Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER SIX; geldrenner hotel
♠
ACE DID NOT STAY PUT. If she started listening to Kaz's orders now she might as well throw on a crow tattoo and fumble and stutter every time he used his shark-like gaze that had everyone in the city trembling. She wouldn't mind stuttering and fumbling around him, but for entirely different reasons that had nothing to do with him bossing her around—or bossing her around for the wrong reasons.
The first thing she'd done when he left was go down to the kitchen and pour herself a drink. Then she'd gotten dressed in her less conspicuous dress and matching hat that covered her features enough and went out into the city—in particular the poor neighborhoods where she found Ciara and Luka, the two kids that had saved her.
Through her walk there, Ace noticed, with a glint in her eyes, the fact that her Wanted posters plastered all over the city had been stamped over, in big red letters, saying: "Ace is Dead" and signed by the Merchant Council. They move fast, Ace thought to herself, but then again if the biggest thief in the city was dead it was understandable that the Council wanted people to know. She might just be able to stay in the city after all. But first, she had kids to recruit.
She remembered helping them a while ago, their family had been (and to be honest still was) struggling financially—Ketterdam wasn't forgiving—but at the time their mother was sick, and if Ace hadn't helped them and paid for the medic the woman could've died. It was the least she could do. She tried to help whenever she could, share her treasures like her mother taught her, but in a city like Ketterdam and with the little power she had, there was no real impact she could make. Or at least that's what she thought. If she hadn't helped those kids' mother, perhaps they wouldn't have saved her, they wouldn't have called Kaz and she'd be a body floating in the Ketterdam Harbor.
The two kids were more than willing to help her now too. She gave them a few kruge for helping her and another handful to ask for their help. And with clear instructions to not be seen, heard, or captured—skills most kids born in the Barrel already possessed—she sent Ciara to Van Eck's house to let her know what happened with Kaz and Wylan, and Luka to Black Veil cemetery, where the boy would stay and watch from afar. And to make sure she covered all the basis she recruited another kid, a twelve-year-old boy called Elijah, whom she'd met on one of her trials to be an altruistic person, and paid him to keep an eye on the sugar silos and Inej and Nina and come running to the spot she would be at if anything happened.
Then, as the sun was already gone and the moon up in the sky, she paid a visit to Eira in the Fighting Pit of Ketterdam. Walking in as if she owned the place, she nodded and greeted people on her way to the infirmary, where she found the little Healer fixing a fighter's dislocated shoulder.
