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“Give him some water.” My eyes flitted to Arkane, who flicked a brow at my request.
“Never took you for the kind type,” Arkane said in a bemused tone, but waved a hand at Mikhail, who nodded. He produced a bottle of water and held it to the prisoner’s face, who gurgled it down only to cough it out.
Grayson maintained an impassive look as he watched me. Like he was waiting for me to make one wrong move so he could plummet me to the floor and give me a Columbian smile.
After Alan Dumfred choked on enough water, Mikhail stepped away, and I took a step forward, which made his drooping left eye in line with mine.
“So why did you want me here?”
“Because you’re an Esteal,” Alan rasped, a faint leering smile on his broken lips. “September thirteenth happened because of the Esteals.”
My head whipped to Arkane, who watched me with his cold eyes as a flare of betrayal spread through my chest. No wonder Alan Dumfred got cocky, thinking switching blame on me could save his life. Sadly, he didn’t know he would never see another sunrise. Either I was going to end his life or Arkane Stormhold was going to end us both.
“You know that’s not true, Stormhold,” I said in a composed voice. “Only three Esteals remain alive. I might have an unusual night job, but my sisters live a pretty normal life.”
“Do I trust a dying man’s words or yours?” Arkane asked in an eerily calm tone that sent invisible shivers down my body. This was bad. If he brought me to extract some kind of revenge, even my body wouldn’t leave this premise. My hand was already itching toward my knives.
“Mine, because I don’t lie. I’ve got nothing to do with September thirteenth. Nor does my family.” I brought my eyes back to Alan Dumfred. I knew turning my back on Arkane Stormhold would be a mistake, but at the moment, I didn’t have much choice.
“Why lie, Alan?” I maintained my calm tone as I impaled the blade of my knife through his ear in the flash of an eye. The movement was so swift, so fast that he barely saw it coming.
His painful wails filled the room as I kept twisting the hilt, till the tear widened and widened, and what was left of the cartilage hung like torn pieces of paper from the side of his head.
“You have too much flesh for me to play with, so you’d better answer me.” I lifted my knife to his other ear, eyeing him coolly.
“Wait, fuck,” he cried, writhing in his chains. “Look, I don’t know everything, okay? But there was something weird going on the night before September thirteenth.”
“Weird how?”
“I was at the Gator Club that night, and there were rumors of a new gang in town, but no one knew what business they were here for. But it scared everyone. All the leaders went into hiding, and no one would breathe a word of it.”
Gator Club on the Lowers was the rotting hub for the local gangsters and the criminals of the Twins. Any lucrative scheme against the city wouldn’t go past that place, but the investigations after the incident were futile. But I do recall an unusual line from the Twins Daily that stated, “September 12th was a quiet night at Gators.” And if you’re from the Twins, you knew very well there was never a quiet night at the Gators.
“And?”
“Look, I do a little side business. Something harmless.” He let out a shaky laugh, his left eye sliding over my shoulder to Arkane, then back to me. “I know a bit of tech stuff, and my part-time job at the Stormhold warehouse came in handy. I mislabeled a few shipments, just a few here and there, enough not to raise a red flag, and sold the guns on the black market. I make sure to never sell more than a few at a time, but that night, I got a request for a large load of assault rifles and SMGs. I would usually say no, but they offered me fifty grand, and who would say no to that?”
The big question on everyone’s mind was how the perpetrators obtained the weapons used in the incident. The Stormholds heavily patrolled the city borders, and something like that wouldn’t have slipped past them, so it was implied that someone from the inside supplied them. Guess that idiot was Alan Dumfred.
“What does it have to do with me?” I trailed the edge of my blade over his aorta just deep enough to draw a thin line of blood. Any deeper and a fountain of blood would gush out, killing him in mere seconds.
Fear flashed in his eyes, a tremor quaking his body. “I usually leave the package at the locker storage at the train station, but he wanted me to personally deliver it to him. So I met him that night at the swamps. They were in a plain white van, and the man who made the deal came out to meet me, but I could tell there were four others inside the van. Just as I left, I heard one of them say, it was all because of the Esteal bitch.”
“So you assumed it was me?”
“Yes, who else could it be?”
“The men, what did you notice about them?”
“Nothing.” Terror crippled his face. “Nothing at all.”
No dying man could ever tell a worse lie. Patience was my virtue, but I hated wasting my time. And I hated liars. So without even another thought, I plunged my knife between his ribs, intentionally missing his major arteries and heart. “Will you tell me now?” I asked calmly.
The loud rumble of his cry shook the walls of the room. He was a sobbing, wailing mess as he jerked from the pain while blood poured out of him in streams.
“Impressive.” A voice whispered in my ear, so deep that I felt it in my bones. I felt his breath brush over the edge of my ear, and an invisible shiver raced down the length of my spine while my steady heart finally picked up a beat.
Arkane’s rough hand circled over my wrist that held a blade to his front. He was fast, I will give him that, because I had the last second to react when I saw him advancing toward me through my periphery three seconds ago.
