Chapter 676 The Blade

• Maeve
• I chew my lower lip as Soren’s eyes scan mine. He turns away, pacing to the far side of the room, and leans against the wall.
• “I told her to get fucked, but a few days later, while I rotted in a holding cell deep beneath her lair, she’d sent her people to fetch Patton from Moonrise. She used him against me, threatening to kill him if I didn’t do her bidding. She put my brother's debt on my shoulders–a sum no one should have ever been able to pay off. I knew she’d kill Patton without hesitation so I… I gave in. I’d been trapped for several weeks at that point. Patton told me my trainers and comrades in the Ghosts thought I’d just walked out, changed my mind, and they moved on like I’d never existed. I started to think Tom was right. There wasn’t a place in the world for people like us, so I leaned in. I started as a thief, a pickpocket. I was good at it, kept getting better at it, all while she held Patton over my head. When I started doing bigger gigs on my own, outside of her command, to pay down my brother’s debt, she used Patton to keep me glued to her, telling me the debt had doubled because of Patton’s needs, his housing in her den, food, clothes. It didn’t matter. I was falling fast, drinking up the same darkness that took my brother’s life. I did bigger, and bigger, jobs. I worked fast and clean. I got the attention of Hannibal, a man I’d never met but apparently called all the shots, and just when I’d managed to pay off my brother’s debt, I turned twenty-one. All of the sudden I was… a liability again.” His eyes hold mine in the growing darkness as the storm rages. “During those years as a thief, she put Patton to work. His skillset was different from mine. She used his charm, grace, and good looks, turning him into a whore, a piece of meat she could dangle in front of people she wanted something from, or that Hannibal wanted something from, and Patton was dutiful because he knew if he ever said no, or refused, the Viper would punish me and vice versa.”