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anyone wants it. Just clean the tip with some alcohol.” Drawing her cloak around her,
she slipped out of the room, and up out of the dungeon, people complimenting her on
her whip-handling all the way. Marla even muttered acknowledgment to a few of the
comments.
Whipping the idiot had been fun—she hadn’t done anything nasty in hours, and she’d
been feeling fidgety. But now she wanted to find Finch. After her performance with the
bullwhip, other people were going to start following her around and asking for her
attention, and she simply wasn’t in the mood.
She spotted Rondeau in the hot tub, with Zara squirming in his lap, and walked in their
direction.
Then she saw Bradley Bowman in the hot tub beside them, doing his best to be
inconspicuous. “Well,” she said, crouching by the tub, behind them, whispering into
Bradley’s ear. “I know you didn’t simply follow us, because I would have noticed. Has
someone been using their little twitch of psychic ability to find out where I’m going to
be, hmm?”
“It’s not what you think,” B said. “When you blew me off this afternoon, I went looking
for something to do to pass the time, and I ended up here.”
“So you’ve been to these parties before?” Marla said, voice silky and dangerous.
“I think he’s on the up-and-up, Marla,” Rondeau said. “He nearly peed in the pool when
he saw me. I don’t think it has anything to do with us. This party is just the place to be,
is all.”
Zara yawned, pointedly, and Rondeau went back to nuzzling.
“There’s no such thing as a coincidence, Rondeau,” Marla said. “Not on a night like
this. If B’s here, he’s almost certainly here for a reason, even if we don’t know what it
is.”
“See?” Rondeau said to B. “I told you.” Zara made a petulant noise at his inattention.
“Confluence,” B said.
“That’s right,” Marla said. “Now, what do you know about Finch?”
B shrugged uncomfortably and glanced around at the other people—the ordinaries—in
the hot tub. “Nothing much. Nothing more than anybody else knows.”
Marla sighed. Discretion was all well and good, but she was tired of being patient.
She’d wasted too much of today killing hummingbirds and whipping idiots, and she
wanted some forward momentum. She dipped her finger into the hot tub and swirled it
counterclockwise. After a moment, the ordinaries in the tub climbed out and wandered
away. Even Zara climbed off Rondeau’s lap and went into the house.