There. Just ahead, peeking out from behind the side wall of a storefront. Adam watched me with a forlorn look.
I sprinted over to him. “Help me.”
“You had your chance to escape, little jewel.” Adam held out his hand. “Now you have to hide.”
The guards marched closer.
“Show me.” Clasping hands, we ran blindly through the market until the covered area fell away into a dense thorny thicket. Was his grip too tight? Was he leading me only to betray me?
I tore free and, crouching low, eased into the bushes, twisting through them until I’d lost him. My leather jacket took the brunt of the damage, my arms up to protect my face. I stopped, listening for footsteps, the branches comforting in their confinement.
I could stay here forever.
No, they’d find me here too. I had to go deeper. Hide so thoroughly that no one would find me.
“Good girl.” Adam appeared, squeezed in next to me in this tight space. “I taught you well.”
He hadn’t taught me, though. He hadn’t been there at all.
And he wasn’t here now.
Sorrow, heavy and dense, welled up inside me. I manifested a blood dagger, feeling the weight of it so irrevocable in my palm. Then I lifted the blade and slashed myself.
Chapter 9
The pain in my forearm was accompanied by a clarity that cut through the fog of this induced paranoia.
“You,” I said to False Adam, “begone.”
“Little jewel—”
No, I knew better now. There was one person in Hedon who knew enough about me to conjure that image of my father up in the first place. One person who would want me incapacitated and unable to fight back.
The Queen.
My blood pounded in my ears but I kept my anger in check. Levi was with her, unaware he might be a pawn in this game.
“You don’t know me,” I said. “Not really. You can extrapolate some general hopes and fears, but if you really wanted me to give up, then you should have given me amnesia because I won’t quit.”
“Interesting,” he said, so like the Queen, that I shivered. “But are you prepared for how deep the shadows go?”
He disappeared, as did the thicket. I was in the perfume market once more, hiding under a table, and still being stared at, but this time in alarm by a couple of shopkeepers.
The dagger. Right. I made it disappear and crawled out. “I come in peace.”
I ran back to the perfume stall where a man in colorful Middle Eastern robes and a bushy beard asked if he could help me.
“Where’s the woman with the pale gold eyes?”
“I’m the only one here. This is my stall.”
“Impossible. She was here.” Everything else about the stall was the same. “What types of perfumes are these?”
“Not perfumes,” he said. “Emotions.”
Silly me. “And you just go around spraying sample feelings on unwitting patrons?”
The shopkeeper looked horrified. “That is forbidden. To do so is to risk the Black Heart Rule.”
Was it now? “Did the sirens go off a few moments ago?”
He shook his head. Some rando had happened to defy the edict and just gotten away with it? Not likely. The Queen had masterminded this.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t hide from her. She’d made her move, now it was mine. I sought out the guards, demanding to be taken to her.
They ignored me so thoroughly, I may as well have been a ghost.
“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll go to the palace myself.”
The guards surrounded me. “You will not,” one said, with absolute authority. “If you do, you face the dungeons.”
With that, they swept past me. Standing here seething wouldn’t help Levi and it wouldn’t advance my search for answers with Mayan.
I got fresh instructions to the Green Olive from the market, but when I arrived, the bar was in smoking ruins. The entire blackened structure had collapsed in on itself, heat still shimmering off the wreckage. It was only identifiable by the martini glass sign with the words “Green Olive” that sputtered magically in and out.
The taste of ash coated my lips.
Guards cordoned the area off, one of them arguing with a short, pudgy man in a pinstripe suit with red suspenders and spats, those weird white shoe coverings with black buttons up one side.
“Don’t tell me you can’t do anything!” the man cried, spittle flying from his mouth. “He torched my bar.”
The guard pushed the man back a few steps. “Obviously not, Alfie,” she said, in an Irish accent. “Since he died two months ago. Now get out of our way so we can find out who did.” She pointed and he moved to the other side of the street, his shoulders slumped.
I approached him, my boots crunching over random sooty debris that had rolled onto the street. “Sorry about your bar.”
Alfie clenched his fists. “This is just the beginning, but they won’t listen.”
“The beginning of what?”
He made a show of looking around and then he leaned in. “Gunter’s revenge,” he whispered.
“What’s that?” I pulled out my phone and called up a photo of Mayan.
“Gunter said I stole his business and his woman. Swore to come after me and take it all away, including my life.” He blotted his sweaty forehead with the red handkerchief.
“I guess you’re not under the Queen’s personal protection.”
He scoffed. “Hardly. Very few are.”
The Black Heart Rule didn’t apply as a deterrent to keep Gunter from coming after Alfie, though Gunter’s deceased status should have been a pretty effective obstacle. “Did you do what he accused you of?
Alfie snapped his suspenders, making his belly jiggle. “It was a good business and she was a fine-looking woman. But now look at it.” He gestured to the smoking beams. “The bastard destroyed the business that he, himself, started.”
“Isn’t Gunter dead?”
Alfie fixed me with a look of scathing incredulity. “He swore revenge. Like death would stop him.”
Okay, crazy man. Enough indulging you. “Listen, a friend of
