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“We all have our secrets or the world would be out of currency.
“Vengeance,” corrected Arthie. “I have no interest in chaos.”
Secrets were meant to ferment; they aged well. The longer they sat, the higher their value.
She liked her men a little afraid of her.
She almost felt sorry for him, until he looked up at her and winked slowly, with vanity. “Every good love story starts with a bullet to the heart.”
After all, fear became hate when it festered long enough.
She was, simply put, a tempest in a bottle, tiny and simmering and ready to obliterate. White Roaring had whittled her sharp as a blade and her wits just the same.
“Nothing beats a good spiced pekoe.” If Arthie was a tea, that was what she would be. It was brewed with care and steeped with just the right amount of spices that brought out earthy, smoky undertones as the leaves unfolded. It demanded perfection, conferred the best, and punished anything that wasn’t with downright bitterness.
“One gets a taste for blood when you have to lick your own wounds, you see.”
It was hard to believe in fairy tales when she’d lived a nightmare, and it just so happened that legends were good for business.
Arthie wasn’t like Jin, whose parents had done the immigrating for him, softening the thorns beneath his shoes and blunting the daggers that came with being different.
She didn’t carry a weapon so much as her defiance—and weren’t they one and the same?
She wasn’t like him. She didn’t go around breaking hearts; she broke other things, like laws and contracts and bones.
“Oh, but I hear that in a fortnight Spindrift will be brought to the ground and your cargo blown back to the sea,” he said, unaffected by the barrel pointing at his chest. “We’ll have ourselves a tempest of tea on the horizon.”
“And what’s our profession, exactly?” “Professional criminals, of course,” she said matter-of-factly.
“As if you’ll stay in your grave like a proper dead girl.”
My little spark.
She was a woman in a man’s world, where every slight was a sledgehammer,
mortui vivos docent. The dead teach the living.
Ignorance had always been a defining feature of the privileged.
Arthie Casimir was a maestro commanding the room. A queen at her throne. The hangman at the gallows.
“Waiting on you, habibti,” he called as she started down the stairs. She didn’t know what that meant and didn’t want to ask. It was likely an insult. He stood up, and the sun cast his eyes in honey and spice. “Where to?”
“From a kingdom hewn of desert and strength, sprawling palaces and sparkling mirages. You’re Arawiyan.”
To whittle a man into a blade required stripping away fear and misgivings and apprehension, leaving ample room for pride to bloom.
“Can’t blame me for needing a way to work with something so bitter.” “Can’t make a choice without meeting its consequence.”
And yet, there was something to be said about a girl who knew everything about everyone and a boy more mysterious than the moon.
“Hello, criminal,” he said, stepping behind her. “Teach me, saint,” she replied.
“No one has to know what will happen when I put you in handcuffs,” Laith said, voice dropping low.
Loyalty was easily bought in a country that valued profit over all else.
We understand what it’s like to grieve with fire and not tears.
She had always believed there was something beautiful in the way a fire could start from nothing and rise into a beast. It told her that anything was possible. It told her that no matter how dark the world might be, all it needed was a spark.
His smile was the edge of a knife, and she was ready to bleed. He smelled like smoke and wood and spice, a mystery twined with enchantment.
He started to protest before he caught sight of her teasing smirk and laughed, rich and warm, and she latched on to the sound as if it were the sequence to a vault.
“Listen for the bells,” Arthie reminded. “And don’t die,” Jin joked. “That’s the one thing I haven’t mastered,” Matteo said with a dramatic sigh.
“It’s teatime, scoundrels.”
The past had been known to hang a person.
It’s easy to look at the errors of a few and blame an entire kind,”
“Let me bleed for you.”
“When I first set eyes on you with your mauve hair and knife-sharp smiles, I swore you would be a means to an end. When we met for the first time in your office, I realized it would be harder to keep that oath.”
“And then you would use your mouth to cut me down in the most wicked of ways, and I realized I’d met countless men and women but never my mirror.”
“Why save the world when you can have tea?”
No, beautiful wasn’t quite the word to describe her allure. She was cutthroat and deadly, the way a rose appeared entirely different when you saw its thorns.
It was rare to hear praise for her intellect. It was only ever treated as something that was overgrown to the point of recklessness; she was always told she was too cunning, too corrupt. Never brilliant.
“Family isn’t who we live with but those we would die for.”
She was forged of shrapnel words and gunmetal bones. An enigma wrapped in tailored armor and violet-gray curls.
roohi. If I begin to tell the world how I feel about you, I may never stop, but here is my attempt to be concise: Every day with you is a joy,
Thank you for fueling me with lattes, for reading my words and cherishing them, but most importantly, for showing this jaded soul that true love isn’t a fantasy that only exists in books.
