Lords & Thieves: Chapter One
A prequel novella to both ✨Song of the Sidhe✨ and ✨The White City✨
Welcome to The White City.
This episode begins the adventure, intrigue, and romance of the series—make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next installment.
The buzz in her hand did not promise good things.
When had it ever?
Elena glanced down at her phone and sighed. Just as expected, the notification showed the institute’s logo, her full name, and the three little words she loathed more than any other:
STUDENT BILL DUE.
She didn’t need to open it to know what it said.
What she did need to do was find a place to grab some lunch, calm her anxiety—through the roof as it was—and come up with a plan. At the very least, examine her options.
Going home certainly wasn’t one of them.
With a heavy sigh, she glanced around the stretch of neighborhood she’d been wandering around in for the better part of two hours, nursing a mostly empty cup of cold brew and telling herself everything’s okay. Everything’s fine.
Everything is absolutely not going to shit.
The nice thing about Chicago was how, being Number Two in the nation for food, there was no shortage of options of places to eat. Especially here, just a skip north of the Magnificent Mile, where every other brownstone building and historic unit was a Ma-and-Pop establishment featuring food from that family’s particular heritage. Did she feel like Greek? Italian? Korean? Tibetan?
She felt like crying.
Elena Martín felt like curling up in the fetal position and just…sobbing.
Deep breaths. Pull your big girl panties on and get to it.
Just in case she did happen to lose her composure and fracture into a meltdown, she decided it would be best to pick a place with as few customers as possible. Given that it was lunchtime, that was asking for the moon, so she kept walking until she found somewhere—anywhere—that had basically no diners but could still potentially make a decent sandwich.
A hole in the wall. That’s what she needed.
That’s definitely what she felt like crawling into.
The quiet restaurant that fit her requirements wasn’t necessarily a “hole in the wall”, given its central location in a fairly popular street of one of Chicago’s boutique-focused neighborhoods. It was, however, open and operational and almost completely devoid of customers. One of those families-from-overseas types, judging by the title she could not pronounce suspended over the quaint but obviously affordable awning.
No one greeted her when she walked in. Even the bell barely tinkled. But the smells that wafted from the kitchen were good enough to keep her standing there until someone noticed her.
Which…took a few minutes.
Plush red carpet covered every inch of the floor and the bottom third of every wall, interwoven with gold filigree motifs that continued into the woodwork. It was beautiful, if not a bit dated, and reminded Elena of pictures she’d seen of fine dining back in the city’s Golden Age. Art Nouveau, they called it.
Back in the far corner of the dining room sat a small group of men quietly talking amongst themselves, heads bent and bodies hunched over the round table as if there were anyone else around to eavesdrop. None of them turned their heads to look at her. None of them acted like they even clocked her presence.
“Oh!”
Elena snapped her gaze back to the front podium where a startled young man stared wide-eyed at her.
“I-I’m s-so sorry!” He stammered, quickly grabbing a menu from a rather dusty-looking stack. “I didn’t realize anyone else was here. I hope you weren’t waiting long?”
“No, it’s fine.” Elena waved it off with a smile and a soft laugh. “I’ve never been here before so I figured, why not?”
“Right! Why…why not?”
She hid the frown from him until after he ducked out from behind the podium and gestured for her to follow him to a table at the far end of the room. For some reason, the waiter seemed on edge. Like he was scared of her, or scared of his boss, or scared of something. He still managed to offer her a bright smile, though, and pulled a chair out for her.
“Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Water is fine.” Elena shrugged off her sweater and draped it over the back of the chair. “With lemon, please.”
The waiter stared at her for another hesitant moment, practically wringing his hands together. But then he nodded once, quick and silent, and darted off to what she assumed were the kitchen doors.
Weird, but it could have been his first day. Or third.
Or maybe he just wasn’t used to talking to women.
Her phone buzzed again, this time loud enough on the table to earn a quick glance from one of the men in the Corner Booth Conference. He seemed surprisingly younger than she expected, and for a flicker of a second he frowned at her like her mere presence bothered him. If she did bother him—for whatever reason—he didn’t do or say anything about it. Just returned to their quiet conversation and left her alone.
If only the college’s accounting department would do the same.
The text was from Elena’s mother; she sent a quick one back promising to call after lunch.
The notification from her email inbox pinged a reminder as if it knew she was finally on her phone and now had the time to read it in its entirety.
FINAL NOTICE.
That’s all she could read among the formal jargon of financial legal speak.
That, and the number in bright red letters down toward the bottom of the statement: $25,768.82.
She was supposed to enroll in summer classes. The spring semester had only just ended a few weeks ago, and her continued enrollment through the optional summer session ensured her student-based apartment lease would continue well into the new school year.
Financial Aid, however, only went so far.
And just like everyone and everywhere else, the school wanted her money before they allowed her to continue classes.
Or residency.
