ItCP31

## Chapter 31

**Chapter 31** of **Into the Crooked Place** follows **Wesley**.

## **Full Version**

WESLEY REMEMBERED THE DAY he truly became a bastard.

He was sixteen and had just met with the Kingpin. He did it often, so the meeting itself was not the special thing. After all, Ashwood enjoyed talking with Wesley, guiding him through the perils of Creije like he was a worthy apprentice.

The special thing was that this time the Kingpin had given Wesley a direct order.

It was not words whispered through the old underboss, or the usual sage advice Ashwood often gave him, and only him, because Wesley had somehow become his favorite among a swell of orphans.

It was a true order, from Ashwood’s shadow lips to Wesley’s ears. It felt a bit like a promotion, if promotions involved killing people. Which they often did in Creije.

Wesley crawled into bed that night, trying very hard to think about what it meant for his career and not what it meant for the man he was supposed to kill.

*Hello.*

It came as a whisper, like the wind was talking to him. Wesley knew enough to figure that was possible, but he’d had a long enough day that he was willing to shake it off.

He settled back into bed, but when it came again, the voice was a sudden girlish yelp.

*Please don’t sleep with me in here!*

Wesley reached for the gun under his pillow. His eyes searched the room, but there was nobody.

He reached for the light.

Nothing.

Wesley checked under the bed, feeling like a child.

*I really am sorry*, the voice said.

It was a girl, he knew that much. Young and with an accent that was mostly definitely not Creijen.

“Where are you?” Wesley asked.

*In your head.*

Wesley nearly dropped the candle. “That’s a brave place to be.”

There was a pause, and then—*It* is *pretty dark in here.*

Wesley laughed.

It was absurd. A girl inside his mind? He walked over to the mirror and looked very hard at his reflection, but there was just him, standing with a candle, sneering at himself like an utter moron.

He shook his head and made to check under the bed again.

*I don’t think you can see me*, the girl said.

Wesley jumped at the sudden closeness of her voice. He looked at himself in the mirror and said, “Get out.”

*I don’t know how I got in. I’m lost.*

Wesley was losing patience. Whatever trick this was, he didn’t find it funny anymore.

“Are you using some kind of charm?” he asked. “Did Tavia put you up to this? Because if she’s still bitter that I wouldn’t put her boring little proverbs inside that fortune orb, then—”

*I don’t know who Tavia is*, the girl said. *I was just practicing my specialty and the next thing I knew I was here.*

Wesley turned from the mirror in case the girl saw his surprise. A specialty. He’d studied enough history books to know what that meant. Had he really just found what the Kingpin was looking for, in his head?

And so it began. A real live Crafter. A girl who refused to tell him her name.

A girl who, every now and again, lived inside Wesley’s mind.

He wanted so badly to tell Tavia, but she would just think he was losing it or get that odd look on her face she tended to have whenever Wesley did something she didn’t like. Which seemed to be most of the time. And so instead, Wesley’s memories and thoughts became stories to this strange girl. She remembered them and thought them too. Everything that made Wesley feel like he was nobody and everything he believed he needed in order to become somebody.

*You need to find someone like me*, the girl said one day, months later.

Wesley nodded. “If I hand the Kingpin a Crafter, I’ll become underboss in a second.” He sighed, almost wistfully. “But I buy and sell magic, not people.”

The girl went quiet, considering her next words carefully. Wesley could sense her hesitance. He was getting good at knowing her emotions as if they were his own.

*If I go to him, such big things will happen.*

“Are you predicting the future?”

*Predictions are unreliable. There are far too many futures to know which will happen. I see them all and that’s not much use. Time is as indecisive as those who live in it.*

Wesley chuckled. “Lighten up, kid.”

He felt the girl frown. *You should stop calling me a kid. I’m destined to do great things.*

“You’re also eleven,” he said. “Enjoy the compliment. The last thing anyone wants is to be a grown-up.”

*I don’t think either of us will get that chance*, she said. *There are so many awful futures of you and me and even Tavia.*

At that, Wesley stilled.

