Chapter 4 · The Broker's Knock

The claw machine's glass was cold through my shirt. He was not.

Forty-seven minutes. I had done the job in thirty and the clock had not stopped; it had only changed what it was counting. Behind the prize counter Milo breathed, in and out, with nobody home behind his eyes. The card that had found a god sat in Silas's coat pocket, and I could feel it through two layers of wool like a second heartbeat laid against mine.

"Choose," Silas said again. His mouth was at my jaw. His hips had not moved. He was holding himself right there, at the edge of me, with the kind of patience that is only ever a countdown.

Help him cut it out. Or let him carve it out of me. Those were the cards. A Dealer knows a rigged deck when he's holding one, and I was holding one, and my hands were shaking anyway.

"Silas -"

It wasn't an answer. It wasn't anything. The mark on my wrist went from ice to white heat, his thumb pressed into the hollow of my throat, and I understood that the question had been a courtesy.

He didn't wait for me to choose.