A Game of Hearts and Heists: A Steamy Lesbian Fantasy Romance (Girl Games Book 1)

“Are you out of your fucking mind, Stirling? How could you ask, nay, demand that woman be on our team? She’s crucifying my business and, by default, our living standard. What is wrong with you?”

I march down the street, pounding the cobbles, needing to burn off the frustration cording its way through my veins.

“Would you slow down and let me explain?”

I halt in the middle of the street, and Stirling walks smack into my side.

“You are most irritating this evening,” Stirling says, brushing her skewed hair off her cheek and giving me a shove.

“Get on with it,” I growl, and put my helmet back on. I pass Stirling hers, and we both get on.

“Well?” I say through the earpiece. I flick the engine on, kick the bike into gear, and unleash the throttle. We race up the drive, the exhaust screaming as I bend left and right down the long, winding driveway.

“Slow the actual fuck down. I’m getting nauseous. It’s not a fucking racetrack, Scar.” Stirling squeezes me where her arms are around my waist and I relent, easing off the throttle.

“You’re not going to like this, but hear me out before you make a judgment. Okay?”

“I’m listening,” I say and pull out onto the main road.

“I watched you tonight and the other night in the club, when you were around her.”

I sit straighter, my arms locking out on the handles. Stirling’s right, I already hate where this conversation is going.

“You basically spend all your time either eye-fucking her or eye-murdering her. Your expressions are so similar I can’t quite work out when one flips to the other.”

At this, I turn my head. I can’t quite see her without twisting dangerously. But Stirling taps my belly to silence me.

“Regardless. Fifty per cent of your time, you want to bang her brains out.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“We bring her onto the team, get to know her. I dunno… maybe let yourself be happy? I mean, she spent as much time eye-fucking you as you did her.”

“And?”

“And you fall madly in love, finally accept it and give the rest of us a break from having to deal with your pining.”

I tut. “You are a giant cock. You know that?”

Stirling laughs. “Be serious though. Maybe you should give her a chance. You might not want to admit it, but you like her. Besides, in the meantime, we can be a team. She will bring her knowledge of the Borderlands.”

“I suppose,” I sigh.

“What’s the alternative? Seduce her, get close to her, earn her trust so you can find out the secrets of her poisons? And then sabotage and drive her business into the ground…”

I sit higher on the bike.

“My Gods, Scarlett, it was a fucking joke.”

“Was it?”

“YES, you fool. Don’t even think about screwing her over.” Stirling smacks me on the shoulder hard enough it makes a thump, and the bike wobbles.

I decide not to respond, but her words sink in, a plan forming. Revenge is always a good idea, right?

We streak past mansions and castles, the night air cutting through my leathers. Finally, we leave the legacy region of New Imperium and drive through the narrower, darker, dirtier streets. Houses without magic crammed together like candy in a packet. Because they’re magicless, the houses are smaller, their brickwork crumbling instead of polished. The windows netted instead of lined with plush fabrics. The air is thicker here, full of smog and the leftover essence of borrowed magic, brought here from the mansions in the heart of New Imperium. Five years ago, I’d never even been here, never deigned to visit the poorer areas of the city. Would never have dreamt that coming here would eventually feel like coming home. Where magic hums in the air and tingles your nose with cinnamon, static, and a little bit of grease instead of it living in the walls of your castle.

We reach our place and I park the bike.

“What if I can’t do it?” I say as I pull my helmet off and take the ear piece out. Stirling already has hers off.

“Then you’ll have fallen in love and… gods, I dunno, Scar… be happy?” Stirling winks at me.

My eyes widen. She throws her head and laughs, trotting off to the front door.

“You’re insufferable,” I bellow after her and lock the bike up.

She sticks her head around the side of the house. “And you might get laid along the way which will also be a bonus for me, because I won’t have to put up with your whiney uptight ass anymore.”

I scramble up and chase after her. But she’s too quick and has the door open and slammed in my face.

I finger our dented and chipped letter box. The flap is hanging off at an angle. I open the door and pull the letters out. There’s two thin envelopes with the Queen’s personal seal.

“The invitations,” Stirling says.

“I guess we’re doing this then, four weeks and counting.”

