Chapter 19 – A Smoking Gun

The Cellar’s lounge was an exercise in contradictions. It had the hushed, velvet intimacy of a royal sitting room, and it shared a wall with a pit where men beat each other unconscious for copper pennies. The air was scrubbed clean of the blood and sweat that saturated the lower levels, replaced by aged mahogany, cigar smoke, and the particular scentlessness of real money.

Eliza sat in a high-backed leather booth tucked into a shadowed alcove, a fresh glass of crimson wine resting in her gloved hand. She was humming, a soft, discordant little tune, her head swaying to a rhythm only she could hear. A woman enjoying her evening.

Across the candlelit table, William was coming apart at the seams. He perched on the edge of the plush bench with the rigid posture of a man sitting for a portrait he hadn’t agreed to, his eyes cutting toward the entrance of the lounge every few seconds. The rented tuxedo was half a size too large in the shoulders and appeared to be engaged in a slow, deliberate campaign to strangle him at the collar.

“You’re doing it again, Boxer,” Eliza murmured, taking a slow sip. “Sit still. You look like something small and edible.”

“With all due respect, Sheltie,” William whispered, leaning across the table, “we are surrounded by things that eat small edible things. And they are all looking at us.”

He wasn’t wrong. The lounge was sparsely populated, its remaining patrons mostly high-rollers licking their wounds after the disaster in the Level 3 pit. Eliza’s stunt had cost the collective patronage of this room a small fortune in dead wagers. The atmosphere expressed this through the medium of sustained, venomous eye contact. A woman in emeralds hadn’t blinked in what felt like two minutes. A large man with a gold tooth was gripping his tumbler the way one grips a weapon one hasn’t yet decided to use.

“Let them look,” Eliza dismissed, swirling the wine. “They’re mourning their wallets, not their honour. And you know the rules as well as I do.”

“No fighting in the lounge,” William recited. “Neutral ground. I know.”

“The Cellar values its upholstery far too much to permit a brawl in here. If anyone draws a weapon or starts building a lattice, the Floor Managers will reduce them to a stain before they finish the syllable. We are perfectly safe.”

“Safe,” William repeated, in the tone of a man being told the bridge will probably hold. He checked his pocket watch, snapped the lid shut, and checked it again. “Are you sure she’s coming?”

A pause. Then, quieter: “After what you did to her?”

Eliza held the wine glass up to the light, inspecting the sediment with academic interest. “I don’t know.”

William choked. It was not a dignified sound. He coughed into his fist, pounded his sternum, and drew fresh glares from three adjacent tables.

“You don’t know?” he managed, staring at her. “You terrorised that girl. You forfeited a match in front of a thousand people, painted a target the size of a barn door on our backs, and you cannot guarantee the girl is going to walk through that door?”

“I cannot force her, Boxer. We are outside the Empire’s jurisdiction. I have no badge here, no authority to compel a witness. If she takes her winnings and disappears, I can hardly chase her through a pocket dimension by her collar.”

William’s eyebrow twitched. “You can’t force her,” he repeated, each word landing like a coin being placed on a counter. “Sheltie. Twenty minutes ago, you trapped her in a cage of solidified air. You physically turned her head to make her nod. You weren’t exactly soliciting voluntary cooperation.”

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Eliza considered this. The porcelain mask tilted a degree to the left.

“Fair point,” she conceded. “I may have gotten a touch theatrical.”

“Theatrical.”

“I might have had a bit too much wine before I decided to jump in the ring,” Eliza added, lifting the glass in mild acknowledgement. “The atmosphere down here is infectious. One gets swept up.”

“You got swept up,” William said, in the flat voice of a man cataloguing evidence for a future inquest into his own sanity. He slumped back against the booth and dragged a hand down his face. “This is my first assignment with you. How does Senior Inspector Bannerman manage this?”

“He complains less.” Eliza took another sip. “Also, he’s boring.”

William didn’t rise to it. He smoothed the tablecloth beneath his fingers—he’d been creasing it into a precise accordion fold without noticing—and when he spoke again, the nervousness had been pushed to one side. Not gone, but managed. Shelved.