The rain came down in sheets that night, not like any honest downpour but like the sky itself had a personal score to settle with every living soul in the godforsaken streets of the Settlement. It hammered the cobblestones, hissed off the corrugated tin roofs of the godowns, and turned the alleys into black rivers that stank of brine, opium smoke, and yesterday's blood.
Valentino Varkis slumped against the wet brick wall, right arm hanging uselessly as a dead fish. The knife had gone in clean just under the shoulder, and now the wound pulsed in time with his heart, hot, wet, and angry. Blood ran down his fingers and mixed with the rain, staining the cuff of what had once been a fifty-guinea Savile Row suit. He pressed the left hand hard against the gash, breath sawing in and out like a rusted hacksaw.
"Bastards," he snarled through clenched teeth. "Draven's gutter rats. They jump a man in his own territory, no warning, no honor. Worthless yellow-bellied curs."
He'd dropped twenty of them before the blade found him, twenty screaming, clumsy fools with their cheap cleavers and their stupid, yapping dogs. Dogs trained to scent Varkis blood, they said. Val spat the blood in his mouth. Let them come. He'd die on his feet before he let some runner from Draven's crew put the final bullet in him.
Footsteps slapped through the rain behind him. Then the baying low, guttural, too clever for street mutts.
"This way! He can't have got far, the dogs have the scent!"
"Quick, you dogs! Drag the Varkis whelp back by his pretty throat before the old man hears!"
Val's lips peeled back in a wolfish grimace. He ripped off the sodden jacket with his good hand, the silk lining tearing like paper, and flung it onto a stack of broken tea crates. The dogs would waste precious minutes on that. He pushed off the wall, legs burning, and lurched toward the faint glow of the market lane ahead. Every step sent fresh fire through his arm, but he kept moving. One more block. One more corner. Then he'd get to a telephone, get word to his father, and watch the whole rotten Draven outfit burn.
Torchlight flared suddenly, half a dozen of them, bobbing like angry fireflies.
"There he is! The pretty boy himself!"
"Catch him! Draven wants him breathing just barely!"
Val snarled and dove into the nearest alley, boots skidding on slick cobbles. He kicked over a pyramid of empty fruit crates; they splintered and rolled, buying him seconds. Behind him came the crash of bodies, the clatter of cheap knives and wooden batons, Rookies. Draven was insulting him, now sending boys with planks instead of proper iron.
The alley narrowed, walls closing in like a coffin. Then, at the far end, twin beams of electric white sliced through the downpour headlamps so bright they bleached the rain silver. A low, sleek shape idled there: a black Cadillac V-16, chrome grinning like a shark's teeth, engine purring soft as a satisfied mistress. Everything the Draven crowd touched had that faint stink of the Concession.
The driver's door opened. A broad-shouldered man in a dripping oilskin held a black umbrella high. Beneath it stepped a woman.
She moved like smoke in a silk qipao, the color of dried blood maroon shot through with faint gold thread that caught the headlight glare. High collar, side slits showing the glint of a garter holster. Jet-black hair swept into an elaborate bun studded with jade and pearl pins that must have cost more than most men earned in a year. Her face sharp as a switchblade, cheekbones high, mouth painted the same murderous red as her dress. Eyes blacker than the river at midnight.
She tilted her head, studying Val the way a bored cat studies a half-dead mouse.
"So this is the great heir of the Varkiss," she drawled, voice low and smooth, laced with that refined Draven accent as if her words were breathing at the end seductively. "Look at you. Bleeding like a stuck pig in the gutter. What a pathetic sight."
Val straightened as best he could, left hand still clamped over the wound, rain streaming down his face like tears he'd never allow himself. His lips curled into something ugly.
"If you've got any sense in that painted head of yours, you'll climb back in that fancy motor and drive away while you still can. My men are already moving. When Varkis hears his son's been touched, there won't be enough of Draven's outfit left to fill a matchbox. Run, sweetheart. Run like the cowards you are."
She laughed almost like a witch before casting a spell, yet it sounded musical, that cut sharper than the knife still lodged somewhere in his shoulder.
"Arrogant to the last breath. How very kind of Varkiss of you." Her gloved hand rose, slow and deliberate. The revolver was small, nickel-plated, but the muzzle looked wide as a tunnel. "Unfortunately for you, I don't run from Varkis trash."
The hammer clicked back with a sound like a coffin nail.
Val's eyes narrowed to slits, blood and rain burning in them. "I'll kill you," he rasped, voice raw with pure, venomous promise. "I'll find you in hell and drag you out just to do it again."
The woman's smile never wavered.
"Big words for a dead man."
She squeezed the trigger.
The shots cracked like thunder in the narrow alley, three fast, merciless cracks that punched into Val's skin and drove him back against the bricks. Pain exploded white-hot behind his eyes. The last thing he saw, before the world folded in on itself, was her face lit by the brief flare of the lighter she flicked open: porcelain skin, crimson lips, and eyes colder than the rain that kept falling, falling, a tattoo running through her collar bone, one he could not make out what it was as his vision got blurry.
Then darkness swallowed everything, and the only sound left was the Cadillac's engine purring contentedly in the downpour.