ItCP03

## Chapter 3

**Chapter 3** of **Into the Crooked Place** follows **Wesley**.

## **Full Version**

WESLEY THORNTON WALCOTT HAD killed eleven men.

Most of them were not good men. A few of them were not altogether bad men. But all of them were men who stood in the Kingpin’s way.

Of course, eleven was not a particularly large number compared to how many people everyone seemed to think Wesley had killed, and since it also included the old underboss—who was quite possibly more of a bastard than he was—Wesley thought only ten should count.

“*Skeht*,” Stelios said. “Take it out.”

It had been ten minutes since the knife went in and though Stelios had given up trying to pull it out, he hadn’t given up on pleading for someone else to.

He was on his knees and sweating, the tongue of his tie licking up the blood that drained from his hand. Wesley was hoping it wouldn’t stain. He quite liked the knife and the table and the carpet, and right now his fellow underboss was dripping blood all over them.

“I wasn’t planning to make you a permanent fixture in my club,” Wesley told him. He watched his carpet continue to smudge. “But we might as well finish our conversation while I’ve got you here.”

Stelios squeezed his eyes shut and bared his teeth in a gold-rimmed sneer.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Ilaria said. “The Kingpin’s new elixir will get to us eventually. You’re just cutting the wait short by passing it on.”

Wesley placed a clover on his tongue, considering.

“So you want me to do you a favor,” he said.

“It’s professional courtesy,” Ilaria said. “We may all enjoy taking a stab at each other every now and again”—she looked at Stelios’s hand, a little smug—“but when it comes down to it, we’re one and the same. We’re all underbosses in this realm. We’re a team.”

Her words made for a nice sentiment, but they were a sentiment all the same. Loyalty or betrayal. Allies or enemies. Wesley didn’t think anything could be that black and white. Even this meeting, which happened each month like clockwork, had turned so quickly from touching base in the regular fashion, to a near-ambush, with Wesley’s fellow underbosses clambering in a tag team, trying relentlessly to sway him into giving them magic they hadn’t earned.

The elixir the Kingpin had handed exclusively, personally, to him.

“You’re like hungry animals, begging for scraps,” Wesley said. “Why not just wait until Ashwood feeds you himself if you’re so sure he will?”

Ilaria all but snarled. “You forget who you’re dealing with.”

But that wasn’t true and Wesley smiled to show it.

“If there’s one thing I never do,” he said, “it’s forget.”

Because he remembered just fine how all three of these underbosses—Uskhanya’s most deadly, before Wesley had arrived—thought him unworthy of their inner circle. It was almost funny to think of it now, how they’d looked down on him, as they did underbosses of the far less grand central cities, thinking he was too young, not ravaged enough by sin.

Now they grew nervous whenever he paused.

Now they saw what he could do with a city under his command.

Of course, just because the underbosses were wary, that didn’t mean they weren’t still dangerous. Nobody was entrusted to run the magic trade for an entire city because they were good and reasonable. Wesley knew that better than anyone.

In fact, he was acutely aware of how awful the people in front of him were.

Crooks and killers, who’d stop at nothing to rise to the top.

And Wesley was the worst of them.

Casim smirked. “Maybe we don’t have your oh-so-special elixir because it’s just not good enough for the rest of us.”

“Or maybe,” Wesley said, “I’m the Kingpin’s favorite.”

Ilaria sucked on her teeth and the look she gave him was tired and unflattering. “Just tell us what the magic does and what the Kingpin is planning. We outnumber you, after all.”

Wesley sighed.

He really didn’t like it when people implied threats instead of making them. It seemed like a waste of good conversation.

*Better to kill them all and just be done with it*, the voice inside him whispered.

Wesley adjusted his cuff links, and the air around him grew cold, his magic humming with the possibility of such destruction.

“It’s a little rude to come into someone’s house and make demands like that,” he said.

Wesley slid a hand into his pocket and thumbed the tiny piece of metal he always carried with him.

Casim shifted uncomfortably.

“Someone back down,” Stelios said, wincing. “I’m not having this blade in my hand all night because you lot want to prove your power.”

“I don’t need to prove anything,” Wesley said.

Though part of him always thought he did.

Wesley leaned forward and stood the small silver bullet in the center of the table.

He inclined his head upward and it rose obediently.

“You’re going to shoot us with a magic bullet?” Ilaria asked.

She stared at him, ripe with disbelief, as though she had only just remembered what a bastard Wesley was.

It wasn’t her fault, of course. Wesley had two faces and he was wearing a far nicer one when the underbosses first arrived. Now the face that belonged alongside his reputation appeared, smug and a little dead around the eyes.

Tavia would have hated it.

“Do it.” Stelios laughed and banged his uninjured hand against the table. “It’s about time my blood had some company.”

“That’s a little much, even for you,” Ilaria said, eyeing Wesley. “Think carefully about what you’re doing.”

Wesley ran a thumb over his lip and slid as far back as his chair would allow. The bullet teetered. “I am thinking,” he said. “About how much of you guys I’m willing to have scrubbed off my floor.”

