Ace Of Shades: the gripping first novel in a new series full of magic, danger and thrilling scandal when one girl enters the City of Sin

LEVI

Muck. Of all the gambling taverns in the city, why had the whiteboot captain chosen Grady’s? Levi Glaisyer hadn’t set foot in there since he’d handed Grady his resignation four years ago. He paced back and forth in the alley outside the tavern, dropping the copy of The Crimes & the Times he’d been carrying. On the front page, a photograph of Malcolm Semper, the oh-so-respected Chancellor of the Republic, soaked up the muddy rainwater.

After a few more moments of cursing, Levi gathered his nerve, straightened his felt homburg hat and strode to the door.

The inside of the tavern hadn’t changed at all. It still reeked of tobacco and burnt food, and the patrons were loud, even now, early in the morning. A group of men seated at the main card table—what was once Levi’s card table—were dressed in clothes with more patches than original fabric. A woman in fishnet stockings giggled and toppled into one of their laps.

The dealer at the table did a double take once he noticed Levi. Most gamblers considered Levi to be the best dealer in the city, and he didn’t normally show his face in establishments as small-time as this one.

But he hadn’t come to gamble. He’d come for business.

Levi searched the room for Jamison Hector, the captain of the city’s whiteboots. The two of them were supposed to meet here at ten o’clock sharp, and Levi had been on edge about it for days. He wasn’t usually the sort to rendezvous with authority—if only on principle—but lately, Levi had done a lot of things he’d never thought he would.

He locked eyes with the captain at a table in the back corner but made it only halfway to him before Grady slapped his shoulder, hard enough for him to wince.

“Levi, never thought I’d see you again,” Grady said with a laugh. His enormous gut tremored. “How you doing?”

As if Grady didn’t know how Levi was doing, what he’d become since his stint here as an amateur card dealer. Reputation aside, he was easily recognizable with his dark brown skin, his calculating gaze and his signature coarse curls—bronze at the roots, but black at the ends, like a burnt-out match. Levi had a look like he was trying to sell you something, and a smile that made you want to buy it.

“I’ve been busy,” Levi answered. “How’s business?”

“Just hired another new dealer and had some rotten luck. He barely makes ten percent profit. Ten percent.”

Levi whistled with feigned concern.

“It was better when you were dealing for me. No, don’t bother apologizing. St. Morse must shell out three times what I paid you. At least.”

Try ten times, Levi thought. But that doesn’t come without strings attached.

“I could get you an Iron,” Levi offered, always the businessman. He made a show of adjusting his sleeves to brandish his tattoos: the ace on one arm, the spade on the other. They marked him as the Iron Lord. “I found this new kid who deals pretty well—”

“I would, but I can’t. The whiteboots keep paying me visits lately, and I don’t want any trouble.” Before Levi could point out that technically speaking, the Irons were the only gang that didn’t break the law, Grady continued, “They think I’m smuggling.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Of course.” He laughed again. “I’ll get you a drink, on the house. Anything for my best dealer—and youngest, I might add. A Snake Eyes—that still your favorite?”

“Sure is,” Levi said politely, though he’d never had a taste for the drink. It was also barely ten in the morning. “Thanks.”

“You should stop by more often. Teach the new fellow how it’s done.”

“Maybe I will,” Levi lied. He had no intention of revealing his tricks to anyone, especially a no-name dealer who wasn’t an Iron.

When Grady walked away, Levi approached the whiteboot captain. The captain wasn’t dressed in his usual uniform, but Levi never forgot a face—and the captain had an interesting one. His nose had been broken so many times that it was bent decidedly to the left, and an ugly scar traced across his jawline to the place where his right ear had once been.

“Not every day I have a drink with the Iron Lord,” the captain said. He had a grandfatherly voice—all condescension, but with an added hint of malice. He looked Levi over more closely. “But you must be barely old enough to drink. Isn’t that right?”

Levi tilted his head to the side and cracked his neck, a nervous habit of his. He hated the way people talked to him in this city—like he was nothing. No, like he was worse than nothing. Like he was a joke.

Levi reached into his pocket and pulled out a silk pouch filled with seven orbs. He set it on the table in front of the captain.

The man raised his eyebrows and opened it. He pulled out the first orb. It was a clear glass sphere, about the size of a billiard ball. White sparks, called volts, sizzled within the glass.

The captain held it up to the lamplight and examined it. “This is good quality.”

“Only the best for my clients,” Levi said smoothly.

“You make it?”

“No. I’m not in the orb-making business.” Not anymore.

