CHAPTER TWO

I went to the back door of the whorehouse, as Anzhéla had instructed. It wouldn’t do for Talia’s upscale clients to see a petty thief walking up and ringing the bell. Inside, a petite woman led me to a marble bathroom. A tub of hot scented bubbles waited.

I was nervous about what was to come—so nervous in fact that I’d vomited up my dinner on the way across town—but never in my life had I been granted access to such luxury. I soaked in the bath, scrubbing myself clean of the ash I usually used to dull my hair. Two women entered without knocking. They motioned me out of the tub and dried me off. They made me take the brown lenses out of my green eyes, then rubbed my skin with scented oils until I shone. One of them offered me a jar of thick, aromatic salve. “You’ll want to be ready in case he’s in a hurry. Do you want me to do your entrance?”

I could only blink at her, unable to believe she’d asked me such a question. She was obviously a whore. Stunningly beautiful. In other circumstances, an offer like that might have been erotic, even if I wasn’t generally attracted to women. But not this time. My anxiety kept my cock in check.

“I think I can handle that part myself.”

When my skin met their satisfaction, they moved to my hair. Normally, I wore it tied in a tight queue down my back, but they were obviously intent on making me stand out. They used a gold band to hold it off of my forehead, then teased against its natural kink, making it stand around my head like some kind of crown. They rubbed handfuls of tinted oil into it until it glistened black, but reflected shades of blue and violet. They strapped me into strangely baggy purple pants, thick-soled boots, and a silk shirt. I thought a tailored jacket would come next, but instead, they draped a heavy brocade cape of silver and violet over my shoulders. It probably cost a mint. Finally, they painted black kohl around my eyes and gold glitter on my eyelids. When they were done, I surveyed myself in the mirror.

Exotic.

It pissed me off to have to admit it, but I sure as fuck seemed to fit the bill.

I always carried two knives with me—one at my belt and one in my right boot—but they shook their heads at me in amusement when I asked for them. “You can’t go in with a weapon.”

“Then how do I defend myself?”

They glanced at each other, as if trying to decide which one of them would break the news to me.

“You don’t,” the older one finally said.

I didn’t like that answer at all, but there was no point in arguing. I was tucked into a carriage. A silent driver I hadn’t managed to see steered the team down the street. Past the trenches. Through the plaza. We stopped briefly at the gate so they could check the credentials of the carriage and driver—wouldn’t do to let gutter trash through, unless it was exotic-looking trash ordered up by one of the tattooed bastards for a night of entertainment—and then we went into the upper city and right up the fucking hill.

My heart began to pound. Anzhéla had said a big fish. Still, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that she meant this big. One of the noble pureborn.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small packet of pills the whores had given me. “The white ones will keep you hard,” she’d said to me. “Talia says that’s important.”