A royal bloodline gets divided by rebels' attempted regicide, casting Alvina from her throne and into hiding, as Quinn, the bastard brother, is forced to take her place.
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Alvina was supposed to be queen, but when her coronation is abruptly stopp...
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We were given weird clothes. It looked like the clothes from those bad gangster book covers. I even had to wear this dumb hat. And so did Dy, but she flat out refused. She also refused to give up her green jacket. I had worse luck. So now I was wearing this dumb hat, sitting in the back of a car with Karla, Dy and another of Karla's friends. He was very large. Even larger than Dy, which only made me wonder why we even had to come in the first place.
Something told me, Karla just wanted us to pay something other than money in return for her fixing our car.
We stopped by a house in a neighbourhood that didn't look particularly... Nice. The houses looked older and more worn. The grass on the roofs had long withered and died and some of the windows had boards in front of them. Something smelt dead too.
Dogs were barking and somewhere a baby was crying. I inched closer to Dy, glancing up at her. She had a cold expression, a mask she'd wear when she was angry, I had noticed.
She reached behind her back, grabbing one of her guns and shoved it into my hand. "Take that."
"I don't know how to use it," I murmured and held the gun away from me as if it'd go off any minute.
"Doesn't matter. Just point at the one you wanna intimidate. It's not even loaded, so don't worry." She put her hand on top of mine and pushed it into the pocket of my borrowed jacket. And then she pulled me with her, following Karla into a building with a sign over the door announcing it was a bar.
Jazz played from a couple of lazy players perched on a stage. They looked barely alive as they tried to get through the song. A bass player and a trumpet player, slumping in their chairs.
Karla went directly for the bartender and sent him an almost charming smile.
"Hello. I'm sure you know why I'm here."
The bartender gulped, his gaze swinging over Dy, me and Karla's friend and then back to Karla. He slowly nodded and bent down behind the bar. He came back up with an envelope.
Karla winked at him and motioned us to follow her back to the car. I didn't understand what was going on at all.
"Why did that guy hand her an envelope?" I asked with a hushed voice, as soon as Karla turned on the radio, drowning out what happened between Dy and me on the back seat.
"It was money. Karla lends people money and then they pay her back. With interest. It's a con." Dy clenched her jaw.
"It's not a con," Karla said and turned down the radio.
Shit. She heard us.
"You're exploiting poor people's poverty. You know they don't have any other choice and then they're indebted to you for years. You're conning people to line your pockets."
"You didn't have that problem when I was lining your pockets." She smirked and looked back over her shoulder.
