Clearing her throat, she nodded at his tattoo of the vulture hung by a diamond bracelet and asked, “How did you learn? Did your old boss in the Vultures teach you like you’re teaching me?”

All she’d known at that time was that he used to work with the Vultures, that his old boss was dead, and that Kohl had destroyed every remnant that the Vultures had ever existed except for the tattoo on his arm.

The side of Kohl’s lips tugged up in a smirk. “Come on, I know you’re curious. What else do you want to know?”

“How did you fall in with them?” she blurted out.

He took a long time to answer, but she didn’t speak all the while. She placed a hand on a pillar, ignoring the cold that pressed through the holes in the thin material of her gloves. The fact that the Blood King had offered her a piece of his history, when all anyone really knew was that he was a violent enigma with hundreds of crimes behind him, meant something. Maybe it meant he would trust her soon, that her place here would be secure, and she’d never have to fear losing this new home.

“You know how my parents came from Duroz to escape the famine before I was born? Well, they didn’t exactly come on a luxury ship. The deal was that they would smuggle weapons into the city in exchange for passage. They held up their end of the deal and got us an apartment on Lyra Avenue, but some gang found out and threatened to report them unless they helped launder money through the tailor’s shop where they worked. They did it for nearly a decade before the Diamond Guards found out and arrested them.”

“So, then you were on your own?” Like I was, she wanted to add, but stopped herself.

“For a while, but apparently my parents owed some money to the gang they were working for, and the gang decided this was now my debt. I dodged them for a while, and started taking on any jobs I could get. I even put together my own group, a few kids from the neighborhood—we mostly did small robberies together, pickpocketing tourists. Then the boss of the Vultures found me, and suddenly the threats from the other gang stopped. He offered to protect me if I started doing errands for him, and that if I did my job well, he’d put together a bribe to get my parents out of prison.”

Her eyes widened. “Did he?”

“I became a spy for him,” Kohl said with a dark laugh, a faraway look taking over his eyes as he told her his past. “At first, I didn’t care about the details. Never get too curious in Kosín, you know. After a while, I realized I was spying on factory bosses and employees who were planning to fight back when King Verrain was threatening to shut them down. Then, the war started, and my job changed. I started smuggling weapons and money to the factory workers, and then my boss also had me bring information to the people who were working with King Verrain. He was playing both sides. I didn’t care one way or the other. When the war died down, I asked my boss if it was time to put up the bribe for my parents.”