and tried a smile. He didn’t quite make it and ended up bearing his teeth in an idiot grin instead.

“Yeah?” Diogo said, looking him up and down.

His dark brown eyes bore into Haken. Diogo’s thickly muscled body always gave him the look of a crouched tiger, poised and ready to strike, even when he was sitting with his feet up and his arms crossed against his wide chest.

Valak came back into the room, dragging a pale, frightened slaveboy by the arm. He backed the frantically struggling boy into a corner and let him pull away, afraid that if he held his frail arm too tight, he would break his thin bones. The boy cowered in the far corner of the room, biting his ruby lips, looking from one man to the other, his dark green eyes round with fear. His hair, the color of new gold, gleamed in the shaft of sunlight that stabbed into the dank rooms and fell across his pallid face, giving him the wild look of an animal caught in a trap.

“You hear that Valak? He’s been meaning to come by,” Diogo said to his friend. He’d taken out a knife and now he used it to clean his nails.

“Right,” Valak said, looking down at the boy in the corner.

His hard, angular face, nearly lost in dark shadows, showed no emotion. In the small room, he towered over the slaveboy, tall and built hard and compact somehow. He had a deadly air about him, like a cross bow always cocked and ready to deal death at a moment’s notice.

He pulled the boy from the corner, dug his long fingers into his golden hair and pulled his head back hard. His other hand moved eerily fast, and a knife appeared from nowhere. He pressed the wickedly sharp blade to the pulse in the boy’s throat, and looked at Diogo, waiting.

The slaveboy tried to pull back from the knife, but Valak paid no mind. He pulled the boy’s hair tighter to keep him from cutting his own throat in panic. Unshed tears glistened in the boy’s eyes and hung like gems in his long lashes. Tiny desperate sounds came from the slaveboy, but no words escaped his lips.

“Where’s my fucking tokens?” Diogo said, looking at the tableau of Valak and the boy.

Diogo wasn’t smiling anymore. His hard eyes had gone a cold shade, the color of freshly turned grave dirt. Haken glanced nervously from Diogo to Valak. The one time farmer turned veteran gambler and hopeless drunk, wished mightily that the earth would open and swallow both of these dark eyed assassins.

“My friends,” he said, in his best let’s-be-reasonable voice.