Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 90426 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90426 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
She lost his attention when he felt how his coat bunched in his hand.
Or, more precisely, what shouldn’t bunch, but did.
He looked at his coat, running it through his fists.
By the gods, he’d thought they’d let him through unscathed.
He hadn’t even felt it.
However, what he felt in that moment was the bed move as Mayda shifted in it. He heard the velvet and silks of the covers sliding against each other as she pulled them to cover her, but he glanced about the floor just in case it had fallen out.
It had not.
“Loren, I—”
“Silence,” he hissed.
“It wasn’t my ide—”
He turned his head to her.
She quieted.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Is it here?”
She bit her lip.
And shook her head again.
That was when he heard it.
A noise in the hall.
Abruptly standing, he pulled on the coat, then he sat yet again, swiftly. He lifted one boot to his other knee, reached to the inner base of the heel, and hit the miniscule catch with his thumbnail.
Winnow didn’t allow weapons in her establishment.
He had his suspicions, these being why he was there at all, but now he knew it was for this very reason.
Loren didn’t go anywhere without a weapon.
As the catch released, the hidden blade jumped out of his heel.
Mayda gasped.
“Speak one word, you’re the first cut I make,” Loren warned, not looking at her.
He hadn’t the time.
He transferred his other boot to his opposite knee and repeated these actions.
The blades were broad in width, blunt in length, with razor-sharp edges that came to a point. At the end of the short shaft was not a handle but a narrow rod that went side to side.
With a twist and click, the blade was at crosses with the rod.
Loren curled his fists around the rods, the blades protruding through his fingers.
He did this with his hands in front of him, his back to the various views to the room.
And he curled his hands carefully into the sleeves of his coat as he walked to the door.
He heard a noise, a wordless call.
His advance on the exit was noted.
The order was made.
Therefore, he was not surprised when the door burst open and two of Winnow’s large, lugubrious henchmen entered the room.
“Leaving without paying, your grace?” the one in the lead asked snidely.
“You return the wallet one of your staff lifted from my coat, I’d be happy to do so,” Loren drawled.
“We don’t operate that way at Avon,” came the reply. “And we don’t give pussy away for free.”
This was tiresome.
It always was.
He was rich.
He was titled.
His father was richer.
And his title was better.
Loren was not at fault for the happenstance of his birth.
But what never failed to infuriate him was that he knew just looking at them that neither of these men had stood proud for Hawkvale.
Neither of these men hunted the dying, but irritatingly prolific, bands of Middlelandian true believers.
Neither of them found their fourteen-year-old scout with his throat slit and a strip of his scalp taken as a prize.
Neither of them witnessed their best friend take an arrow through the throat.
Neither of them held his friend’s mother in their arms as she wept when he returned her son’s possessions.
He didn’t expect pussy for free, not as a veteran who put his life on the line to keep their country safe, not as the son of a veteran who did the same, or the latest in a line of many men who did just that.
He didn’t expect pussy for free because of his title or his connections, either.
He didn’t expect anything for free.
He paid and he paid well.
Though one could say he liked games.
But only those he wished to play.
So Loren had no patience at all for this shite.
In five seconds, both men were on the floor, their blood flowing freely into the silk rugs.
They would never again take their feet.
Mayda whimpered.
Loren stepped over them and into the hall.
In the end, he was vaguely disappointed it wasn’t much of a challenge.
Patrons and workers alike were shrieking and falling over themselves, as well as slipping on blood and bodies, in order to get out while Loren held Winnow against the wall of her office with his forearm.
“Where is it?” he asked mildly.
Her green gaze flicked to her desk.
He transferred one bloody blade to the other hand, still held at the ready, took her by the side of the neck and pulled her to the desk.
“Fetch it,” he ordered.
With trembling hands, she took the keys that dangled from the ribbon that served as a belt, bent to the bottom drawer, and Loren stayed vigilant and alert as he watched her open the drawer.
She came out with naught but his wallet.
But he saw what else was inside.
He took the wallet from her and slammed the drawer shut with the toe of his boot.
“I hope my message has been made clear,” he began. “It will be ill-advised that you ever do this again.”