“Aina,” he said, his voice unreadable. “Come with me.”

3

Aina lifted her hands, and the coins Kohl had given her cascaded onto the elm wood desk in his office. They bounced and rolled onto the floor, where she examined them at her feet. So few compared to the ones in the box in her pocket.

“The Red Jackals almost gutted me, and I only get four hundred kors for it,” she said as she bent to collect the coins for the baker’s death. She felt Kohl’s eyes on the back of her head as she did. Could these four hundred kors really make up for the baker hitting her with a rolling pin as a child? He’d died by her blade, but the memory of those bruises still ached.

“The Jackals aren’t stupid enough to actually kill you,” Kohl said. The floor creaked as he approached her. “They know I’d come after them if they did.”

He didn’t use candles like everyone else in the Stacks. Instead, he used the same electric lamps that the Steels in Rose Court, the factories, and the mansions all worked under, but lamps were only in this room of the Dom. The message was clear: He had more money than any of them. He took 40 percent of the clients’ pay and kept the best jobs for himself. But another message hid underneath the silk trappings of the first. He could give them all of this. He could help them rise, help them move far away from the thugs and orphans and slaves they’d all been. They all knew that if they were going to make it anywhere in Kosín, they needed him more than they needed their own hands and feet. He could keep his electricity, as long as he let them keep their jobs.

Kohl leaned against his desk, the lines and angles of his face as inexpressive and sharp as a cliffside. A high collar shielded half his pale features from view. He might have been born in Sumerand after his parents had fled the famine in Duroz, but he acted as if he’d been in the famine himself; the hunger never left his eyes. He always wanted more, even after years spent attaining everything.

At first, she’d thought the rumors must be fabricated. He was surely too young to have wreaked so much havoc. But then she’d seen it for herself outside another tradehouse whose boss wasn’t paying Kohl his commission. There were multiple tradehouses, but the Dom had come first, so any others that opened owed Kohl a cut.

“Hold him up, Aina,” he’d said in that low voice that always hinted he was about to inflict pain.

It was a sunny afternoon near the Center where a tradehouse masqueraded itself as a dry cleaner’s shop, but Kohl never worried about starting trouble in broad daylight—he’d bribed the Diamond Guards enough to give him a wide berth. A few people stopped to watch, but most were smart enough to move on.