“Yes, we’re all aware what kind of business you’re in,” the captain said drily. He pulled out a mechanical volt reader, flipped open the orb’s metal cap and slipped the antenna inside. The meter read 180 volts. He did this with the other six orbs, even though it was widely known that Levi would never cheat a client. They were all there. Every volt he owed him.

Dealing in orbs was a very official way of doing business—it made Levi look more legitimate. As a currency, volts could be traded in two ways. Glass orbs, like the ones Levi had given the captain, were the traditional method. Alternatively, you could carry volts in your skin. This was the hardest to track, the most difficult to steal and the favorite method of the city’s gangsters.

The captain slipped the last orb into the pouch. “It’s a pity. The Glaisyer orb-making talent is the best of them all.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know how you got these.”

Levi’s eyebrows furrowed. “The investment was a success. You’re lucky you paid in when you did. The venture—”

“Was a scam, boy. Don’t lie to me.”

Levi’s sense of alarm never crossed his expression—he had too skilled a poker face for that. But what exactly was the old man suggesting? He couldn’t know. That wasn’t possible.

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” he answered coolly.

The captain leaned forward. “I’ve got it all worked out. You promise an investment with outrageous returns. One man invests, then another, then another. Then when their deadlines roll around, you pay them back with the volts from the newest investor and pocket a bit yourself. Not a bad scam. It just keeps going and going, all until you run out of investors and have no ways of paying people back.”

No. No. No. Levi had covered every trace, tied up every loose end. After two years of running the scheme, he was nearly done with it. He had only two people left to pay back, and the captain was one of them. He was so close. He wasn’t about to go down now.

He fingered the pistol at his side, even as he tried to think of a clever way out. He always did. Levi the card dealer. Levi the con man. There was no player he couldn’t outplay. But he’d rarely been so easily backed into a corner.

Damn it, Vianca, he thought. I could hang for this. And it would be your fault.

As if his employer gave a muck about what happened to him.

“What do you want?” Levi growled.

“I don’t want anything,” the captain said. He was obviously lying. Everyone wanted something.

Grady set Levi’s Snake Eyes on the table, bubbling in its champagne glass. “Anything else I can get you, Levi?”

“Nah, thanks, Grady,” he muttered, forcing a smile. He still had one hand on his gun.

“What about you, um...sir?” Grady eyed the captain hesitantly. Grady was a good man, but he wasn’t a respectable one. Whiteboots always made him tense. “What can I get for you?”

“Nothing for me.”

Grady returned to the bar, where he yelled at an old man on a stool trying to order his fifth glass of absinthe.

“You know him?” the captain asked curiously, as if he still expected Levi to be capable of small talk at a time like this. Levi had a grim suspicion he was about to be blackmailed. Or worse.

“He’s an old friend,” Levi said curtly.

“That’s why you’re not like the others. The other lords don’t have friends,” the captain said matter-of-factly. “They have victims.”

Levi was mucking tired of hearing how he wasn’t like the other street lords. Tired of hearing each and every way they were better than him.

“How old are you?” the captain asked.

“Eighteen this October,” Levi said stiffly, even though that was four months away. Better to seem older than be treated like a child.

“If you live to October. Have you ever considered that you might be in over your head?”

Levi clenched his fist beneath the table. He thought about it every night, during the hours when he should’ve been sleeping but couldn’t. He didn’t choose to start this scam. He didn’t choose to involve the most dangerous people in the city. Ever since he started working for Vianca, he hadn’t had many choices at all.

“Who else knows?” Levi murmured, the quietness of his voice betraying his fear.

The captain rubbed the scruff on his scarred chin. “I’m not the smartest man. So tell me, if I figured it out, who else might’ve, too?”

Levi caught his breath. He was referring to Sedric Torren, the twisted, perverted don of the Torren casino Family. The kind of man who could clear a room with the snap of a finger. The kind of man who could ensnare his prey with only a smile. The kind of man Levi didn’t want as an enemy.

Sedric Torren was Levi’s final investor. Once Levi paid Sedric back, he’d be done. Clean. Safe. But it’d taken Levi weeks to scrape up the nine hundred volts for the captain, and he owed Sedric ten thousand.

If Sedric did figure out the scam, would he wait for Levi to pay him back, or would he kill him to make a point? Conning a Torren was flirting with destruction.

The captain stood. “I’d prefer not to keep hearing your name.” Then he nodded at Levi and left the tavern. No blackmail, no coercion. Just a warning.

Levi let out a breath of relief. He supposed he was lucky—he could’ve been arrested, or worse. But he didn’t feel lucky. The whiteboot captain didn’t bother arresting criminals he considered dead men walking.

