She didn’t care.
From the corner of her eye, she saw the guard jerk her chin toward her.
“Deal me in,” Aelin muttered to the man beside her. “Right now.”
“We’re in the middle of a game.”
“Next round, then,” she said, relaxing her posture and slumping her shoulders as Chaol Westfall cast his gaze in her direction.
CHAPTER
3
Chaol was Arobynn’s client.
Or he wanted something from her former master badly enough to risk meeting here.
What the hell had happened while she was away?
She watched the cards being slapped down on the ale-damp table, even as the captain’s attention fixed on her back. She wished she could see his face, see anything in the gloom underneath that hood. Despite the splattering of blood on his clothes, he moved as though no injuries plagued him.
Something that had been coiled tightly in her chest for months slowly loosened.
Alive—but where had the blood come from?
He must have deemed her nonthreatening, because he merely motioned to his companion to go, and they both strolled toward the bar—no, toward the stairs beyond. He moved at a steady, casual pace, though the woman at his side was too tense to pass for unconcerned. Fortunately for them all, no one looked his way as he left, and the captain didn’t glance in her direction again.
She’d moved fast enough that he likely hadn’t been able to detect that it was her. Good. Good, even if she would have known him moving or still, cloaked or bare.
There he went, up the stairs, not even glancing down, though his companion continued watching her. Who the hell was that? There hadn’t been any female guards at the palace when she’d left, and she had been fairly certain the king had an absurd no-women rule.
Seeing Chaol changed nothing—not right now.
She curled her hand into a fist, keenly aware of the bare finger on her right hand. It hadn’t felt naked until now.
A card landed before her. “Three silvers to join,” the bald, tattooed man beside her said as he dealt the cards, inclining his head toward the tidy pile of coins in the center.
Meeting with Arobynn—she’d never thought Chaol was stupid, but this … Aelin rose from the chair, cooling the wrath that had started to boil in her veins. “I’m dead broke,” she said. “Enjoy the game.”
The door atop the stone stairs was already shut, Chaol and his companion gone.
She gave herself a second to wipe any expression beyond mild amusement off her face.
Odds were, Arobynn had planned the whole thing to coincide with her arrival. He’d probably sent Tern to the Shadow Market just to catch her eye, to draw her here. Maybe he knew what the captain was up to, whose side the young lord was now on; maybe he’d just lured her here to worm his way into her mind, to shake her up a bit.
Getting answers from Arobynn would come at a price, but it was smarter than running after Chaol into the night, though the urge had her muscles locking up. Months—months and months since she’d seen him, since she’d left Adarlan, broken and hollow.
But no more.
Aelin swaggered the last few steps to the banquette and paused in front of it, crossing her arms as she beheld Arobynn Hamel, the King of the Assassins and her former master, smiling up at her.
Lounging in the shadows of the wooden banquette, a glass of wine before him, Arobynn looked exactly as he had the last time she’d seen him: a fine-boned aristo face, silky auburn hair that grazed his shoulders, and a deep-blue tunic of exquisite make, unbuttoned with an assumed casualness at the top to reveal the toned chest beneath. No sign at all of a necklace or chain. His long, muscled arm was draped across the back of the bench, and his tanned, scar-flecked fingers drummed a beat in time with the hall music.
“Hello, darling,” he purred, his silver eyes bright even in the dimness.
No weapons save for a beautiful rapier at his side, its ornate, twisting guards like a swirling wind bound in gold. The only overt sign of the wealth that rivaled the riches of kings and empresses.
Aelin slid onto the bench across from him, too aware of the wood still warm from Chaol. Her own daggers pressed against her with every movement. Goldryn was a heavy weight at her side, the massive ruby in its hilt hidden by her dark cloak—the legendary blade utterly useless in such tight quarters. No doubt why he’d picked the booth for this meeting.
“You look more or less the same,” she said, leaning against the hard bench and tugging back her hood. “Rifthold continues to treat you well.”
