Page 32

E veryone was freaking out about me being in Lower Cutwart when the Ghoul might be striking.

Neco was hovering and Ollie was plotting.

Beck was stressing and trying to get out of work.

Ronan was doing that thing he did where he got quiet and intense.

If my plan didn’t work, Ronan was planning retribution.

I didn’t even think the Ghoul would be in Lower Cutwart again. The rich fucks sniffed around the merchant girls if none of their cousins were acceptable. Lower Cutwart girls had to be practically perfect in every single way for them to marry out.

Which was stupid because the men they would be marrying were generally awful and flawed. The Lower Cutwart girls had to be beautiful, demure, have several brothers, and have the ability to bite down and never react when their future husband was an arse.

Yeah, even if they didn’t think Guttertown women were total trash, that was a match made in the Underworld. They raised their hand to us and we’d hit back. Most Lower Cutwart women were like that, too. It was only acceptable when you crossed the line between Lower Cutwart and the Merchant District.

Finding a beautiful girl in Lower Cutwart wasn’t hard. We had a ton of them in Guttertown. Finding a beautiful girl with several brothers with the disposition to deal with those arseholes was going to be difficult, even if it meant marrying out.

If the Ghoul struck tonight, it would probably be in the Merchants District.

Trevils refused to let us take that one because he thought it, too.

He promised me that if they were the ones who caught the Ghoul, the men he had were completely loyal to him.

They’d say it was me who caught him red-handed so I could get the cure for Mom.

I was okay with that. I didn’t particularly want Neco there either.

He might think he had a pass as the Blight, but Trevils didn’t know that yet.

If Trevils ever decided to follow him and caught him at the scene, the Barons would just pretend they weren’t paying him and hang him.

Everyone made mistakes and Neco could make one that cost him his life.

We had to plan things very carefully in Guttertown.

Things tended to get intense at the brothel and the tavern after the Day of Respect.

I refused to let Mom work even if she was feeling better.

I told Basselt to sit on her if she tried.

The Madame borrowed a cousin to help Beck, and Panas and Ronan were going to help Ollie and our new staff.

The Madame knew Ronan wasn’t going to get much painting done with us in danger.

“Don’t go inside. If you’re the one who finds him, come get me,” Neco said.

“Fucker, if we don’t pull this off, he’s going to get cured and start killing in Guttertown. This is our only chance.”

“Arsehole, this is your only life. Don’t get murdered. I’m not saying let him get away with it. I’m saying go after him with back up.”

I grunted. That was logical and I could do that. I just wasn’t going to let innocent people get slaughtered when I might be able to stop it.

“We make a pact,” I said. “Trevils drew a map and the houses aren’t that far from each other. We watch the house, but we check in with each other. You don’t go in without back up, either. I’m not doing that to Theda and Rowena. It would kill them and you can’t protect them if you’re dead.”

Neco also grunted. Yeah, that was settled. I’d learned to speak fluent male, and that was a grunt of confirmation. Glad that was settled. One thing about Neco was that he didn’t lie. If he had no intention of agreeing with me, he would have just ignored me. And he went a step further.

Neco spat on his palm and thrust it at me.

“You have my back and I’ll have yours. No one dies but the Ghoul. We swear it. No one does anything stupid.”

Spit palm oaths were sacred, though not as legally binding as signing your name to a contract.

Everyone in Guttertown knew this. Even if I didn’t know that grunt meant he agreed with me, no one in Guttertown spat in their palm and offered an oath when they didn’t need it.

If you broke it, it was bad luck, and you’d be cursed for ten years.

Neco’s eye was dark and unreadable when I spit in my hand and smacked it to his to seal our vow. He held my hand a little longer than he should, and we had a little weird moment until I broke it.

I couldn’t with him right now. I didn’t need to be distracted by Neco Argent when so much was at stake. Yeah, we were kind of talking without screaming at each other, but he’d broken my heart and my nose once and I wasn’t going to let him do it again.

He gave me a curt nod. This was where we parted. Things might never go back to how they used to be with Neco, but maybe we could at least be civil after this. I didn’t know if my plan would work and if it would, if I’d still get the cure from my father, but the Ghoul had to be stopped.