Page 131 of Queen of Volts

“Just don’t shoot me by mistake,” she choked.

Narinder nodded, looking perhaps sicker than she did, and yanked her by her arm into the lobby. Hector and the thirteen other whiteboots turned with a start.

“Don’t shoot!” Narinder shouted, dragging Enne closer.

Hector eyed them warily. “What are you doing?”

“I want to trade. Harrison for the Mizer.”

“Harrison? What could he possibly be worth to you?” Hector asked, and Enne cursed. Narinder might’ve looked the part, but Hector was right—he had no connection to either her or the politician. This looked staged.

“If he dies, his omertas die, right?” Narinder asked, his voice hoarse. “I don’t want to see that happen. I can’t...” He swallowed and pressed his gun harder into Enne’s cheek. She winced from the force of it. He played his part a little too well. “I can’t let that happen.”

Hector studied Enne, who hardly needed to act to appear terrified. She let her eyes dart across the room, to Sophia and Harrison on the floor, to the wide-open doors, to the corners, where—to her horror—another whiteboot already had Grace handcuffed and Roy on his knees behind her, his hands raised behind his head.

Hector’s stare was calculating, his blue eyes all ice. “Take them both,” he ordered.

Narinder stiffened. “I—I’ll shoot her.”

“You won’t,” he said calmly. He saw right through them.

In the cardroom, flames had climbed up the far wall, radiating a heat that pressed into the lobby like an oven. Narinder’s hand was slick around Enne’s arm as he shoved her away, as the whiteboots reached out to grab them.

In the commotion, a scream ran out, and Enne turned to see the man holding Grace crumple to the ground, clutching himself between the legs.

In an instant, Roy leaped to his feet. He reached underneath Grace’s dress and pulled out another gun, one Enne didn’t realize she’d kept hidden along her thigh.

He aimed and fired.

Hector grunted and dropped, dead before his face slammed against the stone floor.

Several other shots fired from around them, and the whiteboots fell, one by one. The first few came from behind the stairs, where Delaney stood, Harvey crouched behind her. Several more had fired from the columns between Enne and the cardroom, where she at last spotted Levi, much of his hands and shirt covered in soot. Roy had shot the two men beside Hector.

But Enne’s relief at finding Levi was short-lived. As she panted and looked around at the fallen bodies, at the sea of blood pooling across the floor, she counted those fallen and those who had shot them. Three from Delaney, two for Roy, five for Levi... She was no counter, but the math didn’t add up.

“Over here,” came a voice from one of the doorways.

Enne whipped around and spotted a girl standing there, barely a few years older than her. Everything about her was razor-thin—her hair, her features, her frame. And her eyes were red.

The Bargainer turned her gun away from the fallen whiteboots and fixed it instead on Enne. “So where is Lola?”

XVI

THE DEVIL

“Forgiveness is not sought—it’s built, stone by stone,

over whatever it is you’ve broken.”

Martyr. “The Faithful Few.”

The Treasonist’s Tribunal

21 Mar YOR 13

HARVEY

Harvey’s first thought at the Bargainer’s appearance was confusion. After years of Bryce and Rebecca and him preparing for this moment, Harvey had begun to picture the Bargainer a certain way. And he’d never imagined she would remind him of Bryce. It had nothing to do with their features, not even the matching red of their eyes. It was their expressions. They shared something haunted. The look of someone who had done terrible things without repentance. The stain blood left behind even after you’d washed it off your hands.