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The storm rolled over from the docks late that afternoon and came down on the Barrel like it had been personally slighted by the foggy streets. Within minutes the cobbles have become slick and tricky, and the streets emptied out in the pleasure houses and factories and bars that lined them. The skies turned dark in the day, and there was an overall air of waiting. Waiting for the storm to end, waiting for whatever unlucky sod got caught alone in an alley with their vision stolen by the sheets of rain. Bodies dropped like flies in the storms, and the next day was sure to be filled with blood-soaked puddles and wailing children.
The Crow Club on the other hand was lit up warm and musty, perfume hanging heavy in the air as the servers sauntered past tables. The rain outside kept the patrons in but came with the unfortunate side effect of keeping all but the most drunk of gamblers out. The bright glow of the pleasure houses dominated the Barrel at this time, though the afternoon had barely passed by. The dark skies, the cold wind and the biting adrenaline of sneaking through the rain-soaked streets always had men with money in their pockets after an evening of deceit.
Dray had been settled into the Crow Club for the past half hour or so, and his arrival was heralded with a drunken chorus and the overwhelming heat of the lamplit rooms. The tables were sparse but rowdy, and he joined quickly a group of four in the far corner. They had some convoluted game of cards laid out on the table in pairs, and a couple rings in the middle that looked almost expensive. Glasses and mugs already littered the tabletop, and he decline a grumbled invite to join the game in favour of warming his shaking fingers by the lamplight. His coat was soon draped over a nearby banister and his attention was entirely focused on keeping it in his sight as the winners and losers of the card game slowly devolved into story sharing besides him.
There were far better places to hole up in the Slat than Kaz Brekker’s club during a heavy storm. Though the place was warm, and the drink good and the bouncer didn’t throw him out on his arse for glancing at him wrong, the main deterrent was of course the owner himself. Dray had only been about the Crow Club a couple times, came into work as a server briefly before trickling out into the small army of pickpockets playing off the naivety of the tourists. His fingers were long, delicate and unbroken and they listened to him like they should. He dove into pockets silently and smiled innocent little smiles to their owners whilst he pried coin and jewellery from them.
Except now, they shook and ached and the rain could damn itself. He’d sooner dive into the canal than loosen a merchant of his change in the roving rain. Not even the lure of a pleasure house could convince a man the shaking fingers in his pockets didn’t belong to some petty criminal.
So now he was here, holed up in a club whilst his body fought off a cold he could not afford to keep, and Kaz Brekker sat at the bar with a stunningly dressed woman, whose cloak was hung on the hooks by the door, and no one dared take a swipe at it.
‘You gonna sit there and thaw all evening, boy?’
Dray breaths out a frustrated sigh and turns to look at the man perched next to him. A frail frazzled looking man with a beard clinging to his chin by its barest strands and eyes set so deep in his skull they disappeared in the flickering shadows.
‘I don’t gamble.’ Dray offers. Which is only a half truth. He gambles his life on the daily, and his landlady would like the say he gambles his rent off to the nearest den which is not a truth at all but is an easier thing to admit than the fact he never makes the rent in the first place.
The man sniffs. ‘You no good?’
‘Never tried.’
‘You’d make a lot with fingers like those.’
Dray suddenly feels the need to shove his fingers deep into a pair of gloves and is rescued from the situation by the server passing the table leaning low and close to the old man and whispering.
Thunder echoes the windowpanes, and Dray glares up at the ceiling. The heavens always seem to open up when the rent is due, and he’s another short payment away from giving in to Carmilla’s suggestions he take a more active role in the Dregs. The urge to pick up the game cards and shuffle them swells in him, and he shoves it back deep into his ribcage. It fits uncomfortable next to his liver, and swells like some infection. Shame flushes his neck, and he excuses himself from the table for the bar.
He gets halfway across the room, when the door flings open from the outside and a figure illuminated by the door lamp breaths heavy on the doorstep.
Dray would have ignored it, would have dismissed it as some kid with a flair for the dramatics and a rude awakening on the horizon, but as the thunder roars and the doorway is soon flooded with mud and blood and rain, Kaz Brekker quirks an eyebrow.
The club goes very suddenly quiet, and Dray is horrified to find he’s stood right in the middle, framed by the door.
Kaz Brekker stand up.
Dray shuffles off to a spare table and sits heavy in the cushion already morning the drink he won’t be getting now. A wind wraps over his forearms, and his fingers go numb with cold. He shoves them in between his thighs in a last-ditch attempt to keep them warm and watches from under his hair as a boy near half the height of the bouncer with wild dark hair plastered to his forehead takes a step into the room and looks right at Dirtyhands.
The woman besides him has stood as well and is already making her way down from the bar to the front room. The bouncer, a giant of a man called Mik who spent the last three shifts Dray’s seen him on taking great pleasure in kicking out unwanted drunks, fights the wind to shut the door once more.
It slams shut with an echoing creak, and the sounds of the storm outside are muted. It leaves the room shrouded in too warm silence, and the easy chatter if the evening as died in favour of this scene.
