King Of Fools (The Shadow Game series, Book 2)

by Amanda Foody

  The Balfour family doesn’t have a talent, Lola had once told her, but even then, of course, Enne had known that couldn’t be true. When she and Bryce had shaken hands for the first time, she’d felt a power in him, the same power of the Shadow Game. But, like all things that reminded her of that night, she’d locked the memory away, buried it beneath anger and ambition, all—so she told herself—to make herself stronger.

  She’d been a fool.

  Enne climbed onto the stage and stood at Levi’s side, Harrison behind them. The relief in Levi’s eyes when he looked at her was nearly enough to make her break down again. He reached for her hand, but she wrapped her arms around herself.

  “What happened?” Levi asked her.

  But Bryce’s next actions drew her attention away. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a long red cloth, then unfolded it and threw it into the air. As the cloth billowed and drifted down, it rested around the shape of something large and circular, though there’d been nothing there before.

  Bryce smiled. “And the game begins.”

  He tore away the cloth to reveal a lottery wheel, alternating red and black like a game of roulette. The crowd gasped—a few people even clapped, as though this were some sort of show, as though Vianca’s bleeding body didn’t lie at Bryce’s feet.

  “Don’t do this,” Harrison said, stepping forward. He laid a protective, almost paternal hand on Bryce’s shoulder. “I know what you’re doing, and you can’t—”

  Bryce swatted him away. “I can. And if you do know, then you also know you can’t stop me.”

  Bryce turned back to the crowd. “In my game, there’s only one rule—survival,” he told the room. The clapping abruptly died. “This roulette wheel contains a number for every card from two to ace. You’d better hope it doesn’t fall on yours.”

  He spun the wheel, and the metal pegs on the table whirled.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Enne saw the glimmer of strings in the air, and she frantically grasped for Levi’s hand, despite herself. For a moment, she was back at that card table, facing those who had killed her mother. The strings hummed around them as the board spun, plucking an eerie song as though playing a harp. The hairs on Enne’s neck standing on end.

  The wheel stopped on the number ten.

  A dozen people across the room crumpled to the floor. At first, it only seemed like a trick, and it wasn’t until the guests around them began to scream that Enne realized those people were dead.

  She watched in shock as many of the guests rose and fled for the doors, only to find them locked. They pounded on them, threw themselves against them. But still, they remained closed.

  The rules of the world had broken, and with that realization, Enne regained the last shreds of her composure. She didn’t know this game, but as she clutched Levi’s hand beside her, she knew she still had things to lose. And so she couldn’t afford to break, too.

  This night had already claimed too many lives.

  She reached into her dress and pulled out her gun. Her hand trembled as she clutched it—it was the same gun that had killed Jac. But still, she aimed it at Bryce’s chest.

  “Stop this,” Enne growled. Beside her, Levi squeezed her other hand, but made no move to stop her. Many of the guests, too, had stopped their escape attempts to watch.

  “Why so angry?” Bryce asked her. He kicked Vianca’s body in the side, and Enne winced. No matter how wretched Vianca had been, there was something unsettling about how carelessly he wounded her corpse. “The three of us should be celebrating.”

  The three of us. Enne’s hand shook, though she made no move to lower her gun. Bryce had been Vianca’s third omerta? But of course it made sense. Vianca was the one who’d suggested Enne visit him—she’d even referred to Bryce as “dear.” And then there was the way Bryce had always spat out the name of this casino.

  “You didn’t know?” Bryce asked, letting out a strangled laugh. “How do you think she knew about the words spoken at our meetings?”

  Bryce took a step closer to them, and even if he claimed to be their ally, Enne and Levi both backed away. The crimson glint in his eyes matched the blood he had spilled.

  “Shoot him!” somebody shouted from the other side of the room. Enne whipped her head toward the crowd, at the terror in their faces. Several men had tried to climb the stage, but an invisible barrier stopped them. They cursed and pounded on what looked like air.