I hand her the invite addressed to her and then open the next letter. I skim the text, blood draining from my face.

“What’s wrong?” Stirling says.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I slide down the door and hold my head in my hands. Stirling takes the letter and mumble reads it aloud.

“Dear Ms. Grey, it is with deep regret and sadness that I have to write and notify you of your eviction notice. While I have been deeply grateful to you both for how you’ve looked after the property, I am experiencing financial difficulties and need to sell the house. I do hope you’ll understand. I require you to leave four weeks from receipt of this letter. Yours, Wilbert.”

Stirling crunches the letter up and dumps it into the bin. “Two nights. That’s what we have once we return from the mission. Two nights after the Peace Ball to get out. We have to get that fucking map, and you need to find a way to get on with Quinn because otherwise, we’re both royally fucked.” She storms into her room and slams the door.

The following morning, I decide to investigate. With the eviction notice hanging over our heads, there’s no question now. We have to take the Queen’s mission. I send Stirling off to reach out to her network for any intel they have on the Borderlands, and specifically, any contacts we could use inside the Border. And on her way home, to source some cardboard boxes so we can start packing our belongings. That leaves me with visiting the physical Border itself. I can combine it with a training session, anyway. I slip on a crop top and lycra compression leggings and strap a pair of Katana swords to my back. The bike scowls at me from its parked position. But I decide the run will be a good warm up, and I make my way to the Border. Five minutes in, I’m already grateful for it. My body is full of frustration. Some people prefer massages and relaxation when they feel like this. I prefer to hurt; the intense burn of lactic acid and endorphins is a meditative experience for me. The searing in my thighs spreading to my mind, clearing it of everything.

I pound the streets, breathing in the smog. My lungs humming with static and cinnamon. But it’s not long before the roads widen, the houses grow bigger and the air clears. I take half an hour to run to the Border. It’s at the edge of what is now New Imperium. Though the city was three times the size before The Tearing a decade ago.

Suddenly, the houses run out, and that’s how I know I’ve arrived. There’s a wide strip of grass as the houses stop and then a wider plain of concrete up to the Border.

Behind me, New Imperium sprawls. And in front of the gap carved through the city like a scar, is the Border. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might not even realise. In the distance, sat upon a hill, is the old palace, and beneath on the undulating hills, a mosaic of city mansions.

It’s all a lie, of course.

It’s why the Queen demolished all the houses sat on the boundary. In the early days after the Border was formed, dozens of people were lost to it. My guess is they weren’t concentrating and because the Border is a mirage, they’d bumble down the road and find themselves crossing into the Borderlands without realising. Poof, they’d vanish and never be seen again. So the Queen demolished every house that sat within 100m of the Border and, instead, situated a permanent base of royal guards the entire way up and down the strip.

Now, combined with the Border Lord, there are passports, access papers, specific trading routes. It’s a lot, and security is… tight, shall we say.

I spend another twenty minutes running along the Border, checking out all the security points, wondering how the fuck we’re going to get in without passports or papers and without the Queen’s permission. Each gatehouse is precisely far enough away from the next that they can reach anyone trying to. The wall of guards is relentless. No gaps. No space for errors.

This is going to be much harder than I thought.

I find a large patch of grass in front of a woody area. While it’s still near the Border, it’s secluded and the streets are empty. I pull to a stop. I take out the Katanas and practice a series of attack and defence moves and a variety of parries until a sheen of sweat lines my brow.

I drop to the grass and do pushups, situps, mountain climbers. I jump up, high knees, tuck jumps. I pump out jump squats until my thighs are screaming so bad I collapse in muscle failure. Now that my body is warm, I pause a minute to recover and then pick up the Katanas again, close my eyes and train blind. Pushing and stretching the remnants of my magic. I breathe deep, let the thread of my senses pulse. The air fills with iron and coal, but the harder I try to reach for the magic, the more it pulls away. I swear and throw the sword to the ground. I pant, hands on my knees.

“Fuck’s sake.” I refuse to give up. The more I sweat, the deeper the burn weaves through my muscles. I like it. Crave it. The endorphins kick in, I push harder and harder, more reps. Fuck the magic. I can rely on my senses without the heightened abilities. I grab the blades, swipe, swipe, duck, spin my leg out. Drop my arms, turning kick, sidekick, reverse kick. Jab, jab, hook, duck, kick to the knee.