‘Wylan.’ Brekker announces. His face is frustratingly blank. ‘It’s a little late for a courtesy call.’
Wylan, Wylan Hendriks Brekker’s newest fascination and someone Dray thought would be much larger of a man, looks if nothing else, like he’s just lost a fight with a bathtub. There’s blood on his temple, runny and transparent with the rain, and a bruise is already forming dark on his cheek. He’s not wearing a coat, looks like he ran through the Slat half dressed. His boots are unlaced, and a vest sits crooked on his shirt, an assortment of complicated looking tools haphazardly shoved into all sorts of pockets.
Most of all, he looks beaten. There’s a red ring around his throat, and a wild look to his eyes that Dray recognises from the bathroom mirror. His fingers twitch, and an empty vial drops from limp fingertips and rolls towards Dray’s boots.
The woman crosses the room in a flourish of rustling petticoats and tartans and stands at Wylan Hendrik’s side.
‘You’re injured.’ She states and it sounds disapproving and concerned all at once.
‘I’m fine, Nina.’ Wylan assures, and Dray is entirely unconvinced, as is Brekker evidently, because he pushes a sigh through a too pleasant grin. Wylan’s next words do nothing to reassure anyone. ‘There’s a body in my workshop.’
‘Dead?’ Brekker asks. Like he’s asking for a weather report. A quirk of his brow, and he says far more amused, ‘or is it Jesper’s?’
‘Neither.’ Wylan sniffs. He’s batting Nina away, and she steps back with another rustle of her skirts. Wylan starts towards the bar, and as he passes Dray, he sees the limp that leaks into his gait. ‘Not for lack of trying. A stranger, all tattooed and kinda big.’ He’s breathing hard, pulling in sharp high noises inbetween his breaths that sound like they hurt. ‘Someone’s put a hit out on me.’
There’s a silence then, and Dray gets the awful feeling there’s an inside joke there that’s flying over his head. He knows he should look away, find some empty glass to stare distractedly into. But Wylan Hendriks is a contradiction to his own trade, he’s young and pretty and looks like hell but acts like he’s already been through it. There’s assuredness in his words that Dray would worry from anyone else would get them into trouble. He’d go telling the young pickpockets to keep that attitude to themselves, nothing gets more money than a smile and uncertainty.
Wylan looks like he knows what a smile and a coy look would get him. He also looks like he knows when a confrontation will get him what he wants, and shockingly that’s what he uses to talk to the Bastard of the Barrel.
Dray considers praying for him and his stupidity.
Wylan walks right up to Kaz and stares straight at him, challenging. ‘Kaz, who knows I’m your demo man?’
‘It’s an open secret.’ Kaz answers diplomatically. ‘I don’t go about advertising you, but you don’t make yourself particularly discreet.’
Wylan flails a little, and he steps back hesitantly. Nina comes up behind him, and a hand is on his back reassuringly, and it helps to keep him upright when he sways on the stairs. Wylan waves her off again, but there’s a sharp short nod from Kaz that keeps Nina very stubbornly in her place.
‘You made any enemies fond of strangling recently then?’ Wylan tries again.
Kaz’s brow, previously blank and open and scary disinterested, furrows. Even from his half obscured staring Dray can see the way the Boss’s eyes darken, and suddenly the floor seems very interesting.
The room goes cold. Nina (who Dray can only infer is Nina Zenik and is suddenly very afraid of the situation he’s put himself into) sways back into her previous seat at the bar and watches the two men go seemingly toe to toe. She’s reaching over the bar and the bartender is already gathering up an array of medical supplies and a large half empty bottle of cheap alcohol.
Dray waits for the moment Wylan Hendriks crumbles, and it does not come.
The other patrons pass back into low conversation, pointedly avert their gaze and talk about surface level topics, and Wylan Hendriks challenges their Boss.
‘Are you implying it’s my fault people are out to kill you? May I remind you—'
‘—It wasn’t him.’ There’s a bare hint of panic now, but it’s not toward Brekker. Where the fuck did, they find this kid, and who the fuck is he to go interrupting Brekker. ‘The guy who ambushed me called me the demo man. This has nothing to do with the posters. Besides, he seemed weirdly attached to his murder weapon.’
‘A hit man?’
‘Didn’t search him, but he mentioned he’d be getting paid.’
Brekker’s smirk dies from his lips, and Wylan seems to take that as some comfort, because he rocks back on his heels and purses his lips. He winces. His shirt is soddening and sticks to his skin, and there’s a still blooming stain that encompasses his upper arm like a band. He brushes it gingerly with absent fingers.
‘What tattoos?’
‘What?’
‘You said he had tattoos. Enlighten me.’
‘Big back thing, all scales and clouds or something flouncy like that.’
Kaz shifts, and his voice comes out dangerous, ‘No need to skimp the details.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wylan shoots back, and he doesn’t sound sorry at all, ‘I didn’t get a good look at it, I was a little busy being murdered.’
