Wicked as She Wants Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward my prey, my fingers curling into claws. The figure smirked and showed me a knife.
    “Lesson one. Don’t kid a kidder, kid. You suck on me, and Casper will turn you in for a thousand well-earned silvers unless I can gut you first. I’m Keen, by the way.”
    I nodded to the mongrel child. “Greetings, Keen. I am Ahnastasia, princess of the Great Snow Court of Muscovy, crown capitol of the Tsarina of Freesia.”
    “Yeah, and I’m the bloody king of Franchia.” Keen grinned with surprisingly white teeth for what I had to assume was a diseased foundling. Tommy Pain had completed his vile self-grooming and twined around Keen’s feet. When the stained brown gloves began to scratch under his chin, he rumbled like a steam engine.
    “What do you care about that maddening man?” I said.
    “None of your goddamn business.”
    “I seem to get that a lot here.”
    “That’s because poor people like us hate rich people who try to make us feel like crap,” Keen answered with slitted eyes.
    “Do I look rich to you?” I held my hands out to show my ruined, blood-spattered dress.
    “Maestro told me you’ve been stored in a suitcase for four years, so of course your frock looks like a handkerchief somebody sneezed in. But I bet that thread’s still made of enough gold to feed me for a year. I see you staring at me like I’m nothing, like I should be bowing and kissing your feet. That’s never going to happen.”
    I sat down on the bed, glaring. Taking a sphere of tarnished brass from a jacket pocket, the little urchin tossed and rolled it from one gloved hand to another with a private smile. I watched for a few moments, noting the markings and indentations in the metal, wondering what the thing was. Raised eyebrows told me I was being purposefully tortured. I sighed in resignation, exhausted from the small act of standing.
    “Enough of this ridiculous standoff. Where is your Maestro?”
    “Getting ready for the trip. He asked me to fetch you to the costumer’s for your disguise.”
    “Why didn’t he come himself?”
    “I told you. He’s busy.”
    I patted my dress and hair, as if anything I could do with my own two hands would prepare me for being seen on the street. What if there were people out there—and not people like Casper and Keen but People. Real people, people who mattered, people who might know me. I cringed inwardly and tilted my head benevolently.
    “I suppose I am ready, then. Lead on.”
    “I got to do something first.” Keen burst into a wide, toothy grin. I finally understood, seeing that brilliant smile, that she was a girl, a young and pretty one, hiding for some reason under short hair and shapeless clothes and a silly hat. Something evil glinted in her eyes.
    “Very well.” I crossed my arms and nodded. “Get on with it.”
    She reached into her jacket, tucked the sphere away, and pulled out a pair of jagged, rusty scissors, the sort of thing our gardeners would have saved for lopping off weeds and the heads of pesky bludlemmings.
    “First, we got to cut your hair off.”
    I drew back and hissed, clutching long white-blond locks to my chest.
    “No,” I whispered.
    “Deal or no deal, princess?” She snicked the scissors open and closed. “They always got room for bludwhores in the next bar over, if you ain’t willing.”
    My hair had never been cut. Not once in my entire twenty-seven years of life. No, make that thirty-one. I had lost four years, and I was well on my way to being whispered about at court as a spinster, if I lived long enough for some snide baroness to call me such. But Keen left me with little choice, and I knew well enough that my hair was my most recognizable feature.
    The little monster didn’t even let me brush it first. As soon as I’d pulled out the few silver pins that remained, she darted behind me and wrapped a grimy glove around the knee-length mass. I yelped and fought her, but that only pulled the hair taut and straight, and I was still weak. She