  Enne avoided their stares, her hand quivering. It’d been easier to kill the two whiteboots, to kill Sedric Torren. She’d hated Sedric, and she hadn’t known the whiteboots. But Bryce, as cruel and twisted as he might’ve been, had once felt close to being her friend. And worse, she understood his anger. She and Levi understood it better than anyone.

  Bryce ignored the crowd, just like he ignored the aim of Enne’s gun. “Jonas was right to wonder how the whiteboots ever got the rifles in time,” he continued. “But the Families have them, don’t they? Just like he said. You see, it was never the whiteboots who ambushed the Orphan Guild. It was me. Vianca gave me the weapons and told me to start a war.”

  His gaze darted wildly between them. “But she never asked you to kill your friends, did she? Not her favorite. Not her girl.”

  Enne’s heart clenched. What Bryce and Levi didn’t know was that she already had.

  “She was going to kill me tonight. She told me over tea. I would be forced to attend this party, and Worner’s victory would be announced, and then my use to her would be finished.” Bryce’s shoulders heaved. “If Harrison hadn’t stopped her, I’d already be dead.”

  Harrison stiffened. “I didn’t save you for this.” He gestured at the anguish around the room. So many people shouted that Enne could no longer make out their words.

  “Even so, it’s thanks to you that I’m alive,” Bryce told him. “And that I now get to save someone else.”

  Bryce spun the roulette wheel again before Enne could decide what to do.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  “It won’t work,” Harrison warned her, but she didn’t listen. She could break rules, too. She could shoot the wheel, just like she’d shot the timer.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The bullet whizzed through it as though it were made of smoke. It blew a hole in the wooden stage floor, and still the wheel spun.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The peg stopped on the two.

  A dozen more people in the room dropped—one moment standing, the next dead. Those remaining resumed pounding on the ballroom doors, screaming at anyone outside to help them escape.

  “That’s impossible,” Enne murmured, staring at the splintered floor.

  “The Shadow Game wasn’t,” Levi said, and Harrison gave him a weary nod.

  But Enne wasn’t convinced. She’d cheated the Shadow Game, and so she could cheat this, too. She would save these people, like she couldn’t save Jac.

  She trained her gun on Bryce.

  “I’ll shoot you,” she threatened.

  “Just like you shot Owain at the debate?” Bryce said, cocking an eyebrow. “I was there, too. Vianca told me about what you planned, of course. She loved to talk to me about you two. But I knew there was more on your mind than just the riot. And I knew you wouldn’t go through with it.”

  Enne winced. She hadn’t been weak. She’d been right to back down.

  Then Levi’s eyes widened. “You’re the one who fired the shots that day.”

  “Yes, Vianca was furious with me about that. Furious enough to kill me, so it seems.” Bryce gave her body a smug look. “She’d hoped for something more organized, but I don’t know... I think I preferred the chaos.”

  Something about the way he said that last word made Enne shiver.

  Bryce took a menacing stride closer to her and Levi. “You think the whole city revolves around the two of you, but this isn’t your story—it has always been mine. Who do you think sent you that letter?”

  Enne reached for the empty envelope Ha
rvey had given her with confusion. Bryce smiled wickedly, stalked away, and spun the wheel a third time.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Enne fired, her gun aimed at Bryce’s heart.

  Like before, the bullet lodged itself in the floor. Bryce winked at her, unharmed, and Enne nearly dropped the revolver in shock. No matter what she did, this was one game she could not win.

  “What are you?” Levi asked Bryce, though of course, Enne felt they all now knew the answer. In the City of Sin, all of the legends were true.

  “I am the secret of the House of Shadows,” he answered.

  The peg stopped on the nine, and several others in the crowd dropped dead.

  Amid the screams, something in the room shifted in that moment, as though the air had grown sparser, the temperature colder. The strings around them, all at once, pulled taut.

  Bryce let out a triumphant howl of laughter and snapped his fingers. The roulette table vanished, and from where it had stood, hundreds of silver Shadow Cards rained down, sweeping across the stage floor. They were Jonas’s counterfeits—the key props to Levi’s plans for tonight. The Fool.

