“BEFORE WE CAN return you to Tryst,” Eva said, “you and I need to come to an understanding.”
Kes looked at the woman who had become her friend over these past many weeks. “What do you mean?” she asked guardedly.
“I need you to do something for me and for your House. And yourself, actually.”
Kes looked from Eva, who sat at the small table in her room, to Teo, standing at parade rest behind her. She faced them, crossing her arms over the chest of the blue medtech smock that she wore. “That sounds odd,” she said. Her throat was still mildly sore, and her voice rasped more than usual. She wished for a drink, but if Eva was up to something …
“Why don’t you sit.” The Arcolo gestured to a chair. “Let’s talk.”
Kes hesitated. She fetched herself a bulb of water first, then sat across from the security officer. “What is it you’re after?” she asked.
Eva gave her an appraising look. “When you first came here, I told you that you entertain a client who threatens imperial interests.”
“The ‘undesirable’ my House has committed to help you with. Yes.”
“Your client is named Janus.” Her next words were matter-of-fact. “I want you to kill him the next time you have a session with him.”
Kes’s fingers tightened on the water bulb. Kill Janus? Was Eva delusional? But she said it with cool assurance, as if she proposed such a thing every day of the week. There were so many retorts to choose from. Kes hesitated before stating the obvious. “Shigasu don’t kill their clients. I’m not an assassin.”
“You will be performing a service for the Emperor, on the authority of Political Division.”
Kes shook her head. “I don’t work for PolitDiv. And it’s bad for business. Janus is a good client. An ideal client.”
“An ideal criminal, you mean. He is singlehandedly responsible for thousands of deaths, injuries, lost businesses, and slides into poverty in this last year alone. Did you know that?”
Kes refused to rise to the bait. “We don’t inquire about our clients’ business dealings.”
“Business dealings?” Eva barked a laugh. “You might call it that. I call it organized crime. He steals and sells contraband, smuggles, runs guns, drugs, protection rackets—whatever turns a profit. It’s not a clean-handed business, Kes. People are pushed into criminal undertakings, put out of business or co-opted into his own, or killed along the way. His cartel began as a gang of assassins. Their callous disregard for humanity remains.”
Kes took that in. This was not a complete surprise; there were telltale derevin signs about Janus, and she knew how some of those people operated from her time with the Icechromers. Yet neither she nor any shigasa could afford to pay too-close attention to what their widely varied clientele did for a living. It might matter sometimes in intelligence learned in pillow talk, but it didn’t matter when they walked in the door looking for entertainment.
Besides, there was a great deal at stake for the shigasue house, obligated to be gracious host and safe haven from the outside world. “Any injury that comes to him would harm Palumara House,” she said automatically, deflecting Eva’s litany of ill-doing. “Does the Eosan know what you intend? Our reputation alone—”
“Eosan Bejmet understands the necessity for this. She agreed to lend you to this task.”
“She’s agreed to have a client killed on Palumara premises?” Disbelief tinged her voice.
“She’s agreed to help me in any way I ask,” Eva replied. “Any way.”
Kes considered that. “If you want him out of the way,” she challenged, “why don’t you just have him killed by your people? Why should I be part of this?”
Eva smiled coldly. “As it happens, we cannot be seen to have anything to do with this. Not even an anonymous assassination will serve. The reason for his death needs to be verifiably personal, something between him and whomever kills him.”
The domina shrugged. “You’re talking to the wrong woman. I have nothing against the man.”
“Not even against the man behind the Icechromers?”
Kes felt gut-punched. She couldn’t speak.
Eva did instead. “Do you know who Gistano takes his orders from? That would be Janus. Without him, there’d be no Icechromers, with their one-hundred-thousand-cred coolsuits and their long-term leases in the Shelieno for sex resorts. Do you have any idea what it takes to set that up and keep it going through slow seasons? Gistano doesn’t finance it all through the loan shark business. That’s just a front for predatory business acquisitions. His lieutenant Franc identifies the targets, and Gistano collects them for his joyhouse hobby. And all this fun and games is made possible through Janus’s backing.”
Kes felt a flood of wetness gushing over her hand and dropped the squeeze-bulb of water like it was a hot rock. She pushed back from the table and stood.
“Everything they’ve done—your father’s murder—”
“Murder?” she gasped.
“You didn’t really think his death was suicide or an accident, did you? They rigged his car, to get him out of the way of their acquisition of Hinano Limited. That, your personal ruination, your debt-slavery—all of that came courtesy of Janus’s lapdogs. Do you really think a derevin like the Icechromers operates without their higher-ups knowing what’s going on? Down to the cred chip? I think Janus picked you out on purpose because you used to be one of his joygirls.”
A riptide of emotion held Kes in its grip. One of his joygirls. The bitter words echoed in her head.
“He needs to die.”
The words were Eva’s, the thought Kes’s. She should feel repulsed by the idea. Instead, she thought of how incredibly vulnerable Janus made himself to her, all the ways he could perish in a session, destroyed at the climax of a scene gone deliciously, brutally wrong. If she had ever needed an excuse to take a scene too far, she had one now.
Her pulse raced as bloodlust came out of nowhere and left her breathless with sexual tension. She felt the predator within stir, a voice that whispered, What if.…?
It left her shaken to her core. Warring with herself, she hedged nervously. “Palumara House would lose face,” she said, “if a client died on-site.”
“The public doesn’t need to know the details. And clients die now and then in the Enclave. You know that.”
“Heart attacks,” she thought out loud. “Bondage accidents. Breath play. Asphyxiation…”
“Nothing will change for you, and Eosan Bejmet will be happy to retain your services into the future.”
“I would want to own my contract,” Kes threw out. “Have my debt dissolved.”
“Done.”
She froze, eyes locked with Eva’s.
“I told you once that you would be enhanced in certain ways during your stay here,” the officer said. “Your inhibitions have been, shall we say, taken down a notch. I think you will find that execution of a criminal is not beyond your grasp. It’s revenge you deserve. And I rather think you’ll enjoy it.”
Kes remembered ripping the tall guard’s face open, and knew in that moment that she would rather have taken his eye, and then his entrails.
She remembered the last time she’d flogged a client, the nice thuddy massage that bulky Hethbert loved, and knew that she would rather see him flayed and unconscious at her feet.
Knew that the next time Helda said the wrong thing to her, she would just as soon rip her throat out and spatter the walls with her blood as talk to her.
Her fists clenched, nails digging into her palms, cat-claws flexing involuntarily to prick her as well.
Eva prodded. “Everything you lost, everything you’ve been through—it’s all because of Janus.”
Kes felt the blood thundering through her veins, a pulse pounding so loudly she could hear it in her inner ear.
“Think how it would feel,” Ilanya purred, “to destroy him in any way you like and to do so with impunity. Bejmet and I will protect you. If you need or want out afterward, I’ll help you get out.”
Kes locked eyes with her again.
“After all,” Eva said softly, “I’m only asking you to do as your nature invites you to.”
Eva’s cold gaze pierced her; the predator within rose to the challenge of the direct stare and broke the surface with a snarl.
She curled her lip and growled her reflexive answer.
“Yes.”