Over and over.

Harder and faster until I bend over, buckling on the grass, and hurl my guts up. I collapse, my chest pumping so hard I can’t work out if I need to be sick again or pass out.

My whole body courses with adrenaline. Everything is louder, brighter, with endorphins flowing through my veins.

When my heart rate comes down, I get up, sleeve the katanas and take a slow walk towards the main Border gatehouses. By the time I get there, there’s a queue four dozen people deep.

I pause on the peak of a small incline in the road and stare out over the view. It looks like the city always did, as if nothing ever changed. But if you scan the horizon carefully, it glimmers. The mirage shudders. If you catch it at the right moment, you can see the city inside. But it isn’t so much a city anymore, as a nightmare. Dark billowing clouds, the sun mostly blocked, light lost to the in-between. A broken city, trapped between the here and there.

Not quite either.

I shiver, and the mirage snaps into place.

One of the Queen’s guards catches my eye. I’m pretty sure he watched me run past earlier.

His royal ruby uniform is pressed and starched to within an inch of its life. The fabric is the same colour as the Sanatio blossom. I flash to the ceremonial swords on his back and suppress a sigh. Fucking guard wouldn’t know how to use a sword if it gutted him over coffee. They’ve all spent so long at the military barrack mansions that they’ve had the mansion’s Collection tattoo inked on them: giant swords down both forearms. They could swipe their blades through the air, and the mansion’s magic would make the swords act for them. Where’s the skill? The skin on my arms, where my tattoos were stripped from me, itch. The scars are no longer angry and livid but pale and watery, echoes of the power I used to draw on.

Bastards. The Queen isn’t innocent either. She might offer us an olive branch now, but she sanctioned my parents’ execution. She’s as culpable as the Border Lord.

I’ll have my retribution, or I’ll die trying.

The guard approaches me. His face is full of scars, striations tearing up his skin. Long faded, like my own scars, but on his face they’re savage.

But it’s not the guards I’m afraid of, it’s what lies beyond the Border I’m curious about. How the hell am I going to get inside to find out enough information?

The queue up ahead moves forward in a slow constant shuffle. That’s when I spot The Poisoner. She waltzes straight to the front of the queue and past all the Border Walkers and traders, and the guards wave her through like she’s a fucking celebrity royal. And then, just like that, the canny bitch vanishes through the other side.

My jaw drops.

What. The. Ever. Living. Fuck.

She said she had grown up there, had access, but that’s… Stirling is going to have a field day with this. How the… If she can just…

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I hate it when Stirling is right.”

The guard approaches me. “Don’t be fooled, missy. I seen you looking at the Border.”

I frown at him. His name label reads Gale. “What do you mean?”

“I see you. I been watching you watch the Border. It don’t look like that inside. It’s a devious bit of trickery. A mirage if you like. One of them magician illusions. I thinks it’s the mansions inside. They’re all pissed at us for fucking up the maps.”

“Is that so?” I smile, brighten my expression, feign interest. He’s not told me much, but perhaps he knows something useful. I can work with this, embody my inner Stirling and pump him for info. She’s all charming, bright smiles or some shit like that. Gods, killing people is much easier than having to talk to them.

“It is. The Border shows you what it thinks you want to see. That’s how it does it. How it lures in the unsuspecting. Makes them think it’s candy and cuddles inside.”

“And I take it it’s not.”

He guffaws. “I only went in once. That was enough for me.”

“Why?” I say, trying to scrunch my face into some semblance of an afraid little girl. It works because he shakes his head, wipes his hand over his mouth.

“You ain’t thinking of going in there, are you?”

I shrug. “There’s something I want in there. I was considering it.”

“You gotta get the right passes and what not, you know?”

I grit my teeth and nod. I want information from him. Not him extracting it from me.

He reaches out to touch my arm. I resist glancing down at his pudgy fingers gripping my forearm. Resist snapping them off.

“Do yourself a favour. Don’t bother. Don’t even consider it.”