  Bryce tossed a final card on top of them, and unlike the others, its foil shined gold. It fluttered as it fell and landed face-up. The Magician.

  “There’s a price to keep the devil away,” he murmured, echoing the lines someone else had once uttered to Enne before the Shadow Game. Another villain. Another monster. “Unless you’d prefer they’d come to play.”

  And with those words, Bryce disappeared like a wisp of smoke.

  A

  “My mother was superstitious. Shatz, really. Whenever she got attached to something, she would throw it away. She said that’s how shades find victims—they bind to pieces of you. They need a connection.

  “She told me, ‘Evil isn’t random—that’s what makes it

  the opposite of goodness. Evil is designed.’”

  —A legend of the North Side

  LEVI

  For the first time in his life, Levi lost his faith in destiny.

  The Irons and the other gangs outside had failed. Jonas had been apprehended. Levi himself had nearly died. He’d watched countless others die in front of him, in this ballroom, at the hands of an impossible villain who had disappeared before their very eyes.

  This was not glory.

  This was not greatness.

  He grabbed Enne by the wrist and pulled her toward him. “Down the hallways, past Vianca’s office, through the back entrance,” he hissed, because fleeing was their only option left.

  Enne didn’t move. “We couldn’t save any of them.” Her voice was hoarse, and Levi didn’t like the hopeless look in her eyes as she scanned the dead in the room. It wasn’t a look he recognized on her.

  “No, we couldn’t,” Levi breathed. Bryce being Vianca’s third omerta felt painfully obvious now. He’d run into Bryce for the first time outside of St. Morse after all. And there’d always been a certain spite in Bryce’s voice when he spoke of the donna—the same spite in Levi’s own.

  But he couldn’t dwell on that now. After tonight, the fate of the city dangled by the thinnest of threads.

  The ballots were still being counted.

  One of the candidates was dead.

  The other had openly murdered his mother in public.

  And if Levi and Enne didn’t escape before the whiteboots swarmed this casino, then each of them would face the gallows.

  “Let’s go,” Levi urged, once again pulling Enne forward. Now that Bryce and his power was gone, the guests had burst through the ballroom’s doors and raced for the exits. Harrison had also slipped out and disappeared within the crowd.

  Before he and Enne moved to join them, Levi took one last look at the ballroom. Dozens of bodies littered the floor, discarded like the party favors and the Fool cards. Vianca’s body stared at the violence around her with eyes wide open.

  This had always been her legacy—blood and betrayal.

  Hands linked, the pair made their way through the hall to one of the back exits. It was the same one Levi had fled through after the Shadow Game, when he’d first seen his wanted poster, when the events of this war began.

  Enne pulled at his hand, slowing them down. “Levi, wait.”

  “We don’t have time to wait,” he answered. “We need to get back to Olde Town.”

  “But—”

  They turned the corner, and a puddle of red glistened beside the doors. Levi frowned, but before he could inspect it, Enne twisted him around to face her and her bloodshot eyes. Her hand trembled as she let go of his.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Then tell me,” he snapped. He didn’t mean to sound impatient, but they couldn’t afford this now. They couldn’t slow down. And she was starting to scare him, the way she shrugged him away when he reached for her, the way her gaze remained fixed on the blood.

  “Vianca found out about you and Harrison,” Enne whispered.

  “It’s fine,” Levi assured her hurriedly. “She’s dead.” He was already planning their escape route in his mind. They would find the others. They would barricade themselves in the museum...

  “She told me to... I didn’t want to.” She placed her hand on her forehead to steady herself, and Levi almost didn’t catch her next words through the strain in her voice. “I couldn’t tell you about it. I couldn’t stop it.”

  Amid a thousand horrifying possibilities, Levi’s mind settled on his darkest thought. On the worst-case scenario. The fear felt like a stone on his chest.

  “Jac’s dead,” she choked out. “I killed him.”

  “What?” Levi asked, even though she’d spoken clearly.

