The Mercenary Queen Strikes Back novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Harbor
Duncan is alive. In Port Verrin Astrid takes a gang boss's bar in front of his men, then finds the Swinton crest on her note.
Duncan MacNab pulled her over the side of the boat by the collar of her suit.
He was thinner than she remembered, and greyer.
He was also alive and grinning at her, and she hit him in the arm.
"You were dead," Astrid said. "The warden read your name to me off a list."
"A list with no body behind it. I put my own name there. I always liked a clean exit."
"Where have you been?"
"Six months in a fishing shack on Port Verrin's north pier, eating tinned beans and waiting for you to do something stupid."
He threw a blanket over her shoulders and a thermos into her hands.
"Jumping off the cliff at Devil's Isle counts," he said.
She drank the coffee and said nothing, because he was right.
The boat turned toward the lights of the mainland.
"Interpol took me because someone gave them my location," she said. "Who sold me?"
"I'm still working on that."
"And the note on my dinner tray?"
Duncan went still at the wheel. "What note?"
She pulled the wet paper out of her sleeve and handed it to him.
He read it twice and looked up at her, and he did not say anything for a while.
"You have a mother," he said.
"So the note says."
"And you're going to find her."
"I'm going to find her, and then I'm going to find whoever put me in that cell."
Duncan folded the note and gave it back with a sigh.
"Then you'll want to start by being rich again," he said. "Your accounts are frozen. Interpol took everything."
"Then I'll take it back from someone."
By midnight they were in Port Verrin, in a bar called the Gull.
The bar had been hers once.
She had never put her name on the door, but everyone in the harbor had known whose it was.
Now a big man with a gold tooth sat in her old chair at the back, with six men around him and his boots on the table.
He was laughing at something when she walked in.
He stopped when he saw her.
"Closed," he said.
"I used to own this chair."
The gang boss looked her up and down and laughed again, louder, so his men would join in.
"Little girl, the Queen of Mercenaries ran this whole harbor," he said. "You couldn't carry her boots."
His men laughed with him.
Astrid crossed the floor and stopped in front of the table.
She picked up the knife he had left beside his plate.
"Duncan," she said without turning around. "Lock the door."
"Already done."
The boss stood up, reaching for his gun.
She put the knife through the back of his hand and into the table.
He screamed.
Nobody else in the bar moved.
Six men had guns, and six men watched a nineteen-year-old girl lean on the hilt of the knife.
"Here's how this goes," she said. "My safe is behind that painting. You're going to open it."
"I don't know what you're talking about!"
She turned the knife a quarter turn.
"Behind the painting," he said. "Right side. Four, two, nine, one."
Duncan was already at the wall.
The safe held cash, three passports and a ledger.
Duncan put the cash in a duffel and the passports in his coat.
Astrid pulled the knife out of the boss's hand and wiped it on his shirt.
"Every man in this room knows my face now," she said. "Tell them who I am."
The boss was white and shaking. "You're Cinder," he said. "You're her."
His men put their guns on the table, one by one.
She turned and walked out into the street.
Duncan caught up with her under a lamp, still carrying the duffel.
"You enjoyed that," he said.
"A little."
He spread the wet note flat against the lamp post and held it up to the light.
"There's a watermark in the paper," he said. "A crest. A lion over a tower."
She leaned in and saw it.
"That's the Swinton crest," Duncan said. "The Swintons own half of Zoria City. Everard Swinton is the richest man in the country."
"Why would his paper be in a prison?"
"I don't know." He pulled a folded newspaper out of the duffel. "But the Swintons are holding a gala in three days for their daughter's twenty-second birthday."
He gave her the newspaper.
The front page showed a family on a staircase, a man in a suit and a girl in a pale dress.
Between them stood a woman with silver-blonde hair and pale eyes.
Astrid held the paper under the lamp for a long time.
The woman had her face.
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