The Queen of Lies: The Drop, Part I
Story Intro | Content Warnings | Mood Board | Vibey Song Lyrics | Ao3
Contents: lady whump (I mean, sort of), being chased, being threatened, being robbed/mugged
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Word count: 4000 || Approx reading time: 16 mins
The Drop, Part I
Teaser: He snorted, putting his plate beside him. When he folded his arms and met her gaze, Bree watched his face for irritation. “Are you asking me why I’m still here?”
“Fox?”
How long they’d been cooped up in their room, Bree wasn’t quite certain. They sneaked out for fresh air only when they were feeling courageous, and when it was quiet enough outside that no one was around or busy enough that they wouldn’t stand out in a crowd—a risky request of his to which she had eventually capitulated when it became clear that being inside all the time was doing him no favours. It hurt her, she’d realized, to look at his pale skin and jittery limbs, as if his need to be outdoors was more than just a childish request, but a physical necessity.
“Yeah?”
Their eyes met over their plates of food—a pork roast and mashed potatoes drizzled with gravy, and a pile of green sprouts that her companion was pointedly avoiding—she’d retrieved from downstairs, doing her best to avoid the gazes of the other guests who surely burned with curiosity about why she never took her meals in the dining room.
Bree dreaded the answer to her question, and yet it had been goading her for days now. She didn’t think she could stand another minute of not knowing. “There’s something I want to ask you.”
“Okay,” he said, looking relieved to take a break from his vegetables. “Shoot.”
“You came with me,” she said. “And I know you were so hurt at first. But you’ve mostly recovered now, and I…I know you have people out there. They must be wondering. Waiting.” She pushed her potatoes around, her appetite fading quickly. “Why are you… Why didn’t you…”
He snorted, putting his plate beside him. When he folded his arms and met her gaze, Bree watched his face for irritation. “Are you asking me why I’m still here?”
“Well,” Bree said, her face heating, “I suppose I am.”
“Thought you liked having me around?”
“I do!” she said, her pulse quickening. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t start a fight. I just…”
“Just what?”
Oh, she didn’t. She didn’t want to say this. “I thought you’d go looking for them the first chance you got.”
He pointed toward the wanted posters staring at them from a stack on the desk; Bree had been tearing them down as she saw them whenever she went outside. “Aren’t you the one reminding me all the time my face is all over the place?”
“Honestly,” she said, “I really thought you’d just leave the moment you were well enough.”
A quietness took hold of him then, and as she’d known she would, she regretted asking. He tugged at his hair, thinking, and after some time, said, “I don’t know if they’re still here.”
That was not what she’d expected him to say. “What? Why not?” With horror, she watched his jaw grow tight. God, why did she always find the worst things to say? She never should have asked, never should have tried to pry, and now he was angry that she’d reminded him of his loneliness. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I didn’t want to—I wasn’t trying to—”
Frowning, he asked, “What are you apologizing for?”
“I wasn’t trying to upset you,” she said quickly. “Please don’t be upset. I’m sorry. I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have said anything—shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry.”
He answered at first with silence, letting it drag on between them. His head tilted slightly to the side, and that hazel-eyed gaze roamed over her, calm but puzzled.
And sad.
“Bree,” he said. His voice was mournful, heavy with cruel imagination and with memory, as heavy as the metal that had once adorned his wrists. “I’m not him.”
The words hung between them, and Bree found she did not know how to answer, for he was right. It wasn’t Fox who grew so terribly furious with her at the slightest provocation, who was impatient and violent and cruel.
“I know,” she whispered.
“And I’m not mad.”
She nodded, suddenly finding she couldn’t think of a single word to say except, “Okay.”
His throat bobbed as he waited, it seemed, to see if she would say more. When she didn’t, he went on, “At first, I couldn’t. Even if I had wanted to. Leave, I mean. To go find them. But now…” His gaze pointed out the window. “I mean, how long’s it been? Weeks, for sure. They’d have expected me to…” She watched every muscle in his body tighten again. “Crack. Ages ago. So. There’s…there’s no way they’re at…” He paused. “Home.”
