Hardy and Ladon - Chapter 7 excerpt

[justamobster]

Hardy had already helped himself to a double of Ladon’s best malt whisky. Unlike Frid, who was polite to a fault and had to be gently bullied into partaking, Hardison Limael took first and never asked for forgiveness. Instead, he lounged—lounged, as if he were made of silk rather than marble—in the chair behind Ladon’s desk, absently paging through the ledger. He wasn’t reading; he was hunting. Searching for any digit out of place he could tuck into his pocket and resurrect later as an inconvenient question.

But he had no questions about the Apple’s accounts when Ladon entered. Instead, he lifted the leatherbound notebook in a lazy arc toward the wall, indicating the stack of personal effects lined up neatly against it. “I see you found Lou’s shoes. Looks like his luck gave out.”

“You’re in my seat,” Ladon said. He didn’t bother removing his coat or hat. Around his own people he wore ease like a second skin, but Hardison Limael was another creature entirely. Comfort was vulnerability. Confidence was something Hardy could see through the way moonlight cut straight through glass. The cold, callous act Ladon used on intruders worked wonders elsewhere—but Hardy always behaved like the Apple belonged to him by ancestral right. In some ways, it did.

Hardy smiled, fangs bright and immaculate, and offered an insincere apology before surrendering the chair. The motion was fluid and mocking—theatric, even. This exchange was ritual by now, and Ladon knew it wasn’t because the chair was particularly comfortable. It was simply another of Hardy’s power plays, his instinctive ability to pour himself into any vacuum of authority the moment it appeared.

He wore his customary stark grays and whites. Moving through Ladon’s warm, lamplit office, he looked like a ghost drifting across a parlor he had no business haunting. His pallor was unsettling enough by moonlight; that it retained its edge beneath the midday glow leaking through the blinds was somehow worse.

“What do you want, Hardy?”

“I’m checking in on you.” He slid into the chair opposite the desk with glacial ease, as though he’d simply melted into it. “That’s what friends do, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“We ain’t friends,” Ladon said as he reclaimed his rightful place behind the desk. He folded his hands, elbows braced on the polished wood like a barricade. “We’re business partners.”

“Checking in on the business, then,” Hardy sighed, punctuating it with an exaggerated eyeroll. “I heard it was a busy night and an even more fraught morning. Conrit’s started with the troublemaking earlier than you expected, I see.”

“Who told you—” The question leapt out before Ladon could strangle it. Hardy only smirked, the expression thin as a razor. Of course. Hardy never asked. Hardy collected. Hardy took. “Stop headgamin’ my staff. You stay out of their brains, yeah? Whatever you wanna know, you get through me.”

“You’re so territorial. Though I suppose that’s healthy for a dragon.” Hardy tipped his head back against the chair, and only then did Ladon notice the black umbrella hooked elegantly over his arm—ever-present, ever ominous. “Is that permission to see what was so interesting about Avalon Lea’s penthouse last night firsthand? That would make this go much quicker.”

“No,” Ladon said, firm, with none of the human softness Hardy loved to needle him for. “Permission never fuckin’ granted, Hardy. We do this like adults.”

Hardison watched him in stillness, those pale, milky-blue eyes like clouded scrying stones, unreadable. Then he raised the whisky to his lips again, the gesture leisurely, dismissive. “If you insist.”

“What do you wanna know?”

“Exactly what I said. Avalon Lea is dead, the whole city knows it, and Joe’s interested in the fallout. Morbid pun intended.”

“Ha ha,” Ladon deadpanned.

Hardy sat back, savoring his drink and waiting for Ladon to continue. Two could play that game. Ladon took his own time, digging a fresh cigarette from the tin in his pocket and sparking it with a tiny crackle of lightning from his fingertips. While he puzzled over the safest half-truths to offer, he kept his eyes trained on Hardy, alert for any psychic fingers trying to pick the lock of his mind.

“Sea water.”

“Come again?”

Ladon shrugged, letting the first drag curl lazily from his nostrils. “Her penthouse was flooded, but none of the taps were on, yeah? Turns out it was sea water. Algae and everything.”

Hardy said nothing, though the vampire had a tell—he worried his thumb with the tips of his fingers whenever he was thinking. That small, impatient fret was the closest Hardy Limael ever came to fidgeting.

“What else?”

“Not much,” Ladon lied. He wasn’t telling Hardy about the mirror. But Hardy saw through him in ways Ladon hated—some change in his posture gave him away. The vampire’s glance shifted, cool as a blade being angled to catch the light.

“Joe’s not going to be satisfied with just that, Ladon.”

