Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
What if my body was fed to pigs? I had watched a movie where the villain went into great detail about feeding corpses to pigs and not trusting a man who kept more than three pigs. Or was it four? Would I resurrect as sentient pig crap?
I didn’t know, and I did not want to find out. If someone like Hreban got ahold of me and discovered that I was unkillable, he would torture me. That old clichéd saying about a fate worse than death was true in my case.
I wanted to vanish into a secure burrow, like a mouse, and get my bearings, and this tiny room failed to deliver that safety. The door was so old and warped, even I could kick my way through it. My biggest security measure wasn’t that door, it was that damn staircase. It would probably collapse if someone in armor tried to climb it.
Being locked in every night wasn’t amazing either. If the house caught fire, I’d be trapped.
The only way to truly get some security would be to buy or lease my own house and hire soldiers to guard me at night. Besides, trading in information required discretion and a private base. I had to get my own place, the sooner, the better.
I lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, and finally came up with a plan. It wasn’t a good plan. It involved a great deal of risk, and risk was exactly what I was trying to avoid. But if I pulled it off, the payoff would be worth it. I ran through my scheme three times, looking for pitfalls until my brain began to overheat. If I hesitated any longer, I would think myself right out of doing it, so I put my shoes back on and came here to the Three Moons.
Now I had to live through the next twenty minutes and exit in one piece.
The waiter emerged from the back room and walked over to my table. “We have a couple varieties for you to try. Would you like to come with me for samples, tress?”
“Yes.”
I got up and followed him through the door into a hallway. He paused to close the door behind me. I turned left, walked to the third door, and waited for him.
The waiter blinked, chased me down, and opened the door for me. A long stone staircase led down to the cellar. The staircase was steep, and more than one person had broken their limbs, and sometimes their neck, after being pushed down those stairs.
“Lead the way,” I told him.
He took a lantern off the wall and started down the stairs without hesitation. Apparently murder by stairs wasn’t on the agenda today.
We descended the staircase and turned left to a huge, old wooden door. The door opened to a wine cellar. We passed through a dark tunnel formed by beer and wine barrels stacked on their sides almost to the fifteen-foot ceiling, and reached another door, even better reinforced than the last one.
My guide knocked three times, then swung the door open. We went through that doorway and ended up in a well-lit room. A long old table, flanked by two benches, stood in the center, its surface stained and scarred. Today it held a stack of papers at the far end and a map of the city drawn on a four-foot-long, square piece of sturdy parchment. To the left, a small bar, a simple wooden counter with shelves behind it, offered a variety of cups and tankards.
A man looked at me from the table. He was tall and lean, with warm, golden skin the cosmetics companies would call sand and tawny light brown hair, cut a bit longish, so it framed his handsome face. He drew the eye in that classically attractive way: a sculpted jaw he kept clean-shaven, strong, angular features with a touch of elegant arrogance, and smart amber eyes. Right now, everything about him was sharp and dangerous, like a well-honed dagger, but when he went about his day job, he was charming, sophisticated, and effortlessly handsome.
In our world he would be in movies and make millions. People would line up to see his films, and they wouldn’t be disappointed, because he was an excellent actor.
He must’ve come directly from a meeting or some formal occasion because his clothes didn’t fit his current expression. He wore a high-collared white shirt left open to display a muscular neck and a narrow golden chain around it. A leather vest embroidered with golden thread caught his narrow waist. His dark brown pants were tucked into soft boots. A leather pauldron shielded his left shoulder. His burgundy cloak, designed to fit over his right shoulder, lay on the bar, casually discarded.
He was thirty years old but looked about five years younger. Solentine Dagarra. The head of the Shears and bastard son of Trihorn Border Margrave Izarn Demarr. Ruthless, dangerous, and deeply paranoid. He was one of my favorite characters. So handsome, so smart, so witty, and yet so deeply fucked up.