My Best Friend Sold Me, So I Went to Poison My Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Friday
At eleven minutes to midnight Pip tells Oren he sold him; Egon offers the last of the paper for one job, a vial for Benedikt Dreyer, and Oren signs.
"I sold you, Oren."
Pip said it to the dressing-room mirror, with a braid half done in his fingers and his eyes on the floor.
It was just before midnight on the last night of Oren's debt.
His bag sat packed by the door, with the coffee tin of tips on top.
Oren turned on the stool and looked at the back of his best friend's head.
"Say that again."
"Egon has your papers. He'll burn them if you do one more thing for him." Pip's voice cracked. "He gave me a name for it. A real one, Oren. A bus ticket and a name."
Oren had known Pip since they were fifteen.
He had held Pip's hair back over a toilet at the Wick Street bus stop, and Pip had split his last sandwich with him in the stairwell the week the club took him.
Six years of that.
"You sold me for a bus ticket," Oren said.
"He said it was one client. A quiet one." Pip finally looked up. His chipped front tooth showed when his mouth shook. "He said you'd be fine."
"And you believed him."
"I wanted to."
The veil patch itched behind Oren's left ear, where it had sat every night for six years.
He picked at the edge of it and stopped.
On the mirror frame, tucked in the glass, was the last card from Room Nine.
It had come with the lemon tart at seven, in the same square block letters as every Friday.
SEE YOU AT 7 WHEREVER YOU LAND.
The seven had a line through it, the way old harbor men wrote them.
He had planned to stand outside the Gilt Room at midnight and think about what that meant.
Now he put the card in his pocket and stood.
The door opened without a knock.
Egon Tarvik did not knock in his own house.
He wore the charcoal suit and the gold ring, and he smiled the polite smile that Oren had watched take apart a hundred omegas.
"Oren. Midnight is a lovely time to finish a thing."
"Then finish it," Oren said. "I've paid. I did the math every night for six years. Ask me what I owe."
"You owe nothing." Egon came in and closed the door with two fingers. "That's the beauty. Your father's note has been paid. Down to the cent."
Pip made a small sound.
Oren kept his face still. It was the only thing he owned that Egon had not taken.
"Then I'm leaving."
"You are. After the favor."
Egon took a photograph from his breast pocket and laid it on the dressing table, face up, in front of Pip's brushes.
A man in a dark suit stood on the steps of a stone building, looking at something outside the frame.
He was tall and broad through the shoulders.
He had a pale scar through his left eyebrow.
"Benedikt Dreyer," Egon said. "Dreyer Shipping. He has been a nuisance to this house for two years, and he is going to be a danger by spring."
"I don't do hits."
"No. You do something far nicer."
From the other pocket Egon took a glass vial no longer than Oren's finger.
It held a clear liquid and was sealed with red wax.
He set it beside the photograph.
"Three drops in anything he drinks. It will look like his heart. Ninety days."
Oren stared at the vial.
His mouth had gone dry in a way six years of clients had never done.
"You want me to kill a man."
"I want you to be a gift." Egon smiled again. "Saturday night at the Customs House ball, I will present you to him, in front of everyone. A man like that cannot refuse a gift in public. He will take you home. You are very good at making men want to take you home."
"And if I say no?"
"Then your father's note stays open, with interest from the day you were eighteen. I would have to find a way for you to pay it."
Oren's hands tightened on his bag.
"My father is dead."
"Debts are not." Egon tilted his head toward Pip. "And Mr. Varga's name is still only a promise."
Pip had his hands over his mouth.
Oren looked at him for a long time.
He thought of the sandwich in the stairwell, and the way Pip's hands shook every time he counted out the rent.
He thought: you don't get to cry on this.
"Where is the paper now?" Oren asked.
"In my safe. Do this, and I will put it in your hand and let you burn it yourself."
"And his name."
Egon inclined his head.
"Within the hour of the news."
Oren picked up the vial.
It was cold and weighed almost nothing.
He turned it so the red wax caught the mirror light, and thought about the six years that had brought him to a room where this was the only door.
Then he took the pen from the dressing table and signed the line Egon held out, because it was the only way to get to the other side of that door.
"Saturday," Egon said. "Wear the green."
He went out.
Pip stayed where he was.
"Oren, I'm so sorry."
"Don't," Oren said, and put the vial in the lining of his bag.
At the door he looked once more at the photograph.
The man in it was a stranger, with a scar through his left eyebrow, and Oren had never seen him in his life.
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