The glass of ice water appeared out of nowhere, perfectly garnished with a twisted slice of lemon and a spring of fresh mint. Elena blinked, then realized that no, it didn’t actually appear out of nowhere—she was just that distracted by her own poverty and looming homelessness to notice the waiter’s return. “Um, thank you,” she muttered as her cheeks warmed.
He seemed a bit more at ease. At least his smile felt more genuine this time. “Of course. Can I get you anything else?”
“Oh. Um…” She hadn’t even glanced at the menu. “What do you recommend? I don’t know if I’ve ever tried any of this before, so…”
That smile quickly spread into a grin. “Well, if you’re asking for my personal opinion?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then you must start with the borscht. It’s a house special. Baba Y—”
“Liev!”
One of the Corner Booth men abruptly lifted his gaze, locked in on the waiter, and beckoned him over.
Liev glanced between the man and Elena a few times, his fingers doing that wringing thing again as he shifted his weight between feet. “I, ah…”
The man snapped something else in a language she didn’t recognize. Liev paled, turned to apologize to her, but she didn’t want him to feel like he needed to. “I’ll take that,” she quickly said with a reassuring smile. “The borscht. Whatever it is.”
“Soup. Perfect. You’ll love it.” And then he was off, practically tripping over himself to attend to the demands of the rude man.
Who kept looking at her.
Come to notice it, so did his friends.
The one in the middle caught her eye. Not that she was staring in the first place, but something just felt…off. Now that she’d made eye contact with whoever he was, the leader of the group or at least the moderator, that feeling sank deeper into her gut.
Along with a few other feelings she did not need to surface.
It was his eyes. Silvery gray, they seemed to glow beneath his furrowed brow as he regarded her with casual interest and slight irritation. The hard lines of his jaw made it difficult to decipher which was more accurate. The firm press of his mouth did nothing to conceal the fact that his lips were kissably—ahem—considerably full compared to what she usually saw on a man. He had no facial hair, but she wondered what it would look like if he ever grew some because his tapered hair was so strikingly white, she couldn’t tell if it was a dye job or simply grew naturally like that.
She could paint him.
She wanted to paint him.
Heat flared in those silver eyes when he realized she was staring at him.
The corner of his mouth twitched up.
Oh, holy night. She felt her heart pound once against her ribcage, hard, and then nothing as a new kind of heat quickly spread across her cheeks.
“Please! Please! I’ll make good, I swear! Let me walk!”
Her reverie was broken by the sudden slam of a door in the far, far back of the restaurant, paired with the sounds of scuffling and a man begging to be let go.
Two burly men in dark shirts and inked from knuckles to chins dragged a much scrawnier man into the dining room like it was a totally normal thing to do. They all but threw him at the feet of the round table where the guests calmly yet quickly moved out of the way to either side of the silvery man.
The unease in Elena’s gut only grew.
“Mr. Avril, so good of you to join us.”
Oh.
Oh. That voice. His voice.
He could read the dictionary and she’d still feel those butterflies going wild in her chest.
The whimpering man they dragged in clawed the table to pull himself up to his feet, limbs shaking but his chin held high. At a nod from their apparent boss, the men who brought him in swiftly shoved a chair under him, knocking the wind out of him when the edge of the table connected with his stomach.
“Did I hear you correctly?” Silver Eyes calmly asked while the man sputtered and wheezed. “You’ll ‘make good’?”
“Yes!” More wheezing. More sputtering.
“And how, exactly, am I supposed to trust you?”
The young waiter silently emerged from the kitchen to bring Elena her borscht. She noticed the way he kept his head and gaze lowered, focused strictly on the floor, her table, then back to the floor. Before she could thank him, he turned on his heels and beelined back into the kitchen.
“I-I-I’ve got a guy! A deal! It’s just gonna take a few days—”
“Sounds familiar. Doesn’t it?” Silver Eyes tilted his head to regard his companions. All of them chuckled and nodded, which made his ever-so-slight smile twist into a wicked sneer. “I believe that was your story last week. Another story last month sounded pretty familiar, too. You, what? Had a contract you were about to sign? A sale about to go down?”
“I mean it this time—”
“This time?”
Silence fell on the group. Elena took a sip of her soup for the sake of at least appearing to be eating and minding her own business, but if her appetite was shaky before, it was long gone now.
Silver Eyes leaned back in the booth. No expression shifted his face one way or another. Which, Elena realized, made him appear even more intimidating.
And hot.
Stop it. This is not the time!
“Ten thousand. That was our original deal.” He tapped a long finger on the tablecloth. “Then times got hard; we all knew that. I knew that. You came to me for another twenty.” Another finger tapped the table. “But see?” Now a third. “That’s thirty thousand.”
“I know, but I—”
“Thirty thousand,” Silver Eyes repeated, “plus seven percent interest. Compound interest. Not accrued.”
Even Elena gulped. She knew those terms from the student loans she took out just to pay for a fraction of her school’s tuition. And just like with student loans, small percentages added up to insurmountable debt the longer it went unpaid.