Home. Bree knew little about the world from which he’d careened into hers, but she had never imagined that a gang of thieves might have a place they called home. A hideout, maybe. What would Baden call it? A snake pit. A criminals’ lair. A—she almost smiled—fox den.
“Do you have a way to contact them?” Perhaps it was a hopeless, pointless question.
Fox looked away from the window, studying her now as he once had in a cold and filthy prison cell—curious and assessing.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “There is.”
As if he weren’t quite aware that he was doing it, he traced the lines of his tattoo: the roots and the tree, the circle, the letters she had stared at so many times when he wasn’t looking—I.A.
As his fingers moved over the black-ink curves on his arm, his eyes went to hers. “You gotta promise,” he said. “If I tell you…” Bree’s heart pounded, and for a moment, she felt utterly giddy. “You gotta swear you won’t tell anyone. Ever.”
“I won’t,” she breathed. “No one. Ever.”
“Promise?” he asked, holding out his hand.
She extended hers. “I promise.”
***
Flip the coin.
“No, not like that,” he’d said, chuckling at her look of confusion. “Not in the air. As in, turn it over.”
Bree reached out and turned the wooden coin so the side with the letters I.A. were facing upwards and the tree with the ringed roots faced down.
Drop the message.
A short note, written in such atrocious hand, she hadn’t been able to read it.
“What does it say?” she’d asked, watching him blow on the ink and cut a piece of string so he could tie it around a stone to weigh it down.
He’d laughed when she’d confessed she couldn’t read his writing. “Well, I mean, it’s kind of on purpose. Don’t want just anyone reading it, right? But it says I’m alive. And out.” The smile he wore had faltered as he went on. “If they’re still around, they’ll know it’s me. Hopefully.”
“You signed it?”
“No,” he said, rolling his eyes. “J—” Suddenly, he’d stopped. “They know my shitty handwriting. They’ll…they’ll know.”
Bree dropped the messily tied note next to the coin. He’d said there were a few places around the city that Iustitia aecum used for sharing messages and dropping goods, but there were some he thought his friends would be more likely to check than others. After some thought, he’d narrowed it down to two—and after some arguing, they had agreed that he would drop a note in one and she in the other.
“You’re going to get caught,” she’d said, her heart in her throat.
“I’ll be careful,” he’d promised. “I didn’t get busted just walking around. I got ambushed meeting with someone.” His expression had soured. “It was a trap for my…”
She hadn’t been able to get more out of him on that, but he’d seemed to waver somewhat in his conviction to keep his IA secrets from her. It hadn’t escaped her notice, that bitten lip, that pause, that glance over her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She’d chosen not to mention it.
Bree also hadn’t voiced the other concern that beat painfully against her ribcage: that Fox would never return for a different reason—that him being rearrested was not the only thing that might prevent her from ever seeing him again. Perhaps his friends, by chance, would find him dropping the message. Perhaps he would slip away and go to the home he said existed somewhere in the city, and there they would be, delighted to find him alive and whole, and they would welcome him with open arms, and Bree would never lay eyes on him again.
She pushed the thoughts from her mind. If he wanted to find his friends and rejoin them, wasn’t he free to do so? Hadn’t she been the one to ensure he had that freedom?
Get the hell away from there.
The last instruction in Fox’s list of three. Bree glanced around, praying no one had noticed her pause by the sill of a broken window in an abandoned storefront, and then headed back toward the inn. The wind whipped around her, and for the first time, she was grateful for the trousers—better if you don’t look like you, he’d said, and she’d agreed. She had to admit, as much as she missed and preferred her skirt and petticoat, it was nice to not have them tangling around her legs.
God, what if Fox really didn’t come back?
As she hurried through the streets with night falling gently around her, tears struck, so sudden and so sharp, they took her breath away and blurred her vision. Furiously, Bree wiped them from her eyes. What was she crying for? Why on earth should she weep at the thought of never seeing him again? What a fool she was.
Bree took a moment to catch her breath and regain her composure, to force back another slew of silly, girlish tears. She’d set him free. She’d made that choice. What he chose to do with that freedom was up to him.