Brekker’s gaze flicks down to Wylan’s reddening neck, and even in the dim light the pattern of rope is beginning to show through the bruises. It looks sore and irritated, and Dray knows from experience rope burn is a tender thing on the neck.
‘You didn’t kill him?’
‘He’s not gonna wake up happy, but he’s not dead. Probably.’
Brekker’s cane taps against the stairs as he descends them, pushing smoothly past Wylan’s ragged form. He slows, deliberately so it seems, but Dray does often wonder how much of that cane he relies on when the weather gets all cold like this. He aunt used to complain about her joints when the rain got heavy. He wondered out loud once and was swiftly reminded of the trio of bodies that floated up in the canal the day before that had last been seen with Brekker and his sharpshooter.
He's so stuck in his speculation, he just barely keeps in his beating heart when he looks back at the scene through his lashes and finds it blocked by Brekker’s dark suit. Well-worn smart gloves tap impatiently in his eyeline, and he follows the cane up to find Brekker looking down at him. His face is unreadable, dead eyed and dangerous.
‘Dray Smithers?’
‘Aye?’ Dray answers and curses himself for sounding like his pa.
‘You know where the demo warehouse is?’
‘I—yeah. On the corner right, where the tannery used to be?’
‘Good. There’s a body there. Go pick it up.’
There’s a promise of money in that, and a good promise if Wylan’s spluttering in the background is any indication. He’s been corralled into the chair next to Nina Zenik, whose using a handkerchief to dab away at the blood still dribbling down his crown and into the hollow of his cheeks. He’s protesting about the wind and the rain and the fairness of it all, and once again Dray is confused by the boy. Regardless, Brekker’s given him a job, and he’ll be damned if he fucks up a body retrieval.
‘You want it put anywhere boss?’
Brekker stills, and half turns his head towards Wylan. As if inviting him to have the decision. Who is this kid.
Wylan is still frowning, and his hand his hoovering around his collar. There’s burn scars on his knuckles now that Dray looks at him in the bar light, brighter and cooler than the rest of the club. There’s soot on his finger pads too that leave murky prints on his shirt collar. And yet all his fingers are right and straight. They look almost like his own, unbroken and delicate and strange for their profession.
‘You’ll want him alive, if he is. He’s been sent by someone.’
Kaz Brekker smiles and its horrifying as it always is, all teeth and blinding deceit. The smile of a god on a kingdom he intends to abandon. There’s no trust earned with a smile like that, and there’s no doubt it haunts the dreams of many on nights like these.
‘Take him to Nikita.’ Brekker says finally. ‘Let him know I’ll be there in the morning. Make sure he’s comfortable.’
‘Kaz.’ Wylan starts, but there’s a sharp look and he drops whatever argument was on his tongue with the barest hint of an eyeroll.
Dray observes this whole interaction with a detached self-preservation, hoping that if he keeps indifferent to the sheer contradiction that is Wylan Hendricks and the Bastard of the Barrel, he might be able to keep his role in the Dregs without issue. No one likes a gossip, and no one wants to be found in the papers as another body dredged up on the shore.
His jacket is still damp when he puts it on. His gloves are threadbare and sodden and do little to keep the chill that’s settled into his bones back, but he shoves them on and drifts out the door into the storm. Mik gives him a half friendly wave, and its mildly reassuring that he’ll likely be welcomed back without issue now.
He finds the warehouse in the thick downpour, and the door is left open so the water trickles down the wide staircase that winds its way into some kind of makeshift workshop.
He’s not sure what he expects to find, not sure he even really believed Wylan would do enough damage with his delicate fingers and wide doe eyed gaze.
He did not expect to find the prone figure of a man just barely six feet slumped over by the bed. A long length of rope is wound in his fist, and the end is loose and left to drag on the floor. Rope burns decorate his knuckles, likely from the force of pulling the rope tight and back, but they’re nothing to the still simmering burns that mar the man’s left side. Down his cheek and across his nose, snaking over his shoulder and through the fabric of his shirt. He can see the peek of a tattoo at the cuff, and it too is stricken through with splashes of come acid.
The bed is mused, and there’s an entire side of the workbench that’s filled with shattered glass and torn notes. Blood stains the floor, and the corner of a cabinet is dark with what it probably the origins of the demo man’s head injury.
Wylan Hendricks is right. The man is alive, and there’s no one more unfortunate that it’s for than himself. The man groans, signalling he’s gonna have an awful wake up, but a swift kick to the head has him out again, and Dray begins the process of bundling him into a thick coat he took from the storerooms and hoisting him over his shoulder to mimic a drunk. He’s heavy, stocky and strong and even Dray at all his lanky height struggles to haul him up with damp stone steps.
Wylan Hendricks took this man down alone; with no weapon it seems besides the vial of acid he dropped on the Crow Club floor.
Dray considers for the first time, if Kaz Brekker isn’t the only crow to be afraid of in the Barrel.