“Now.” He shifted in his seat to rest his arms on the table. It was a casual gesture probably meant to put everyone at ease, but all it managed to do was make the whimpering guy cower in his chair and Elena wonder if anyone would notice her slipping out the front door.
Because she was not about to become a witness to whatever the hell was about to go down.
Silver Eyes steepled his fingers together as he stared at the man. His soon-to-be victim, no doubt. “I am fairly certain that since you don’t have thirty thousand to pay me back as agreed, you’re a little short on that interest. Am I right?”
The man shakily nodded.
“So what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to maintain order and keep up business if I let men like you walk all over me? Over my generosity?”
Mr. Avril quickly shook his head. “No. No, sir! I am not walking all over you!”
“No?” That smile wasn’t anything other than predatory. “You didn’t just admit, here and now, to my face, that you’ve been lying to me the whole time?”
Shit.
This man was going to die.
This was the mob, this place was a front for the mob, and Elena knew for a fact that she was about to witness a mob-sanctioned murder.
Silver Eyes flicked his gaze over to her. It was so fleeting, she almost missed it, but their eyes met in that brief half-second and despite everything, despite what was going down, she felt her heart do that thumping slamming thing again.
He grunted to himself. Then smirked. “You are very lucky, Mr. Avril. I’m not about to ruin this beautiful lady’s lunch by giving you what you deserve.”
Mr. Avril slumped in his chair with a wheezing sigh of relief.
“Don’t get too comfortable. You are not off the hook.”
The men flanking him didn’t need a signal. In unison, they each stood and formed a tight circle around Mr. Avril, their backs all facing Elena. She couldn’t hear what else was said, but it couldn’t have been anything good because the man in the chair burst into panicked sobs.
She didn’t want to witness anything. She’d already seen too much, heard too much, and was probably the next item on that meeting’s agenda once they dispatched Mr. Avril. But if she appeared preoccupied with her meal? If they turned to grab her next and saw she was just some innocent bystander enjoying a bowl of borscht?
Which—whatever it was—tasted freaking incredible.
The room fell silent again, but it didn’t require her looking up to know it was because the majority of the men left with Mr. Avril in tow. Oddly enough, she didn’t exactly hear them scuffle out like the way they’d come in, but to be fair, she was rather distracted by her own worries.
Which brought an interesting question to mind: what’s worse? Losing her home and ability to finally finish her degree? Or having a mob hit put out on her for being an unwelcome witness?
Elena paused mid-stir of her spoon in the soup.
Wait.
Really…what was worse?
Soul-crushing debt and the constant threat of “what if” from a loan shark?
Or soul-crushing debt and the constant threat of “what if” from the federal government?
He was a loan shark. He had to be. That kind of conversation didn’t happen between bankers and clients, or between friends who went south over a deal gone wrong. Elena had read enough mafia romance novels to get a fairly decent grasp on what was going on here.
Did loan sharks give money to just anyone?
…Did she possess the courage to find out?
The soft tinkling of the front door tugged her out of those dangerous thoughts. Elena blew out a silent prayer of thanks to God for saving her from making what would have probably been the worst decision of her natural life. Clearly, this was a sign from Him to stop, do not pass Go, do not collect any money from that man no matter how sexy he looked.
Or sounded.
She stole another tiny glance his way. Only two of his men remained, and they seemed pretty checked out on their phones from anything he had going on for himself.
Which looked like a new meeting, a different kind of meeting, given the man who strode across the restaurant with an air of confidence that screamed, “Do Not Provoke”. Unlike Mr. Avril, this newcomer stood tall, strong, and unaccompanied, with a tailored suit that must have come from somewhere overseas in one of those high fashion houses because the cut and style wasn’t as familiar to Elena as it probably would have been to the wealthier elite.
And if this man’s presence screamed anything other than that warning, it was the fact that he absolutely came from a status of wealthy elite.
“How’s the soup?”
Elena jumped in her seat. Then blushed, embarrassed at having been caught eavesdropping and staring and being generally nosy by sweet Liev. “It’s delicious! I love it!”
He refilled her water, set down a small basket of what looked to be rye bread with a tiny dish of mascarpone, and did his swift dash back to the kitchen like the room was on fire. She noticed the way he glanced at the now almost-empty corner booth but didn’t stop to check on their waters or food—not that they had any—and seemingly quickened his pace to get out of there.
Yup. Time to wrap this up and get the hell outta here.
The thought made her inwardly groan at the realization that she should have asked for a To-Go bowl or something. Not accept more food intended to keep her there longer.
And it didn’t look like Liev was coming back any time soon.
“You have got to be out of your fucking mind.”
Silver Eyes’ voice cut through the quiet with renewed intensity. When Elena looked over to him, she could see and practically feel the tension between him and the newcomer instantly thicken. Not like earlier, when he expressed impatience and the other man just took whatever was dealt. This time, the man he addressed didn’t even flinch.
An equal. Another one of his kind.
Well…shit.
This episode of Lords & Thieves may be over, but the story continues.
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