I’m almost done. I’m almost safe, he reminded himself. The only person I have left to pay is Sedric, then I can finally focus on the Irons.

With all the time he’d been spending on Vianca’s scam, his gang was slowly crumbling. Their income was tight, their clients were irritated and Levi hardly recognized some of his own kids. But Levi refused to fall with this scheme. He had a destiny to forge and an empire to build.

Levi stood to leave. As he made his way out the door, he tried not to notice Grady’s face fall at the full drink he’d left behind on the table.

Levi headed to the newest abandoned house Chez and some of the other Irons had made their own. As he put more distance between himself and Grady’s tavern, his shoulders relaxed, and the tightness in his chest loosened. Walking always cleared his head.

Around him, the white stone shopfronts and gambling dens gave way to the signature black scenery of Olde Town, the most historic neighborhood of New Reynes. With the buildings so tall and the alleys so narrow, there was little light here, which was why Levi had claimed it when he founded the Irons five years ago. It was nearly abandoned—nicknamed the “stain of the city,” it was the sort of place you didn’t want to find yourself, no matter the time of day. There was an art to navigating its maze of alleys, of slipping oneself into its endless shadows. Here, it was always night. And sleights of hand were easiest in the dark.

When he reached the Irons’ hideout, Levi paused, running his hand across the wrought iron bars bolted over the windows. He knew every inch of Olde Town. Because you own it, he told himself, convinced himself. But did he really own it anymore?

Levi cracked his neck, mustered up some bravado and knocked on the door. Chez unlocked it.

“There’s a missy here to see you,” Chez said, crossing his heart, as gangsters always did for their lord. As Chez usually did for him, though his sign of respect was often forgotten lately.

“What? Who?” Levi hadn’t scheduled any meetings today.

“A real prissy one. From one of the territories.”

Before Levi could ask if he was joking, Chez skulked off to the living room. Levi followed, ripping his arms out of his jacket. He didn’t have time for this. He needed to figure out how to deliver ten thousand volts to Sedric Torren before Sedric Torren delivered him.

In the living room, Levi found Jac leaning against a quilted armchair, his aura drifting lightly in the stale air. Levi had inherited his split talent of sensing auras from the Canes, his mother’s family. He couldn’t sense everyone’s auras—his split talent wasn’t strong enough for that—but those of the people he knew well were often discernable to him.

His best friend’s aura flowed toward him in waves and smelled like linen and the color gray.

Mansi perched at the end table, practicing a card trick Levi had taught her yesterday. She crossed her heart and beamed at him, just as she always did. Mansi was one of the best up-and-coming dealers in the Irons. Some called her Levi’s protégée, though Levi hadn’t made that decision yet. Still, her unwavering loyalty held appeal—there wasn’t enough of that to go around, these days.

The missy in question sat on the couch, her back straight as a billiard rod, her legs resting to the side with one ankle tucked delicately behind the other. She was tiny, only about five feet tall, with fair skin and brown hair falling out of a tight ballerina bun. She was real pretty in a second-glance kind of way, though she looked like she was on the wrong side of the city—a strand of rose pearls caught on one of Olde Town’s serrated spires.

She stood when Levi entered, like he was some dinner guest. “You must be Mr. Glaisyer.” He cringed at the sound of his father’s name. The others snickered.

“What’s going on here, Jac?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on her. It wasn’t every day such pretty or strange girls showed up asking for him.

“She said you could help her contact someone. And before you say no—” Levi snapped his mouth shut, and Jac continued “—she outran two whiteboots this morning after just arriving. Not bad, eh?”

Not bad? By the looks of her, Levi would say unbelievable. What could she have done to anger the whiteboots? Curtsy the wrong way?

“Who is she?” he asked.

“I’m right here,” she said haughtily. “You might as well ask me.”

“Exactly,” Levi snapped. “But I didn’t. Which means I didn’t want to.”

That shut her up.

“She’s from Bellamy,” Jac explained. Bellamy was one of the Republic’s territories, a mostly self-regulated island that paid taxes to the wigheads. It had a reputation for being twenty years backward, which explained her conservative clothes. “Bit of a snob, really.”

She cleared her throat with a sharp ahem.

The only person Levi knew from Bellamy was Lourdes Alfero, but he hadn’t thought about her in years. She was one of those “anonymous” journalists who wrote for the monarchist papers. Though the Mizers were all dead, the monarchists kept lobbying for a reinstatement of the old kingdoms and the crowning of new families to rule them. The monarchists were the only ones in opposition to the First Party, the core political party of the Republic.