She stood, watching the evening rush ebb and flow around her, and her eyes fell upon a now-familiar piece of paper fastened to a lamppost up ahead, and her stomach turned. Heavens, but she was so sick of tearing down the posters—his and hers. Terribly sick of the lies splashed across them, terribly sick of the needling feeling ushered in by the sight of them—that awful fear that Baden knew full well she had not been abducted, and that he nurtured his own reasons for telling the world she had.
Heaving a furious sigh, she darted forward and ripped the poster from the pole.
“What—hey—look!”
An affronted cry rang out behind her, but Bree didn’t bother to turn. Whatever had upset that woman, it surely wasn’t her business; she had other problems to worry about.
“That boy’s taking down Breanna’s poster!”
Oh.
Oh, no.
It bowled into her, much too late now, that it was not the voice of some unknown woman shouting at her—rather, shouting at the “boy” who was so wickedly disrupting the constabulary’s search for her missing friend.
It was Alice.
And Alice was at her side, grabbing her arm with the force of a furious adult disciplining a misbehaving child.
“What on earth are you doing?” she demanded. “How dare you? Don’t you realize we’re still looking for the girl on that poster?”
“He probably can’t read,” a passerby said. “Most street kids can’t, can they?”
“That’s no excuse!” Alice said. Her lovely eyes were wild and fuming, an expression Bree had never seen there. “Explain yourself!”
Alice, eyes glistening, forcefully pulled Bree toward her—and her face changed. Her grip loosened.
“Breanna?”
Bree’s chest grew tight, too tight, and the cold air turned to shards of ice deep within her lungs, so frigid and piercing that she could hardly bear to draw a single breath.
“Breanna? Is it…is that you?”
Without thinking, Bree tugged Alice to the side, away from the curious eyes that were collecting around them, terror lending to her grip a strength she’d never wielded before. “Shh! Don’t say my—”
Alice’s eyes came close to overflowing. “How—why? Where have you been?” Her voice shook. “You sent that note—all those passages you marked—your note—” She took hold of Bree’s hand, wrapping her fingers tightly as if she might never let go. “And your cousin! You never had a cousin named Lucy! Why would you—”
“Alice, please.” Breanna squeezed the gloved hands wrapped around hers. “You must understand.” Her voice broke. “I know you do.”
Alice stared at her, her face ghostly pale. Almost as grey as the sky above them. “Where have you been?” she repeated. “Are you hurt? Are you safe?”
“I’m safe,” Bree said. “And I’m—I’m gone. And I’m not going back.”
“What?”
“Never, Alice.” Bree’s fingers twitched tighter. “Please. You—you never saw me. Please.”
Alice remained still now, her eyes wide and frightened, and ever so confused. “Breanna, you’re scaring me. You’re talking—you’re talking—”
“I’m never going back to him!”
The vow erupted out of her, rending the air between them like thunder.
“I’m never going back.” Bree’s chest heaved, her breath spinning beyond control now rather than frozen in horror. “If you have ever thought of me as a friend, Alice Wright, you’ll let me walk away, and you’ll never tell another soul you saw me here.”
Breanna Hatchett, cowering somewhere in her subconscious, quailed at the force behind her words: she fell to her knees, in tears, and she begged for Alice’s forgiveness. After all, what kind of girl would speak to her friend that way?
The girl who had become Bree Scarlett, however, did not take her eyes from Alice’s, and she did not back down.
The tears Alice had been so obviously and valiantly trying to contain spilled free.
“Promise me,” she whispered. “Promise me you are safe.”
“I promise,” Bree said. “I’m safe. And I’m h—hap—”
The truth of that stuttered, unfinished word—happy, for she was, wasn’t she, against all odds?—struck with such violence that Bree was almost relieved when a familiar voice cried out, equal parts harsh, concerned, and irritated.
“Alice? What on earth are you doing? We’re going to be late!”
Breanna spun around, and the woman calling Alice gasped.
