15
Mercy
I didn’t knowthe Noble underling who stopped me in the hall, but his words set my nerves jangling in an instant. “Mercy Katz? Ezra wants to see you in the audience room.”
I gave him a thumbs up, but my heart had sunk. The Noble leader hadn’t bothered to speak to me since the shoot-out in the Gilded Walls. I knew he hadn’t been keen on going after the Steel Knights to begin with. It’d been my crusade, and that crusade could have gotten Ezra’s only heir killed the other night.
Somehow I had the feeling he wasn’t super happy with me at the moment.
Kaige had mentioned that the Nobles were putting feelers out to form an alliance so they could make a definitive strike against Colt, though. Maybe then this would all be over. I had no idea what Ezra might want to speak to me about right now, though.
When I walked into the audience room Anthea had shown me what felt like a year ago, I found Ezra already in his throne-like chair. He wasn’t alone. Anthea stood on the opposite side of the coffee table, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and Wylder was poised by his father’s right hand. Both of them looked way too tense.
Axel and one of Ezra’s other main men lurked at the back of the room. A prickle ran down my spine. Basically, the only person in the room I could count on to be on my side was Anthea—and she also probably had the least power out of any of them, family name aside.
Ezra nodded to the sofa across from him without so much as a hello. “Sit down. We have a lot to discuss.”
I sat, eyeing him carefully. “What are we discussing today?”
Ignoring my question, he shifted his attention to my waist. “How has your wound been healing?”
I touched the scabbed-over scratch from the Steel Knight’s knife. “Frank says it’s healing fine. It wasn’t deep.”
“I appreciate how energetically you participated both in that altercation and during the ambush of the truck,” he said.
He did? I managed not to gape at him, but it was a near thing. “Um, thank you. I’ve always promised I’d hold my own. I might not have a lot of experience on the ground, but my father put me through plenty of training.”
“That much is clear. And that’s why I think you’d be the right fit for this job.”
I glanced at Anthea and then Wylder but got no clue what he might mean from their equally grave expressions. Wylder’s mouth was set in a scowl that was typical when he had to pay any attention to me these days. I resisted the urge to grimace right back at him and focused on Ezra again. “What kind of job? If there’s something I can do to help take down Colt, I’m ready.”
Ezra raised his eyebrows toward Anthea. “Look how enthusiastic she is. I don’t think this should be any problem at all.”
“You haven’t told her what the job is yet,” his sister replied evenly, but those words and the sense that there’d been an argument about this between them earlier set me even more on edge. What was going on?
Ezra returned his chilly gaze to me and gave me a chillier smile. “You’re aware that we’ve reached out to another organization to add to our numbers for a more powerful offensive against the Steel Knights? What happened last Friday was a direct call for war, and we can’t leave it unanswered.”
“I heard you were looking to make an alliance,” I said. “Has that gone through?”
“Nearly. What do you know about the Demon’s Wings or Jasper Herald?”
Both names were vaguely familiar. It took me a few moments to place them. “They’re the main gang in Rallum—Jasper is the boss.” My father had mentioned them once or twice. He’d kept an eye on all the major powers in the nearby counties as well as our own.
Somehow Ezra’s smile got both colder and wider at the same time. “Very good. They’re the organization I’ve reached out to. I’ve been able to strike a tentative deal with them to receive the reinforcements we need for the next phase of our plan. But he’s asked for a minor… gift up front to seal the deal.”
I still wasn’t seeing how I fit in. “I guess that makes sense. Would you like me to deliver the gift?”
He let out a soft chuckle. “Miss Katz, you are the gift.”
My back went rigid. “What?”
“Only temporarily,” Ezra said, looking way too amused by my reaction. “He wants us to send him a woman for one evening. He’ll take you to dinner, you’ll entertain him and see that he’s happy, and that’s all there is to it.”
Anthea made a strained sound. “I think the problem is the type of entertainment he enjoys.”
That sounded ominous. I held my instant revulsion at the idea of being offered up like a choice piece of meat in check and asked calmly, “Is there a particular reason you chose me?”
“Of course,” Ezra said. “Jasper Herald has very particular interests when it comes to the women he spends time with. He likes a girl who can fend for herself and put up a fight.”