Unlucky for me, we’re way past not considering it. I need to get that map, restore my legacy and be done with The Poisoner, too. There’s no way I’m not going in. I place my hand over his and gasp. “Why? What’s so deeply terrible about a city that used to be part of ours?” A haunted look passes across his eyes.

The soldier pulls himself back, disentangling from me. He eyes me with a narrowed gaze.

“Because, missy, there are a thousand nightmares in there. A rotten, decaying world with rotten people, rotten creatures, and all of them want to eat you. Or at least it was in them early days. Traders and Border Walkers say it ain’t too bad these days. But I ain’t risking it. Some of them… the ones who veer off the routes, they don’t come home looking so good.”

I shiver under his gaze. It was full of shadows and the icy prickles you’re left with after a fright. Whatever he’d seen in there had him spooked.

“You walk in there alone, you won’t last three seconds,” he says. “That’s if you can get in without a pass. Which I’m assuming you don’t have. And if you don’t, you won’t get one.”

Well, The Poisoner just walked in. But I wasn’t going to bring that up. Whatever she had on the guards that enabled her to get through like that, is something I need to know.

I’ll torture it out of her. I might enjoy that. Fuck her until she screams her secrets at me. But I’m instantly annoyed because what I want to think about is torturing her and flailing the skin off her bones. But instead, my mind drifts to thoughts of my bare hands spanking her arse cheeks and tweaking her nipples, leaving marks of me on her flesh. Gods, Scarlett, get a grip.

“Are you listening, miss?” the guard says.

“What? Yes. Of course. I’ll get a pass.”

He sniffs. “Look. I watched you train. You got some skills, I’ll give you that. But I was in one of the early teams to investigate the Borderlands. There were ten of us.”

Were? My blood cools. Stories that start in the past tense never end well.

“I might not look it now,” he pats his paunch, “but I was in the Queen’s Guard squadron. We went in all young and cocky, like you. Thought it would be a breeze. It was our city, after all. We’d all lived in it our whole lives. Yeah, the city was torn in half, but it was still our city.”

He lowers his eyes. Rubs a hand across his face. “Two of us made it out. But Freddie didn’t last the night. I tried to keep him alive, but he… he didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.

He nods, swallows hard. “If you go in there, make sure you’re not alone or you might as well kiss whatever it is you’re hunting goodbye.”

“GALE?” another soldier calls from up ahead. His beret as ruby coloured as his uniform. A Sanatio symbol on his epaulette. He must be the captain of the squad.

“Thanks for your help,” I say. He nods and walks to his post.

Even after Gale took his place back at his post, as he settled and his shoulders relaxed, the harrowed expression never left his eyes. Whatever he’d seen, whatever happened, it haunted him deep. Ghosts of monsters and nightmares furrowed in between the lines of his scars. All of them wrinkled and etched into the grooves of his face so he’d wear them close and never forget.

My stomach tightened. He was right. I might be an Assassin, but what do I actually know of the Border? I’ve never been inside, not since we escaped The Tearing. Neither Stirling nor I have. She may have some contacts that have intel, but clearly, The Poisoner wasn’t lying when she said she knew the Borderlands.

I hated it. I hated that Stirling was right, that I’d have to grovel my way into The Poisoner’s good graces and ask her to work with us.

I’m spiralling, turning everything over and over. There’s only one way to settle this. I pull Chance out of my bag and rub her edges.

“What should I do? Yes for team up. No for go solo.” I kiss Chance, flick her up, and she spins through the air. When she lands, I drop her onto the back of my hand.

YES.

“Fuck’s sake.”

But the more I think about it, the more I realise Chance is right. If going in alone is really as much of a risk as the soldier made out, then there’s no way I’m putting Stirling in jeopardy for the sake of my pride. I don’t give a shit about me. I won’t put my sister in harm’s way for the sake of our legacies. No. We’re going to need a team. I’ll go to The Poisoner’s apothecary tomorrow and ask her to join. I suppose the best bit is that I can do exactly as Stirling said. She was joking, but perhaps there was something to it. If I can needle into The Poisoner’s heart, I could uncover something. The secret to her infamous poison… I could sabotage it, crush her business the same way she’s been throttling mine.

Yes.

Now this is the kind of plan I like.