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Grey and purple mingle in the clouds outside. Gloom gathers in the Flooded District, kept at bay with carefully hung lanterns in the shelter of the commerce building. Tonight, however, the precautions are more lax than usual. A few glints of brilliant light are allowed to escape through the broken down exterior of the building which the assassins call home and scatter into the twilight. A skeleton crew of guards stand watch outside, flitting from place to place in clouds of sparkling black smoke.
There is a gentle buzz within, punctuated by the occasional shout of victory, clack of liquor bottles, or thump of wood on rotting floorboards – and, above it all, unifying every other sound, the shuffling of cards.
Daud’s deft fingers work the deck with casual efficiency, his eyes on the empty space at the other side of the table. Around him, the party carries on, most of the men maintaining a respectful distance from their master. He is content to watch them until his partner arrives, fully aware that no other challenger will approach. Whether he came on a dare or simply of his own reckless stupidity, the last Whaler to go up against Daud lost all but the shirt on his back.
Someone brings him a drink and he accepts it, for once. His immunity to poison makes it difficult to get drunk, but on rare occasion he does make an attempt. Nights like these don’t come around often, and his men aren’t the only ones who need to blow off steam.
He is halfway through his whiskey when a rain-spattered Whaler enters, another disappearing out of the same doorway to take up the watch. The den, full of moving bodies and bright lamps, is far warmer than the frigid streets. The hounds have come in to lie on the floor and beg for scraps, and the new arrival steps over them while gloved fingers free a well-worn mask.
A flash of dark brown skin peeks out from beneath the hood. Eyes of hard purpose stare him down, giving lie to the softness of her full lips. Her face is regal, cheekbones high and dusted by short, black hair now molded to her skin by the rainwater. She reaches up and brushes the heavy fabric aside, tousling her hair into damp, scattered strands.
“Nice of you to wait for me,” she says, taking her seat opposite him.
Her gas mask clatters across the table, shedding droplets onto the metal sheet. The Whalers crowd around, forgetting their own games, and the room goes quiet as the real show begins. Wordlessly, Daud deals the cards, the smile that only she can draw pulling weakly at his lips.
He finishes the deal and gathers up his hand, fitting in a sip of his drink as he surveys his cards. “No one else was up to the challenge.”
At that, she leans forward over the table, her posture both catlike and aggressively female.
“What challenge?”
Her boldness elicits a chuckle from him and a muffled laugh from their audience. He leans forward on one elbow, his hand carefully guarded.
“Put your money where your mouth is, woman.”
There is no hesitation, merely a flicker of her eyelashes as she glances down at the cards in her palm. She pushes forward a stack of a hundred coins, a large enough portion of their monthly salary to make every Whaler’s eyes go wide.
“Five.”
Daud studies the spread as if consumed by thought, though every soul in the room knows what he will do next. With little ado, a fat stack of cash finds its way to his side of the table.
“Is that where our bounties are going?” asks one small voice among the assembled crowd. He is hushed by his neighbor immediately, but a ripple of laughter warms the room.
The pair is silent, however, as they regard each other, Lurk’s eyes locked more on the coin than anything else.
“Thrall,” she says, rapping her knuckles on the table. “One night.” Their gazes meet coldly, Daud’s eyebrow rising in interest.
There is a pause; then his words fall like a gavel. “Done.”
The assassins have never figured out quite what the two mean when they exchange these code words. It is just like Daud and Lurk, spinning their own webs while keeping the rest of them in the dark. From the choice of language, however, they have formed a general consensus that she is agreeing to do extra work for him without pay. There are few other ways to outbid the boss, who is as tight with a penny as a krust with its pearl, and only brings his money out to play in situations like these.
She exposes the Hound and gives him a good look, then absorbs it into her hand. Six more of her cards come raining down, the edges of the cards snapping against the metal.
Skulls. Skulls. Skulls. Skulls. Skulls. Skulls.
“You don’t spare any energy on subtlety,” Daud remarks with a smirk.
“I don’t have time for subtlety.”
She lays down another skull as her lead, drawing a snort from her partner, and they commence play. He eyes the Lord Regent capping one of her visible piles, discreetly searching his hand for something more. With sinking dismay, however, he realizes that Regret is truly the highest card he holds. How symbolic, he thinks, staring into the face of two hundred coin.
His quiet, ironic chuckle is mistaken for confidence by the Whalers, who are making no effort to conceal their frantic gambling. The odds on Daud go up, but he knows better than to take that wager. Soon enough, they will also learn the truth.
With each trick, Lurk’s Nancy grows fatter. He watches face cards drain into it like rainwater, leaving him high and dry. She gets lucky a few times, but most of her success is simply due to the fact that his hand is utter shit.
Her eyes roam his face every chance they get, taking note of the fingers locked around his tepid lowball glass. She does enjoy watching him squirm, and there is a part of him that enjoys it as much as she. This small fraction of his being, however, does not keep the rest from protesting when she slaughters him in the first round, racking up fifteen points and placing him firmly in the gutter.