It was true. In his late thirties, Arobynn remained handsome, and as calm and collected as he’d been at the Assassins’ Keep during the dark blur of days after Sam had died.
There were many, many debts to be paid for what happened back then.
Arobynn looked her up and down—a slow, deliberate examination. “I think I preferred your natural hair color.”
“Precautions,” she said, crossing her legs and surveying him just as slowly. No indication that he was wearing the Amulet of Orynth, the royal heirloom he’d stolen from her when he found her half-dead on the banks of the Florine. He’d allowed her to believe the amulet that secretly contained the third and final Wyrdkey had been lost to the river. For a thousand years, her ancestors had unwittingly worn the amulet, and it had made their kingdom—her kingdom—a powerhouse: prosperous and safe, the ideal to which all courts in all lands were held. Still, she’d never seen Arobynn wear any sort of chain around his neck. He probably had it squirreled away somewhere at the Keep. “I wouldn’t want to wind up back in Endovier.”
Those silver eyes sparkled. It was an effort to keep from reaching for a dagger and throwing it hard.
But too much was dependent on him to kill him right away. She’d had a long, long while to think this over—what she wanted to do, how she wanted to do it. Ending it here and now would be a waste. Especially when he and Chaol were somehow tangled up.
Perhaps that was why he’d lured her here—so she would spy Chaol with him … and hesitate.
“Indeed,” Arobynn said, “I’d hate to see you back in Endovier, too. Though I will say these past two years have made you even more striking. Womanhood suits you.” He cocked his head, and she knew it was coming before he amended, “Or should I say queen-hood?”
It had been a decade since they’d spoken baldly of her heritage, or of the title he had helped her walk away from, had taught her to hate and fear. Sometimes he’d mentioned it in veiled terms, usually as a threat to keep her bound to him. But he had never once said her true name—not even when he’d found her on that icy riverbank and carried her into his house of killers.
“What makes you think I have any interest in that?” she said casually.
Arobynn shrugged his broad shoulders. “One can’t put much faith in gossip, but word arrived about a month ago from Wendlyn. It claimed that a certain lost queen put on a rather spectacular show for an invading legion from Adarlan. Actually, I believe the title our esteemed friends in the empire now like to use is ‘fire-breathing bitch-queen.’”
Honestly, she almost found it funny—flattering, even. She’d known word would spread about what she had done to General Narrok and the three other Valg princes squatting like toads inside human bodies. She just hadn’t realized everyone would learn of it so quickly. “People will believe anything they hear these days.”
“True,” Arobynn said. At the other end of the Vaults, a frenzied crowd roared at the fighters slugging it out in the pits. The King of the Assassins looked toward it, smiling faintly.
It had been almost two years since she’d stood in that crowd, watching Sam take on vastly inferior fighters, hustling to raise enough money to get them out of Rifthold and away from Arobynn. A few days later, she’d wound up in a prison wagon bound for Endovier, but Sam …
She’d never discovered where they’d buried Sam after Rourke Farran—second in command to Ioan Jayne, the Crime Lord of Rifthold—had t
ortured and killed him. She’d killed Jayne herself, with a dagger hurled into his meaty face. And Farran … She’d later learned that Farran had been murdered by Arobynn’s own bodyguard, Wesley, as retribution for what had been done to Sam. But that wasn’t her concern, even if Arobynn had killed Wesley to mend the bond between the Assassins’ Guild and the new Crime Lord. Another debt.
She could wait; she could be patient. She merely said, “So you’re doing business here now? What happened to the Keep?”
“Some clients,” Arobynn drawled, “prefer public meetings. The Keep can make people edgy.”
“Your client must be new to the game, if he didn’t insist on a private room.”
“He didn’t trust me that much, either. He thought the main floor would be safer.”
“He must not know the Vaults, then.” No, Chaol had never been here, as far as she knew. She’d usually avoided telling him about the time she’d spent in this festering place. Like she’d avoided telling him a good many things.
“Why don’t you just ask me about him?”