“Breanna? Breanna Hatchett? You’re here? Where have you been?” Marguerite’s mouth dropped open. The frustrated quality to her voice changed, its target shifting from Alice to Bree, and her pitch rose to piercing shrillness. “And what in heaven’s name are you doing dressed like that? Goodness gracious, what’s happened to you?”
The stares of the surrounding townsfolk were only growing.
“Why are you dressed up in boy’s clothes?” Marguerite asked. “And—why are you here? Half the city’s been looking for you. Your husband has been so—”
Bree observed rather dizzily how her friend kept her distance, as if she did not wish to get too close, as if coming near might sully her lovely dress or her spotless white gloves. As if she were worried that Bree might do something unseemly or rash.
As if she were afraid.
“Everyone says you were kidnapped,” Marguerite said nervously. “You don’t look hurt. You just look…”
Bree backed away. Something she did not trust, something she feared, glittered in Marguerite’s gaze.
To Alice, all she could think to say was, “Please, say—say nothing—”
“Alice?” Marguerite interrupted. “What is she talking about?”
And sweet, lovely, kind, and caring Alice glanced between Bree and Marguerite, stuttering out a few anxious, incomprehensible sounds. “Well—well—I—”
“Look at her. What is she doing?” Marguerite’s face drained of colour as Bree backed up even further. “I think—I think she’s gone quite mad. She’s going to hurt herself, or—or even someone else. Someone fetch the pol—”
Bree turned on her heel and ran.
Icy wind scraped at her skin as she fled, the rush of air in her ears drowning out the surprised shouts of strangers and the worried calls of Alice and Marguerite. Perhaps Alice believed her; perhaps she would have held her tongue—turned away and pretended they had never crossed paths.
But Marguerite?
She’s gone quite mad.
Whether or not that was true, Bree thought grimly, was rather beside the point. What was far more concerning: what Marguerite had been about to say.
Someone fetch the police.
No doubt, somewhere behind her, someone had called for the constables. What other choice did they have, believing there to be a madwoman roaming the streets, spurning the aid of her dear friends, pretending to be someone else, and tearing down her own “Missing” posters?
They didn’t understand; they could not. Marguerite had done as she thought was proper, and if there were police seeking her now, the search for poor, missing Breanna Hatchett urgently renewed, those officers also did what they believed to be right.
As did Bree.
She stopped running when the stitch in her side grew to be too much to bear, and the uneven stones beneath her feet threatened to trip her and send her smashing to the ground. She laid a shaking hand against a wall and allowed herself to rest.
Listen. Pay attention. Look for pursuers. All things Fox had told her would be imperative during, as he called it, the drop.
“Gotta stay…uh…” He’d paused, scratching his chin. “What’s the word? V—vi—”
“Vigilant,” she’d supplied, and he’d grinned, repeating the word after her with a wholly unembarrassed chuckle.
His voice faded from her mind, replaced by the sounds of the still-hidden high street. Perhaps someone had given chase, but she heard no furious shouts, at least none that seemed to be related to her flight from Alice and Marguerite.
Slowly, Bree let out a breath.
So she’d made it away without getting caught.
Now what?
The quivering Breanna Hatchett inside her wanted to spin around, terrified at how unfamiliar the area was, and to fall to the ground and weep, because even Bree Scarlett recognized that she was, in all likelihood, very lost.
She swallowed her tears and took another deep breath. She wasn’t lost; rather, she was just off the main street, and once she made her way back there, she’d be able to find her way. Ask for directions from someone who seemed kind. Someone who didn’t believe her to be a criminal or a madwoman or a helpless victim of Iustitia aecum.
Once the pain in her side had faded, Bree pushed herself forward, keeping one eye on the darkening sky. The wind churned up dust, dead leaves, and detritus as it rushed through the alley, threatening to loosen her tied-up hair and dislodge the woollen hat Fox had “found” and given to her to hide her face. It was dark and cold, yes—and getting darker and colder—and she was lost, yes, but that did not mean all was lost.
Find the high street.
Regain her bearings.
Make it back to the inn.
Reunite with Fox. He would be there.
He would be there.
Wouldn’t he?
***
Listen. Pay attention. Stay vigilant.