  “She...” Enne swallowed. “She ordered me to fix it, to fix us. Then she told me to break your heart.”

  New Reynes was loud with sirens as Levi threw open the back doors and vomited onto the pavement. His mind had gone quiet, numb, but something about that wailing still made him sick.

  Enne apologized, over and over. He didn’t hear her over the sirens. He didn’t hear her at all.

  As they wove through the streets of the Casino District, all Levi’s memories of the past day with Jac seemed meaningless. His heart kept returning to that one day—the day they’d fought. Jac had been right. Levi was selfish, shortsighted, and arrogant. And Levi had willingly taken all of those insults, apologized for them. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Jac was the one who’d taken the bullet.

  Only as St. Morse fell farther behind them did Levi remember that he was finally free of Vianca, free of that casino.

  But as he listened to the sirens, Levi couldn’t believe he’d ever called the ache in his chest destiny. No desire was as precious as what he’d already had.

  * * *

  When they returned to the museum, Tock and Lola were leaning against the hood of Lola’s motorcar. They still wore the same clothes from earlier, but Tock’s skin was covered in soot, her dress torn. Lola clutched her keys in her fist like a weapon. Blood was smeared on her cheek, and she held a leather notebook open in her hand.

  When Levi and Enne approached, equally as worse for wear, Lola choked out a sob, tossed the notebook down, and threw her arms around Enne.

  “We thought you were gone,” she said.

  “Almost,” Enne whispered.

  While the two of them hugged, Levi made his way over to Tock. He felt so exhausted that it was a struggle to stand. Exhausted and nothing else.

  He waited for Tock to perform some sort of grand gesture, to wrap her arms around him and cry as though they all had something to be thankful for.

  “Tell me,” Tock said instead, gently.

  “I can’t. Not here.” His voice shook. He peeked at Enne over his shoulder, and something ached inside him to look at her. All he could see was that pool of blood.

  “Tommy was shot beside me. I couldn’t save him,” Tock murmured. “It was an ambush. Ivory hadn’t brought all the
Doves to the Catacombs, because there were at least another thirty of them waiting for us at St. Morse. It was a massacre. Not just Tommy—we lost Linton, Melika, Anna, and Eric. The Scarhands’ second died. Scavenger is gone. The Spirits made it out without casualties, but several of them were wounded.”

  Levi’s knees shook, and he leaned against the hood of the car for support. He’d intended to end the war tonight.

  But the war would continue on, and with Bryce and Ivory now their enemies, the North Side would turn bloodier than ever before.

  “I mucked up,” Levi choked out. “This was all my plan.” He took a shaky breath and held his fist to his mouth. He knew Tock too well to be ashamed, but still, he looked away as his chest heaved. “I can’t believe...”

  “This isn’t on you,” Tock told him. “We all agreed. You couldn’t have known—”

  “I should’ve known!” There was so much that Levi had ignored. The legends of New Reynes weren’t dreams to aspire to—they were nightmares. He’d adopted what he wanted from those stories and abandoned the pieces that didn’t suit his own ambitions. All this time, he’d tried to convince himself that he was different from the other lords—different means, different ends. But the past few months had proven him to be just as cruel, just as selfish.

  He had chosen this story for himself, knowing all of these stories ended the same way.

  Lola stepped away from Enne. “Where’s Jac? I thought he’d be with you. He went inside St. Morse right before the doors locked.” She fiddled with her watch.

  Levi’s gaze flickered to Enne’s. He didn’t recognize his own voice as he snapped, “Why don’t you tell them?”

  Something passed over Enne’s face, something Levi suspected to be hurt. But as Enne danced around her story, from Vianca’s orders to every moment that led to the hallway, to the puddle of blood, Levi couldn’t listen anymore. It all sounded like an excuse.

  “He’s dead,” he interrupted. “He’s dead. And it’s Vianca’s fault.”

  But it was also his.

  A horrified silence fell over the group—Lola, Levi noticed, looked particularly stricken. But as he turned away and walked back to the museum alone, an insidious thought crept into his mind.