The curtain dropped. The room held its breath for a second.
Kazan finally leaned back and muttered, "If she bleeds out chasing that run, I want her boots."
"You're not touching her boots," Darian said.
He gave it a moment, then rolled his neck and laid down with a wince. Every joint ached. His jaw still throbbed where the Butcher had rung his bell, and his right shoulder crackled like a bag of bad bones.
Kazan side-eyed Darian and chuckled, brushing a stray strand of golden hair behind his ear. "I call ten."
Darian didn't even open his eyes. "Off my sixty?"
Kazan shrugged, mock-innocent. "Finder's fee on the finder's fee. Let's not pretend she'd have budged without me talking sense. I'm the grease that gets this wheel turning."
Darian side-eyed him. "More like the smoke that makes the wheel think it's on fire."
Kazan just grinned. "And yet, here we are, deal struck, knives packed. You're welcome."
Sefra was already gone, but her scowl lingered in spirit.
Darian sighed. "Fine. Ten."
Kazan grinned and leaned back on one elbow, satisfied.
They all knew the rules. Only thirty percent of any haul went to personal cuts. The rest, seventy percent, went straight into the crew pot: rent, bribes, tools, medical, food when they could afford it, redleaf when Bren got too twitchy to sleep.
So when Darian said sixty-forty, what he really meant was eighteen percent for him, twelve for her. And now, Kazan would skim ten percent off Darian's slice. Hardly a fortune.
But in the Gutters, even a single silver meant something.
Especially when it might come covered in blood.
Darian dozed for a while, just long enough for his body to cool and his ribs to start aching again in that deep, slow way bruises always did once the fire faded. The tower creaked and muttered around him; someone screamed two streets over, but no one ran. Just Varentis singing another verse.
But he moved, because the city didn't wait for anyone, especially not sore boys with a handful of silver and a bruised jaw.
He stretched, rolled his neck again, and crossed the room to where Bren lay sprawled on his pile of rags, tucked into the shadowed corner between two cracked crates.
"Oi," Darian muttered, nudging the tangle of blankets with his boot. "You dead, or just pretending again?"
Bren groaned, eyes crusty and red as he rolled onto his back. He blinked at Darian, then at the ceiling, then at a crack in the wall like it had insulted his lineage.
"Dreamed I was a bishop," he said, voice hoarse. "Then a moth. Then I was marrying a bishop who was also a moth."
Darian gave him a flat look. "You're worse when you sleep. Snap out of it, I need your lizard brain."
Bren grunted and sat up slowly, scratching at his scalp through a mess of matted ginger hair. His redleaf tin lay open beside him, mostly scraped clean.
But his hands were already moving for his satchel, that stained leather thing he clutched like a lifeline, half pillow, half purse, all obsession.
Darian flopped down next to him and grabbed a chunk of rat from the bowl, cold, oily, and tougher now that the fire was gone out. He bit in anyway. The skin squished, the meat chewed like shoe leather, and the salt stung his tongue just enough to feel like flavor.
Bren hunched over his satchel, already scratching numbers onto a slate slab with a sharpened bone pick. His fingers twitched, not from nerves, but from the leaf. He always claimed it "helped the numbers sing."
Most of the time, he wasn't wrong.
"You know," Darian said between bites, "this might be the best rat I've had since the one from Drenn."
"Yeah?" Bren didn't look up. "Drenn rat had three legs and a ring around its tail. Kaz nearly shit blood for two days."
"Still tasted decent."
Darian reached into his coat and pulled out his pit purse. "Here, catch!" As he flung it towards Bren.
Bren caught the purse with surprising accuracy and opened it, letting the winnings fall onto the slate slab. Then he adjusted the satchel strap, tugging it like it was a ritual. "You got four silvers and two coppers, I'm owed five cops for keeping us fed last week."
Darian raised a brow. "You counting that spoiled loaf and the moldy cheese as 'fed'?"
"Kept your ribs from touching."
"Fair enough." Darian remarked.
"Plus," Bren added, wiping the corner of the slate with his thumb, "we still owe Vassik for rent. If Jossa doesn't come back with coin by week's end, we're short two full months..."
"She won't," Darian said, licking grease from his thumb. "Everyone's saying she bolted after that Dock Nine mess."
Bren grunted. "Then her cut folds back in."
He was quick with coin, fast with math, and frighteningly efficient when he wasn't hallucinating lizard kings under the floorboards. Darian had long stopped questioning the system. Whatever mad system of scribbles and charcoal logic Bren ran, it kept them afloat. Barely.
"We're always one fight away from eating boot leather," Bren muttered, adjusting his bag again. "And you keep volunteering to bleed."
"What about the fish run?" Darian asked.
Bren snorted. "Ollo stiffed us again. Claims he paid us in protection."
"Protection from what?"
"The Crime Clans... Yeah, apparently the Clans have such a vested interest in fish guts worth 25 cops..." Bren continued as he rolled his eyes scratching some numbers of the slab.