Somewhere behind her, she heard the muttering of two boys, and fear flared in her chest, but as she tried to catch their conversation, she realized that while they seemed to be talking about her, they kept saying “boy” and “lad.”
The disguise, at least, was working.
She made her way toward the main road, shoving her hands deep into the pocket of her coat in a desperate attempt to retain some warmth in her fingertips.
She’d make it back and find her way. She could. Breanna Hatchett would have already given up. Bree Scarlett was stronger than that.
She paused at a corner, uncertain of which way would point her toward the inn.
“Hey, you. Kid. You lost?“
When Bree glanced back, she saw that the young men were still about, one poised to walk away, the other with his eyes on her.
“No,” she said. Goodness, she must really have looked confused, if they’d noticed her pausing and looking around and wondering what to do next. This was unfortunate, for they looked rough, certainly not the sort of people she’d usually find herself speaking to.
Except recently, she supposed. Since her only companion of late was a wanted criminal, and despite what the poster said, so, in fact, was she.
“Where you headed?” the boy asked. “You need a hand?”
Bree shook her head. Some cautious emotion prickled at the back of her mind. Yes, she’d been looking for someone to ask for directions. These two didn’t quite seem like who she had in mind, not with their sly mouths and beady eyes.
“You sure?” The boy approached quickly, confidently. “’Cause you’re looking a little lost there, friend-o.”
“Well, I’m not.” Bree turned away, blood ticking a little faster through her veins. Why wouldn’t he take no for an answer and just leave her alone? “Good…” She let her voice trail off. Was goodbye too formal for this conversation? How did boys speak to one another on the street? “Go away.”
The boy’s blue eyes reflected back at her the light of the nearest lamp, shining yellow and lurid. “What was that, kid?”
“Kinda rude,” the other one said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Just leave me alone,” Bree said. “I don’t need your help, all right?” She began to walk away, gaze trained on the gas lamps in the distance. It would be fully dark soon, with only the lamps to light her way, and she was wasting time.
“Uh, where do you think you’re going?”
Keep walking—that was all she had to do. She didn’t turn around. What would Fox say if he were here? “I told you to get lo—”
Addressing his friend, the boy interrupted her, his voice snide. “Did you hear that weedy little asshole tell me to go away?”
“Sure did.”
“And I was just offering to help him, wasn’t I?”
“Yeah, you was.”
“Kinda feels like he needs to be taught a lesson…don’t he?”
“Yep.”
None of this sounded good at all. Bree ducked her head, hastened her footsteps—and walked directly into a bulky form that seemed to materialize out of thin air.
“Sounds like,” the boy said, taking hold of the collar of her coat, “we got a problem here. Don’t it?”
A brick wall pressed against her back.
“You gotta know whose turf this is,” the boy said. “And I never seen no pansy little shitheads like you around here before. ’Specially not a mouthy little bastard in a fancy-ass coat like that. So, where the hell’d you come from, fella?”
“I certainly don’t know whose turf this is,” Bree said, pushing weakly against him and remembering too late that she wasn’t supposed to sound like herself. Her attempt to shove him away did little but dredge up memories that were neither comforting nor helpful. Baden had cornered her like this at times when he really wanted to shout in her face about something—never using such language as that, of course, but it felt familiar all the same. Her breath hitched. “Get off me, you—you—you brute—”
“A brute, huh?” The boy snorted, holding more tightly to her coat and thrusting her back into the wall. Even through her clothes, the rough brick stung on impact. “We’ll see. Empty them nice pockets of yours, kid, and maybe we’ll let you pass through with a warning. Maybe.”
A knife spun in between the fingers of his free hand, glinting bewitchingly in the lamplight that trickled in from the road. Bree watched the reflected glow swirl in the air and turn from green to blue to yellow, then disappear entirely as he caught it again.
“Do it,” the other one said, voice drenched in gleeful malice, and Bree could not tell if he was speaking to her or to his friend.
In agonizing, mocking slowness, the knife lowered and rested against her neck—and there it stayed, grazing the skin of her throat with teeth as cold and razorlike as ice.
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