Ilaria’s laugh was brittle. “Just like Ashwood’s lapdog to try to bite off more than he can chew.”

Wesley exhaled and without warning, without him really meaning for it to, the bullet shot through the air, spitting through the narrow gap between Ilaria’s arm and her ribs. She jumped up as it tore into the sofa behind her and continued its blazing path until the mirror at the far end of the room shattered.

“Are you out of your mind?” Ilaria roared.

It was a fair question.

“You could have killed me!”

“I’m aware of that,” Wesley said. “I just wanted to make sure you were.”

Ilaria only glared, which meant that Wesley had made his point.

Perhaps the underbosses were resentful that the Kingpin gave him his pick of the magic and that this new elixir, this thing Ashwood was so excited about, shrouded in awful mystery, was only Wesley’s to sell. Perhaps he should have made nice and fed their egos. But the truth was, they weren’t allies and they weren’t on the same side.

Wesley had earned every advantage he had over them.

Creije was thriving because of him. The city was Uskhanya’s magical mecca because of him. Wesley may not have been in the position for as long as the other underbosses, he may not have killed and tortured as many people as they had, ruined as many lives and burned as many bridges, but he’d done more in those short years to help his city than they could in their entire lives.

Wesley loved Creije, and these people were too awful to love anything.

He picked up the half-empty decanter of Cloverye and refilled his glass. The wind called in through the open window, mingling with every trick Wesley had in his pocket, telling him it was time to go.

“If that’s all,” he said, “then you’ll have to excuse me. I have places to be and a city to run. I’m sure at least one of you knows what that’s like.”

Ilaria slammed her fists on the table.

“What happens on the day you don’t have any more of the Kingpin’s fancy magic to throw around?” she asked. “Because that’s the day when we’ll come for your city, Walcott. What are you going to do then?”

Wesley stood, straightening out his suit sleeves. “I suppose I’ll just have to kill you the old-fashioned way.”

“There’s only one of you and three of us.”

Wesley looked over to Stelios, still bleeding onto his carpet. “Two and a half,” he said, and headed for the door.

The moment Wesley turned from the other underbosses, the shroud of magic he kept around himself began to hum, like it always did when his back was turned, ready to protect him in case someone decided to stick a knife in it.

Wesley crossed the Crook with its song in his ears and pushed open the door to his office.

Of all the ways for a night to end, that wasn’t the worst. Nobody had tried to kill him and he’d managed to walk away making everyone think he might just kill them.

All in all, he’d call it a success.

The underbosses needed to know that he wouldn’t cower to their demands, because if Wesley gave them the smallest bit of slack, they would use the rope to hang him.

They were envious and Wesley knew it, not just because Ashwood favored him, but because the other Uskhanyan cities were such a stark juxtaposition to his. Places like Ilaria’s Eltriea to the east, packed with concrete buildings hidden amongst the clouds, sandwiched too close to look like anything other than a jigsaw, broken only by flashing signs that advertised food or pleasure. The southern city of Kythnu that Stelios watched over was older and brimming with a very boring kind of culture that made for pretty architecture and not much else. It was warm, always, but the glow of the sun was the only color in its stark expanse of white buildings. And then there was Rishiya, Casim’s territory to the west, the most war-devastated of the realm, where farmers worked the land and buildings were covered in greenery.

They were nothing compared to Creije, where buildings were a mix of colors spread lavishly across the city, so when the sun hit them just right the windows cast paintings on the ground.

Wesley sat on the edge of his desk and reached into his pocket for another clover.

Behind him, the painting he inherited from the old underboss began to shake and Wesley eyed it with a curious smile. It depicted the four elements of the Many Gods, their symbols like watchful eyes that forever despaired over Wesley’s secrets and, nestled above them, a shadow moon in the drawn sky.

In the old days, it was called the Crafter Moon and was part of some sacred ritual Wesley had read about, though he couldn’t remember in which book. He did remember that the text said whenever a shadow moon appeared, magic increased tenfold. It was only a story, he supposed, and since Crafters were no longer around to ask, he couldn’t be sure whether it was true. Still, Wesley always liked the idea of a magical moon imbuing people with power.

It was why he kept the painting, long after he disposed of its owner.

Wesley watched, patiently, as the image continued to shake until it finally creaked open. From the darkness behind, a face slipped through.

“Sir,” Falk said, quiet and cautious. “I think I’ve had a breakthrough.”

Though Falk was older than Wesley, it was not by much, and yet still his face was worn with magic. Stretched and then scrunched, making everything about him pointed, from his lips to his small nose.

“A breakthrough,” Wesley repeated.

Falk nodded and Wesley’s lips drew to a smile.

The other underbosses were so concerned with the Kingpin’s elixir, with the things that Ashwood gave to Wesley, that they never thought to worry about the things Wesley would make for himself.

The weapons and the magic, and the infinite possibility they held when paired together.

“Show me,” Wesley said.

Falk pushed the door of the painting back wider, erasing the shadow moon from view.

Wesley pillowed his hands into his pockets, and with a whistle to match his magic, he stepped through.