Darian leaned back against the crate behind him, took another bite of rat, and chewed slowly. "Remind me to slip a piece of shit into the big fuck's window."
Kazan chuckled. Bren made a note. It might've been a joke. Might not have been.
There was a rhythm to how they lived, a kind of desperate arithmetic, measured in bruises and borrowed favors. Bren handled the books, such as they were. Darian bled for coin. Sefra worked angles. Kazan hunted scraps.
"I passed something to Sefra earlier," Darian said, after licking the grease from his fingers. "Ran into a whisper on the way back. Merchant talking to a cloaked runner. Said something about a shipment leaving at dusk. Black gate. Payment on arrival."
That made Bren pause. He turned his head slightly, one brow raised. Not surprised, but calculating. Always calculating.
"She move on it?"
"She's checking it out now. Thought it might tie into something she heard earlier."
"Good." He tapped the slate once. "We need it."
Darian set the rat bone aside in a tin bowl already full of others. "We always need it."
"Yeah," Bren murmured, eyes drifting back to his figures. "But we're starting to need it loudly."
He didn't elaborate. He didn't have to.
The bell at the curtain rattled under three sharp rings, the sound like a hammer to a coffin nail.
Kazan was closest. He shot Darian a look, half-amused, half-annoyed, before yanking the curtain open with a flourish. "Ah, Lord Vassik! Come to bless our humble abode with your radiant presence?"
Vassik filled the doorway, a slab of muscle wrapped in a moth-eaten velvet coat that might've been fine a decade ago. His nose had been broken so many times it zigzagged like a lightning bolt. Behind him loomed two hulking shadows, his 'collectors,' though everyone knew they were just thugs with poor impulse control.
"You're two months behind," Vassik said, voice like gravel in a tin bucket. He didn't step inside. The Gutters stank enough without adding his rotten breath to the mix.
Bren's scratching paused. Darian didn't move from his crate, but his fingers twitched toward the knife at his belt.
Kazan leaned against the doorframe, grinning. "Now, now. We've had a slight delay in cash flow. Temporary setback. Very temporary."
Vassik's eyes, small, black, and glistening like a rat's, flicked past Kazan to Darian. "I don't care if you're bleeding out your ears. My coin's due." He spat on the threshold. "Next week. Full amount. Or I call the Sons."
A beat of silence.
Darian kept his face blank, but his gut tightened. The Sable Sons didn't send polite reminders. They sent fingers in envelopes.
Kazan's grin didn't waver. "The Sons? Really? Those overpriced hacks? Vassik, we're practically family—"
Vassik stepped forward, crowding Kazan back into the room. "Family don't steal the bread off your table." He jabbed a thick finger at the floor. "You freeloaders think you're clever, skimming, dodging, playing your little games. But the Sons? They don't play." His lip curled. "They'll gut you where you stand and hang your ribs up as wind chimes."
Bren coughed, a wet sound. "We'll have it."
Vassik turned his glare on him. "You better." He lingered just long enough to let the threat sink in, then turned on his heel. His thugs followed, one pausing to leer at Kazan.
"Looking forward to it, pretty boy."
Vassik's boots hadn't even cleared the stairwell before Darian pushed off the crate, jaw set. He grabbed the winnings on Bren's slab and put them back into the pouch. It clinked.
Kazan's grin faltered. "Darian wait—"
Darian ignored him, shouldering past to pull the curtain back open. "Vassik!"
The landlord turned, eyebrows raised. His thugs paused, hands drifting toward their cudgels.
Darian lobbed the pouch at him. Vassik caught it on reflex, hefted it, then loosened the drawstring to peer inside. Silver glinted.
"One month's worth," Darian said. "Rest by next week."
Vassik's laugh was a wet, ugly sound. "You idiots really do have money stashed." He tied the pouch to his belt, patting it like a pet. "Should've known better than to trust a gutter rat's word." He leaned in, close enough for Darian to smell the onion-and-gin stink of his breath. "But I'll take your coin and your dignity both. Next week, full amount, or the Sons peel your skin off in strips."
Darian didn't blink. "Get out."
Vassik smirked and left, his thugs' laughter echoing up the stairwell.
Silence.
Then Bren, without looking up from his slate: "Well. Guess you're back to zero."
Kazan whistled. "That was your fight winnings? The whole damn purse?"
Darian flexed his aching hand. "Better than being a wind chime."
Bren tapped his slate. "Debatable." He said it like the words tasted rotten. "And the redleaf's gone by tomorrow."
Kazan flopped onto his back, arms spread. "Ah, the sweet tang of impending doom."
Darian stared at the ceiling. The math was simple: no silver meant no bribes, no food, no extra medicine when the next fight went bad.
But the other math was simpler: alive today. Dead tomorrow.
Kazan spat onto the floorboards. "Sefra's lead has to pay out."
Bren's chuckle was hollow. "Yeah. And rats might learn to sing."
They all knew the math. Rent was overdue. Food was thinning. And Darian's next fight might not end with him walking home.
The city was starting to press in.
And the margins were razor-thin.