The Gala at Southbank

POV Malia's

The lights along Southbank stretched gold over black water, and I hated how beautiful it all looked. Beauty had a way of dressing up rot until you couldn't tell the difference anymore, and tonight, rot wore a tuxedo and called itself Jarrah.

"Smile," he murmured against my ear, his hand resting at the small of my back like it belonged there. "They're watching."

They always were. That was the point of a night like this a ballroom full of people who traded in things that could kill you, all of them smiling like they sold flowers for a living. I smiled too. I'd gotten good at it. Good enough that sometimes I scared myself, how easily the mask slid on.

"Who's watching?" I asked, keeping my voice low, my eyes on the crowd instead of on him.

"Everyone who matters." He steered me past a cluster of men in dark suits, their laughter too loud, too rehearsed. "And a few who don't. You'll learn to tell them apart."

I already could. It was Jarrah I still hadn't learned to read, and after three months at his side, that terrified me more than any of the men in this room. Men like that wore their danger openly, like cologne. Jarrah wore his like a second skin, so close to the surface you forgot it was there until it cut you.

A woman in emerald silk caught my eye across the room and raised her glass in something that wasn't quite a toast. I didn't know her name. I didn't want to. In this world, knowing names was its own kind of liability, and I'd learned to collect faces instead filed away for later, for the day I'd need to remember exactly who had watched me become whatever it was I was becoming.

The auction floor opened at the far end of the hall, velvet ropes and hushed voices, the kind of quiet that only existed around things worth killing for. Jarrah led me toward it without asking if I wanted to go, and I let him, because refusing was its own kind of confession. You didn't survive in his world by showing what you were afraid of.

The first few lots passed in a blur a crate of rifles still smelling of packing oil, a case of something I didn't let myself look at too closely. I kept my face still and my hands folded, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had become someone my sister wouldn't recognize.

Then the dagger came out.

It sat on black cloth under a single spotlight, and even from where I stood I could see it was old old in the way that meant blood, real blood, not the movie kind. The handle was wrapped in silver wire that had gone dark with age, the blade curved like it had been designed by someone who understood exactly what a body looked like on the inside.

"Beautiful, isn't it," Jarrah said. Not a question.

"It's a weapon."

"Everything beautiful is." He was already lifting his hand, already bidding, and something in my chest folded in on itself and went very still. I knew this game. I'd watched him play it with other people buy something rare, something dangerous, and hand it over like a question he expected you to answer correctly.

He won it, of course. He always won. Numbers climbed and fell around us like a tide going out, other bidders dropping their paddles one by one until it was only Jarrah's voice left in the room, flat and certain, closing the gap between want and ownership the way he closed every gap without hesitation, without a flicker of doubt crossing that carved, unreadable face. The auctioneer's gavel came down and the room's attention slid toward us, curious, amused, waiting to see what Jarrah Voss would do with a four-hundred-year-old blade in front of his newest acquisition.

Because that was what I was in most of this room. An acquisition. A pretty thing on his arm that might or might not last the season.

He didn't hand me the dagger there, in front of everyone. He waited until we'd stepped out onto the terrace, until the music behind us dulled to a heartbeat and the river spread out dark and glittering below, and only then did he set the case in my hands.

"For you," he said.

"I don't want it."

"I didn't ask if you wanted it." His voice was gentle, which was somehow worse than if he'd been cruel. Cruelty I understood. Gentleness from Jarrah always came with a price tag I couldn't see yet. "I asked you to hold it."

My fingers found the clasp before my mind caught up to what I was doing. The blade caught the terrace lights when I opened the case, and for one long second neither of us said anything. I could feel him watching my hands, not my face watching to see if they'd shake.

They didn't. I wouldn't give him that.

"You're testing me," I said.

"I'm always testing you." He said it so plainly, so without apology, that it landed harder than a lie would have. "You knew that when you agreed to this."

"I agreed to survive. That's different from agreeing to whatever this is."

Something shifted behind his eyes not quite surprise, not quite approval, something in between that I didn't have a name for yet. He reached out and closed his hand over mine, over the hilt, and for a moment the blade was between us instead of the careful distance we'd both been keeping since the night he pulled me out of a burning warehouse and told me I owed him a debt I'd spend years paying off.

"Then prove it," he said quietly. "Prove you can hold something sharp and not bleed."

I hated that my breath caught. I hated more that some traitorous part of me leaned toward his hand instead of away from it, the way you lean toward warmth even when you know the fire will take your fingers if you're not careful. Three months of hating him and wanting to understand him had blurred into something I didn't have a clean word for, and I was starting to think that was exactly what he wanted for me to stop looking for one.

"Why me?" I asked, the question I'd been swallowing for weeks finally slipping loose. "Out of everyone in that room, why does it matter to you whether I bleed or not?"

For a moment I thought he wouldn't answer. The wind off the river pulled at his jacket, at the loose strands of my hair, and somewhere behind us the auction house doors opened and shut on a wave of laughter that didn't reach the terrace.

"Because," he said, and stopped. His thumb moved once against my knuckles, absent, like he hadn't meant to do it. "Because you're the only person left who still looks at me like I could be something other than this."

I opened my mouth to answer I don't even know what I would have said when the terrace doors slammed open behind us and a man I'd never seen before, his shirt dark at the collar with something that wasn't sweat, stumbled out gripping his side.

"Voss." His voice cracked on the name. "They found the buyer. The real one. He's already inside the building."

Jarrah's hand went rigid around mine, the dagger still caught between our palms, and the warmth in his eyes vanished so fast I might have imagined it.

"That's not possible," he said. "I killed the real buyer myself."

The man's knees buckled, and behind him, framed in the light of the terrace doors, I saw a face I recognized a face that was supposed to be dead, smiling at us both like he had all the time in the world.