“Seventeen, negative seventeen,” he calls out into the crowd, his voice morose despite its volume. Daud and Billie have never needed pen and paper for their games. He adds in his head and lets the Whalers keep score, and they will report it back to him at the end of the game.
Lurk mocks him from across the table, removing her gloves and warming her fingers as if raring to deal. Their fingers brush as she hands him the deck, her dark eyes dancing with anticipation. Daud shuffles the cards with a grimace of distaste and hands them back like a live explosive, eager to get them out of his hands. As the deal unfolds, however, a sour look pollutes her features and twists her ample mouth into a frown.
“I’m not sure you shuffled well enough.”
“Don’t pout, Lurk.”
She shoots him a glare that promises he will pay dearly later and organizes her cards, face unreadable. Perhaps it is the cold that still keeps the color drained from her face, but the woman looks to be made of stone.
“Four,” he says conservatively, dumping fifty coin between them in a cacophony of tumbling change.
“Fine.” She matches the bet with pouch of money bursting at the seams, what must be the last of her monthly funds. The woman must have a spectacular job in mind to gain it all back.
To her credit, Lurk puts up a good fight, but there is no saving the round with a hand like hers. Daud takes the win with no more grace than she did, dangling the taking of each trick before her with sadistic glee. In his case, the emotion merely manifests itself as a smug grin sprawling across his thin lips, but she can read it well enough to be irate.
In the end, he scrapes together five objectives and fifteen points, which are reported to the enthusiastic assembly with a touch of twisted satisfaction that slides across his tongue. Betting among their ranks intensifies into a mass frenzy. Lurk shuffles the cards while staring him down from beneath sharply angled brows.
His façade is cool, but Daud feels his heart skip a beat. The fact is private, clutched tight to his chest as he takes the deck and slaps its contents onto the table.
The Outsider is in his hand. He is infused with a sense of optimism about this round.
Lurk regards her own cards silently while leaning back in her chair, one boot braced against the table and the other placed squarely on the edge of the seat between Daud’s legs. A glass of whiskey has appeared in her hand as if by magic, serving to intensify her air of nonchalance. Upon closer inspection, Daud finds that his own has gone missing. Noting his rueful expression as she looks up, the woman raises the glass in a wordless toast and downs the drink. Her lips leave a faint stain of purple on the brim. He allows himself, for the moment, to be distracted.
Then the rim hits the desk with a crack that spikes into his ears and sets the hairs on the back of his neck to prickling. Her arm is outstretched, hand poised on the bottom of the glass. A few droplets of whiskey form a ring on the metal. Rather than reprimand her, he turns his attention back to his cards.
This round is the most evenly matched of any, prompting a heated staring contest before the betting.
“Two,” he says finally, anticipation wearing hollows in his cheeks.
The corners of her mouth turn up into a smile, though her lips barely part and he sees but a flash of teeth. Her neck curves slightly, head tilted to the side and already provocative voice lilting into a tease.
“Are you scared, Daud?”
His form, by comparison, is square and straight. There are no gentle coaxes from his smoker’s throat – only gravel and tar.
“I’m not stupid.” There is a pause as he lays down his hand and readjusts, lighting a cigarette that slumps between his fingers. “You talk a big game, Lurk, but I doubt you can deliver.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and waits to see what she has to offer, cards fanned out in front of him, facedown and potent. The spark of confidence never leaves her face, only consumes his words and uses them to fuel her inner fire.
“Four.”
Now that’s a tall order, he thinks quietly. No doubt a note of derision shows in his face. It’s almost as if she wants to—
Well. He’ll see.
Wanting to see her blanch and falter, he pushes the price up higher than it’s ever gone before. Then, perhaps, he’ll torture her, let her backtrack or trap her into the bet. A part of him fills with preemptive enthusiasm, but the paranoid assassin that seems to inhabit the most reptilian part of his brain interrupts the celebration. He bites his tongue before opening the bet, the hinges of his jaw unnecessarily tight.
“Six nights.”
His palm is flat against the table now, grounding him. He’s glad of how little whiskey he managed to down before she stole it away. Even the smallest buzz could put off his game, and this is one he has no intention of losing. What makes him even more nervous is her reaction. There is not a hint of fear, nor of regret. She never stumbles. If anything, her aura of self-assurance – of invincibility, even – only seems to deepen, forming a cocoon around her. Another drink is pressed into her hand by one of the men. She hardly seems real, even as she sets the glass down between the two of them and its cool surface touches the tips of his splayed fingers.
“Seven.”
An entire week. It’s unfathomable, more than he’s ever expected to see on the table before, and it seems to have been dumped right into his lap. A flare of suspicion accompanies the paranoia that this is a deal far too good to be true.
Lurk, meanwhile, makes no effort to hide the fact that she is trying to distract him, coaxing him into matching her offer. Briefly, she brushes the flat of her nail against the pad of his middle finger, softly and sweetly enough to make his breath catch in his throat. He withdraws immediately, shaking off the chills and gathering up his cards. With one last look down at the spread, as if to make sure he hasn’t missed something, Daud nods.
“Go on, then.”
Billie does as told immediately, a smirk spreading languidly across her face. She collects the Hound and swaps her cards out, cocking a brow at him over the top edge of her hand.
