Funny about that, when their new leader had said he was glad we’d taken down Colt. But then, Xavier wouldn’t want the former Claws messing up his plans either. It probably suited him just fine to have some of his new men eager to take down anyone who’d ever challenged their side.
“I never caught your name,” I said to the guy as he led us down the stairs.
“Roy,” he said, and then called down the stairs, “Everything’s okay. Mercy Katz came by to talk to us.”
We came around the bend at the bottom of the stairs into a wide, concrete-walled room lit by a couple of bare bulbs. There were four other guys there, all of whom looked at least vaguely familiar, though I didn’t know any of their names either.
They were standing in a semi-circle around the doorway, one with a knife in his hand and another just tucking his gun back into his jeans, but the card table in the middle of the room with a pile of chips in the middle suggested I’d interrupted a poker game. I spotted sleeping bags and blankets bunched against the walls. These guys must have been living down here, not just working out of the place.
A pang of guilt hit me. I wasn’t the only one who’d lost things in this unexpected war.
“Mercy,” said the guy with the gun, giving me a respectful bob of his head. He looked about forty, with a hint of gray just starting to creep through his short moustache, and he held himself with an air of subdued authority. “I’m sorry about your dad. Colt deserved everything you gave him.” His gaze slid past me to Anthea. “Who’d you bring with you?”
I touched Anthea’s arm. “This is Anthea Noble, a good friend. I couldn’t have taken down Colt without her—or without plenty of help from others in the Nobles too. For now, I’m allied with them.”
The men eyed both of us but didn’t raise any complaints. The Nobles had been standing up to the chaos that Colt—and Xavier—had been instigating, at least as much as Ezra had allowed. Even if these guys had chafed under the Nobles’ rule from time to time, we all knew we were on the same side.
“So you came by just to chat?” one of the other guys said, folding his arms over his chest. “What about?”
Roy snorted. “Don’t be like that with her, Wheeler. She was the boss’s daughter.”
Wheeler grimaced at him. “The boss is dead. She’s just some chick.”
“Shut it,” the guy who seemed to be the leader snapped. “If we’d done our job better, maybe he wouldn’t be.”
“You know I didn’t have any part in that shit, Kervos,” Wheeler retorted, holding up his hands. “I never even knew she was getting married—that’s how much anyone bothered to tell me.”
Kervos rolled his eyes and turned back to me. “What do you need, Mercy?”
Anthea spoke up. “Why don’t you go back to your game while we talk? We don’t want to keep you away from it.”
The men gave her an odd look, but I assumed she had a good reason for suggesting that. And hey, maybe it’d give me a chance to prove I was more than just some “chick” too. I tipped my head toward the table. “I see there’s an extra chair. You want to deal me in next round?”
Wheeler started to make a disgruntled noise, but Kervos swatted him across the head and motioned me over.
The men threw down their last bets, and it turned out Kervos had won. As he scooped up the chips, one of the other guys shuffled the cards and dealt them around the table, including me this time. Roy hung back behind Kervos, and Anthea stood behind me like some kind of guardian angel.
I examined my initial hand and held back a wince. Not looking so great so far. But the key to winning wasn’t always in the cards but how you presented yourself. I’d gotten pretty far in this life by acting like the boldest person in the room.
I let a smile creep across my lips and tucked my cards close as if treasuring them, my gaze daring any of the men around the table to challenge me.
“What can you tell me about everything that’s going on in the Bend now that Colt’s fallen?” I asked. “We’ve gathered that he started working with this Xavier guy and a group led by the Storm—any idea how that went down?”
The dealer laid down a card that didn’t help me at all, but I let my smile widen anyway. “The Steel Knights never told us much even when we joined up with them,” he said.
Kervos nodded. “They’d just say things like that they’d made some new connections, brought more power on board. And that they needed the backup after Tyrell had been scheming to take them down.” He sighed. “I should have pushed harder about that and not bought into their stupid lies.”
“Hey, standing up to them put targets on all our backs,” Wheeler said. “We might have been dead men if we’d challenged them back then.”
“Still,” Roy said tightly, “we owed Tyrell more than that.”
I glanced at the faces around me. “So none of you saw any actual evidence that my dad meant to betray the alliance with the Steel Knights?”
The next card gave me no favors either, but I tossed a handful of the chips Kervos had offered me at the start into the middle anyway. The men studied the growing pile, Wheeler frowning. “I wasn’t around enough to see anything,” he said, and set down his cards. “Fold.”
The other guys shook their heads. Kervos swiped his thumb across his lips. “Tyrell wanted that alliance more than anything I’d ever seen.”
Anthea leaned forward. “I think you saw something. What is it you don’t want to tell us?”