“She had a Talent,” Ladon offered, watching as the menace melted way from Hardy’s face. “Saw it on her dead body.”

“That’s more interesting. An unregistered Talented parading about on the radio waves?” Hardy chuckled, swirling the whisky. “The commission must’ve been pissing themselves.”

That made him snicker. Ladon felt his guard slip, just a little. “Yeah. Can you imagine? Dame’s on the radio talkin’ about God and Arthur. Not even under their noses—right in their fuckin’ faces. And they can’t do nothin’.”

“Sounds familiar.” Even beneath Hardy Limael’s inscrutable veneer, Ladon caught a flicker of nostalgia. “Conrit ever find one of your wanted posters? I told him I’d give him a hundred lise for one.”

“You asshole.” Despite the sore spot Conrit’s behavior currently was, Ladon couldn’t help a snort. Of course Hardy would try to bribe his kid brother into finding his old mug shot and criminal allegations from Garevia. He could almost remember the litany of charges written underneath one of the worst photographs he’d ever taken. Robbery and attempted robbery, grand theft, larceny, so much more. “Surprised you didn’t ask for your own.”

“I did,” Hardy admitted. “Offered him two hundred for that.”

And there it was—the laugh. Hardison joined in. For a brief, weightless moment, Ladon felt like the carefree idiot he’d been in his twenties. This was what it was like back at the beginning, when they’d first started knocking over small banks outside of Garevia. Before things got complicated. Before they fled for Nieve. Before—

Before he’d asked Hardy for exactly what Guivres now wanted.

“Hey.” Ladon leaned back, letting the chair groan under him. “I need a promise outta you.”

Hardy looked up. And just like that, the ice was back—his face smoothing into that pale, impenetrable mask, the lively spark of his cellmate from long ago snuffed out once more. “If I can.”

“Don’t take anything outta Guivres’s head,” Ladon said. “He saw somethin’ he don’t wanna remember. But he’s gotta learn from it. He’s gotta grow.”

Hardy tipped his head. “That’s a little hypocritical, don’t you think?”

Ladon bristled, but pushed the tension out in a smoke-heavy sigh. “It’s different. If he’s gonna live here, he needs a tougher hide. The kid’s soft. If he wanted to stay soft somewhere else, that’d be different. But this city’ll eat him alive.”

“That’s not untrue. But I could make it easier on him.”

“No,” Ladon said. “I mean it, Hardy. Don’t.”

“And if he winds up like you did?” Hardy leaned in, setting his empty glass on the desk with a deliberate, echoing tap. “Weeks of never sleeping? Hell, I don’t think I saw you eat or drink anything that didn’t have an ABV for almost a year. All of us thought you were going to off yourself, by accident or on purpose. You were a mess, even more than normal. There was nothing wrong with needing my help, Ladon.”

Yes there was. There had been everything wrong with it; it had gutted the friendship they’d briefly slipped back into just moments ago. Twisted it. Poisoned it. Made them… this. All because he couldn’t get his shit together.

“You’re no use to anyone when you’re self-destructing.” Hardy rose from his chair, and Ladon’s hackles went up with him.

“You ain’t tellin’ me nothin’ I don’t already know.” The growl in Ladon’s chest came without asking, low and warning.

Hardy didn’t step back. He just watched him, letting the sound roll through the room like distant thunder. If it stung—hearing an old friend’s instincts react to his proximity as a threat—he gave no sign. “That wasn’t a criticism. Just the truth of the matter.”

“Yeah? I’ll take that into consideration.”

Ladon searched Hardy’s pale gaze for something—anger, pity, anything—but it stayed inscrutable, a shuttered window in a storm.

“What was her Talent?”

“Don’t know.” Ladon slid seamlessly back into lying-by-omission. “I’ll tell you soon as I figure it out.”

“Fine.” Hardy tossed the umbrella up and caught it mid-shaft, then used the hooked end to retrieve the white fedora from Ladon’s hat rack, easy and elegant. “I won’t touch Guivres, but I can’t say the same for my girls.”

“Keep them off him, Hardy.” Ladon pointed with his cigarette, posturing as much as he dared. “Pull those damn strings, puppet master. Or one of your skirts is gonna wind up with a mouthful of butane. And the kid’s gotten real good at givin’ ’em a light, yeah?”

Hardy turned and glared. The two locked eyes, that growl still vibrating in Ladon’s chest.

“Down, dragon,” Hardy said.

And Ladon’s grumble stuttered—cut off as surely as if Hardy had severed a wire inside him.

“Fuck you,” Ladon spat, but Hardison Limael had already slipped out the door, cold as a shadow cast by a tombstone.