“You look nervous, sir. Something troubling you?”
Daud grunts, glancing up from each move in the trick to look at her. “More like someone.”
Of course, it is exactly what Billie wants to hear – her soft, twisted chuckle tells him as much. His lips purse with misgiving when he takes the first trick and not an ounce of dissatisfaction mars the features of his partner. She simply plays on, letting him win at least half the tricks without a single word of protest. Given her normal cussing, glaring, threatening violence and clawing-for-victory approach to card playing, it is startling. He’d rather she flip the table onto his lap and shatter a bottle of whiskey at his feet, but she lounges in complete comfort, liquor in hand and elbow propped lazily onto the table.
They each have a respectable number of tricks on their sides – four for Daud and three for Billie. It is still clear, however, that she will not complete four objectives by the end of the round. By his current count, she barely has two.
Daud saves the Outsider, his good luck charm, for the second to the last trick. He has kept it to the bitter end, relying somewhat superstitiously on the protection provided by his benefactor to see him through whatever mischief Lurk has planned. There is a small grin on the assassin’s scarred face as he lays the card bearing his deity’s visage (however poorly represented) on the penultimate trick.
Billie covers him immediately with the image of Death, no doubt hoarded in the very same way until this opportune moment. She tosses the Outsider back to Daud after gathering the trick pile to her side, crooking her finger at him expectantly.
Huffing in exasperation, he fans his takings face down in front of her. His jaw is clenched until his teeth protest, staring intently at her hands as she holds the card of her selection aloft and turns it so that he can see.
Once again, his destiny stares him in the face. A man on his knees, head in his hands, a pool of blood before him. In some decks, it is gold – in others, his tears. In any deck, it is a face card, and it is only then that he realizes what Billie has intended all along.
She taps the card with a finger, ensuring that his attention does not waver. “Look, Daud. It’s you.”
He bites his lower lip and stares at her third objective, and yes, he feels it. Regret.
“Chosen by the Outsider,” he rasps under his breath, and she nods. “You crafty bitch.”
Billie smiles back at him with the cruelty he has been looking for - some great, sleek predator staring out from her dark eyes. Daud shakes his head and looks down at his cards, biting his lower lip in concentration. There is nothing there to bail him out of his misstep now.
He drags himself through the next trick without even attempting at a win. It doesn’t much matter. Afterward, she tallies up her objectives, taking her time and digging in the hooks.
Two, negative two, he calculates silently. When it comes time for the final score, Daud slams his palm down onto the table and waits for the ruckus to calm down.
“Zero to zero,” he says sharply, not waiting for his assassins to report back and add up the score. A roar of complaint goes up as practically everyone in the headquarters loses their bet, save for the bookkeepers and those sly enough to bet both ways.
“I want a tie breaker,” Daud demands, and this time it is Billie he is speaking to. She grins and rises from the table, gathering up her mask and gloves.
“No.”
A scowl wrinkles his forehead as he rises as well, stepping closer to her in an effort to exert his will. “Why the hell not?”
She shrugs and begins dividing up the coin that sprawls across the center of the table, the rasp of metal on metal whispering hoarsely in the air as they part from side to side. “We’ll just split the winnings down the middle.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come on, Daud. Didn’t your mother ever teach you how to share?”
Her relatively pleasant demeanor is infuriating, but she meets his eyes with hidden fire as she straightens up to look at him. They are almost too close now, nearly intimate enough that the assassins will begin to wonder, but the current situation justifies their proximity. Barely.
Billie’s hands have still worked while she stared at him, and presently she gathers her share of the coin up and holds her hand out to the side. One of his men deposits a hefty, clinking leather sack into her open palm, and she weighs it with a cocky smile.
“I’ll see you in your office to negotiate the rest of the winnings.”
She is gone before he can protest and he is left among the crowd of Whalers, all of whom are now studying him with rapt curiosity. He gulps down one last glass of whiskey before gathering up the cards and ambling back to his office, a strange mix of curiosity and anxiety overwhelming him at the thought of what lies in store.
Billie Lurk is boldly draped across his bed when he climbs the stairs, her wet clothes abandoned for one of his clean, dry shirts and little else. He is all but helpless against the sight of her in such casual beauty, the white fabric a beautiful contrast to her dark, muscular thighs.
However, Daud saves all words of poetry for a later date, or never. In fact, the first thing he says to her is “Seven doesn’t divide evenly.”
“Thank you for the maths lesson, Daud. If only you were that good at Nancy.”
“I’m a far sight better than you are,” he says automatically, though the truth of that statement is questionable at best. He tosses his coat aside before sitting down next to her, the small of his back a few inches from her hips.
“I think tonight’s game proved that we’re evenly matched, if anything. You know I could’ve beat you if I tried.”
Much as it shames him to admit it, she did hold back on him tonight, and the reason has him curious. He turns slightly to look at her. “Why didn’t you?”
“I thought it would be more fun this way.”
“So what do you intend to do with the extra night?”
She smiles and leans up for him, a hand lighting on his neck and her lips drawing ever closer to his. “Maybe I’ll teach you how to share.”