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“I’d bet you won’t last twelve months of being married to me before there’s something growing in your belly.”

Their neighbors at the closest table leaned ever so slightly forward, their chins tilted at a level not quite perpendicular to the tavern floor anymore.

The wife-to-be in question, a young one by the pretty luster of her fair skin and the set of her ruby mouth, hid something like a smile behind a quick hand pressed to her mouth.

Red crawled up her cheeks. The whole tavern had heard, surely. “Delen,” she shushed the dashing young man sitting beside her as she squirmed in her seat.

They were young to be married, but there was little doubt in the minds of the tavern patrons that the girl’s family had needed the bride price. There were more than a few in the city who were exchanging daughters for some extra coin after the last increase in taxes from the fae bastards across the boundary line.

The young man’s eyes, gray as a morning in winter, glinted with something shared only between them.

“You’ve barely lasted all our engagement,” he said, apparently not cowed by her attempts at shushing him, “without a little me in you.”

“Delen,” she said louder. Her hand pressed deeper against her mouth, like she could take his words back by smothering her own. A wave of brown hair pressed against her features, hiding the rest of her face from the world.

Delen’s fingers slipped between hers where she had placed her other hand in her lap. “Ana. I love you with my entire heart and soul. I love you more than my life.”

The intimacy of the moment diverted the stares that had been thrown their way. A confession of love between fiancés wasn’t nearly as interesting as the snippet that had preceded it.

The Last Chance was perhaps a bit of a melodramatic name for a tavern, but it was usually anyone’s last chance to drown themselves in fermented starch in the entire city of Irbess. Bordered as it was by the fae-controlled territories west of it, it was any Irbess dweller’s last chance at seeing a friendly face, too.

As the shadows thrown by the hearth in the center of the tavern grew longer, their eavesdroppers grew bored with their drink and how regular the conversation upwind had grown. Soon, they abandoned their mugs and the rings left on the tables by them and headed to their own rooms for finer conversation.

It was only just midnight when the tenor of the engaged couples’ conversation changed. Empty mugs sticky from dried drink sat before them on the table.

“What are you saying?” Her hand, burdened by a modest band of silver indicating their engagement, caught the light of the fireplace’s faltering glow as it flew to her throat.

“Nothing,” Delen snapped. His fingers raked the strands of his combed curls as his eyes cast anywhere but at his beloved. “Just … leave it be, Ana. You’re talking too much again.”

“But—” Ana’s face was red. “You said you don’t want to marry yet. What others were you talking about? Other girls?”

Delen stood, and his chair nearly fell from the force. “I’ve had enough of your nagging already. Tell your da it’s over.”

“But Delen—” Ana’s words ended in a cry when Delen slammed the door of the tavern behind him.

Her hair piled around her where she pressed her face against the wood of the rickety table where they’d sat together. Her shoulders quivered. She was alone with their empty cups and the plates of their picked-clean supper. When her wrist flew from her side to smudge at her wet face, she knocked one of the cups to the floor where the last of its contents dripped, soaking into the floor and joining generations of stains. She smelled of ale.

There were markedly fewer patrons of The Last Chance left to have seen the argument, but there were enough.

After a short while, the man who had been watching her from the start rose and fitted himself where Delen had sat.

By now, the hearth was nearly cooled. The barperson didn’t look up from his work where he sopped sudsy water into the floor, trying in vain to erase another day’s worth of footprints and dirt.

There was no one left to hear the stranger’s murmurings to the girl.

* * *

The girl whose alias was Ana stiffened in her seat ever so slightly when the man’s hand grazed her lap. She wasn’t nearly as drunk as she had let on, so she could very clearly feel his fumbling, yet determined, attempts to get at what was under her dress.

She would relish this next part.

Just get through it.

The man’s eyes were hard and black like beetles. His skin had a sallow cast to it, as if he were always standing underneath the last minutes of torchlight in the streets of Irbess. In this city, the grime caked onto the lanterns’ glass gave the flames an uncomfortable glow at night.

She found that, equally so, the men who wanted to prey upon her were pretty and ugly. This one was not pretty.

It mattered not to her.

She allowed him to lead her upstairs, swaying on her feet when his arms weren’t all over her, which was most of the time. When they stopped before a door, he produced a key.

As soon as the lock clicked back into place, the man turned to her, his fingers groping at the ties holding together the back of her dress.

His chin pressed into her collarbone as he whispered, “You won’t remember any of this come morning, darling. Best to lie down and let me do what he won’t anymore.”

It was then that the bones in his fingers crushed like brittle, dead leaves. She knew with a hard certainty that a bone in his thumb broke as she forced it to bend at an angle that was almost hard to witness.

Almost.

As her hands were occupied behind her back, she kicked him in his manhood. Her hands were like a prison around him. The strings to her dress remained knotted together.

She never let a man touch her without touching him back just as hard.

She forced them both into his room, and he rolled like a barrel to her delight.

“You broke my hand,” he screamed. His good hand was wrapped around his injured one like that would fix it.

Oops. She was supposed to keep them from screaming when she got them inside.

She crouched above him. “You need to be quiet, or there’ll be worse than that,” she threatened.

“You—you little harlot! You did this on purpose,” he yelped much too loud.

The girl smirked. She liked that insult. It was like an old, worn coat. She could don it and cast it aside whenever she wanted.

“Clearly,” she said, her eyes already on the heavy ring hanging off one of his good fingers. “Give me that.” She nodded at it.

The emerald embedded in the metal stared back at her, glimmering in the low light of the room. How nice it would look sitting on her own finger—

Pain raced across her scalp. The foul man under her had clamped his good hand around her hair and was yanking it repeatedly to the ground.

She cursed herself. She’d been careless.

The girl ignored the pain as she slammed her foot into his throat. She should have silenced him before now. His legs thumped against the floor, and she prayed that those on the floor below thought that they were roughhousing for other reasons than to hurt each other.

When the man slumped into an uneasy unconsciousness, she emptied his pockets, saving the ring for last as she slipped it onto her own finger.

Her fingers lingered on his coat. It was sewn doubly thick compared to ones she’d seen before, lined as it was with fleece. It was perhaps the warmest coat she could remember feeling against her skin.

Winter is coming again.

The girl looked down at the fat emerald. Usually, they tried to limit the items they stole that could be traced back to them. Coins were best, but she allowed herself a piece of jewelry or other trinket every now and again. It put a bigger target on them, she knew, but it also raked in the coins.

Clothes would never fetch as much as a ring would, double lined or not.

She remembered the night before, and the chill seeping into their bones as they’d huddled together in their home.

The girl sighed and replaced the ring on the man’s finger before slipping the coat from him. At least the coins amounted to a comforting weight in her pockets.

The girl whose alias had been Ana for the night left the room and the man behind. Buried in the coat’s pockets, her fingers flipped one of the coins over and over as she thought of the meals that she and her partner would eat for the next several nights.

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