“Tavia will be golden,” he said, because the thought of anything else was not something he would consider. “She’ll travel the realms and be whatever she wants to be. There’s nothing awful in her future.”

*In some of them there is*, the girl said. *In some she betrays you. In some you kill her to save the lives of so many Crafters.*

Wesley sat up, rigid, anger crawling on his skin and biting down like an insect. “I’d sooner kill you and every Crafter alive than turn my back on Tavia,” he said.

And he meant it too. Maybe Wesley wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t a disloyal prick. There were many lines he would never cross and all of them were to do with Tavia.

“You don’t know what it’s like to create a family from nothing,” Wesley said. “Not out of blood, but sweat and graft. To *earn* those closest to you.”

*Is that not what we are?*the girl asked. *Are we not family too?*

“You’re a Crafter.”

Wesley said it as though it were the worst kind of accusation. Worse than her accusing him of betraying his best friend.

“You and I are not family,” Wesley said. “You should be grateful I haven’t handed you over to the Kingpin.”

They were awful, untrue words, and the moment Wesley spoke them they tasted like poison—like a reverie charm gone bad—and though he wanted to take them back, he couldn’t.

He was too angry to be kind.

*You wouldn’t betray me*, the girl said. *I know you.*

And that, right there, was the problem.

Wesley letting people know him was his greatest weakness and one he wanted desperately to keep to himself.

“No,” Wesley said. “You don’t know what I’d do to win.”

It was just three days later when Wesley saw the girl at the consort’s headquarters, standing beside the Kingpin.

She was bound and bleeding.

Wesley knew her without hearing her speak.

He recognized her face, even if he had only ever seen it in his mind.

“She came to find you,” the Kingpin said. “Crossed the realm and went straight to the underboss to see where you might be.”

She thought Wesley would save her, proving that he was better than the Kingpin, that he was good and she was his friend as much as Tavia. Or that he’d spare his underboss when the bone gun was in his hands. Or that if Wesley came to power, he’d do something good.

Perhaps she thought a lot of things, as children often did, but Wesley only proved her wrong. He hadn’t saved her, or spared his old underboss.

He hadn’t done anything close to good.

“This is the start of a new era,” the Kingpin had said. “Once I absorb her powers, I can begin to create a better realm, with you by my side.”

“I’d be honored,” Wesley said, slipping the seal of the old underboss from the dead man’s hand and onto his own.

He felt numb.

He felt dread.

“You don’t mean it,” the girl said. “It’s not a choice between me and her.”

Wesley saw the moment the Kingpin shifted, interest piqued, wondering just who else Wesley might be loyal to aside from him.

When Ashwood spoke, Wesley felt the words grate across his bones.

“Her, who?”

Tavia.

Always, Tavia.

His closest friend. His partner. His family.

Wesley didn’t want the Kingpin knowing her name.

Maybe one day, when he was a powerful underboss and could protect her and make her the greatest busker in Creije. But not yet. Not like this, in a way that told Ashwood she could be an obstacle, rather than an asset. Not in a way that told the most dangerous person in the realms exactly what Wesley’s weakness was.

“It’s a choice between you and my Kingpin,” Wesley said to the girl. “And I will always choose him.”

Maybe he was too stubborn to admit he cared.

Maybe he hated the possibility of the girl’s predictions being true, and so hated her for seeing a future where Tavia wasn’t by his side.

Maybe Wesley really was just a bastard.

Whatever the reason, he signed that girl’s death warrant, and the Kingpin’s laughter turned the air to bristles and the blackness around him danced.

“Oh, my boy,” he said. “I will make us the world.”

Everything that happened since was Wesley’s fault. Everything the Kingpin had done was Wesley’s fault. He had rekindled the Kingpin’s madness. He was responsible for anyone who died because of it.

Some blood never washed away, and after all Wesley had done, he deserved to be haunted. So when he stepped into the conjured doorway aboard the train, Wesley knew with absolute certainty what regret would greet him.

The word doubled over in his mind, loud and accusing.

*Coward.*