Numbers swam up under a stranger’s face like sheet music Ezra half-knew, notes he hadn’t studied arranging themselves into something he could suddenly read.
He was standing in the doorway of his floor when the champion walked toward the entrance: a vampire he’d seen three times before, mid-tier, nothing the board had ever flagged as a threat.
A second layer surfaced under the man’s ordinary features, cold and precise.
Lockout state: clear.
Hidden ability: speed-tier reading above his rank, consistent with a decade of suppressed sire-line augmentation.
True standing: two tiers higher than the board’s surface number claimed.
“Evening,” the vampire said, a short nod, the same nod every regular spared the furniture.
“Evening.” Ezra kept sweeping, kept his voice as flat and unremarkable as the broom in his hands.
“Busy floor tonight.”
“Heard there’s a witch down from Baton Rouge looking to make a name for herself. Might be worth watching.”
“Might be.”
“You ever place bets on this stuff, manager?”
“Not my place to bet on anything that walks through that door.”
“Smart policy.” The vampire grinned, easy and unbothered, and Ezra already knew, now, that the man wasn’t what his number claimed.
A fighter sandbagging his own strength, waiting for a match where the reveal would translate into a kill nobody saw coming.
He’d have missed it a week ago.
Tonight he saw it the instant the man crossed the threshold, cold and clear, without the blind spot that had nearly gotten Ezra killed four times in the two weeks since he’d woken on Bourbon Street.
True-Rank Sight had unlocked.
His first real Prerogative: a read on any combatant’s true standing, suppressed abilities, and lockout state, the Mercy law turned into a tide table of when every threat came back.
And it won zero fights.
The vampire passed him without another glance and walked onto the floor, and the limit of the gift arrived right alongside the gift itself, the two halves inseparable.
He could see who would kill him fastest.
He could map the hidden weapons every champion carried in.
He could read the lockout state of every creature on the board and build a private calendar of danger that let him prepare for threats before they ever arrived.
None of that stopped a fist.
None of that turned a blade aside.
The Sight was his greatest weapon because everyone else in this city was fighting blind, and it was also, in any physical confrontation, worth nothing at all.
He tested it again an hour later, when Davina Claire crossed toward the floor from the direction of the Quarter, her number spiking and volatile the second the Sight caught her.
“Floor’s open,” Ezra said, before she’d even reached the doorway.
“Same as always.”
“I know.” She didn’t slow down.
“Wasn’t asking permission.”
“Wasn’t offering any. Just saying it’s open.”
“You say that every time.”
“It’s true every time.”
She gave him half a look, unreadable, then walked past him onto the floor without another word.
Ezra let the Sight run over what it had already told him: a witch whose power wasn’t stable enough to rank cleanly, spiking and dropping in a rhythm no board should have been able to render at all.
Rousseau’s had already called her the board’s most unstable power.
The Sight confirmed it in a language rumor didn’t have: a wild card that could topple a bracket clean or save it, depending on which side of the spike she stood when it mattered most.
Vincent Griffith arrived not long after, scanning the floor until he found her silhouette against the carved light, and stopped at the doorway instead of crossing it.
“She spend much time here?” he asked Ezra, voice pitched low enough that it wouldn’t carry to her.
“More lately.”
“That worry you?”
“Not my floor to worry about who uses it.” Ezra kept sweeping.
“She’s not hurting anyone in there.”
“Didn’t say she was.” Vincent watched her a moment longer, something unreadable behind his eyes, the caution of a man who’d buried too many people already to trust any ground he couldn’t personally stand on.
“Just don’t like not knowing what this place actually does to her.”
“Neither do I,” Ezra said, which was truer than Vincent could have guessed.
“That’s not exactly reassuring, coming from the man who runs it.”
“Wasn’t meant to be. I just sweep the floors, Vincent. I don’t have answers, only a broom.”
Vincent almost laughed at that, a short, tired sound.
“Everybody in this city keeps telling me that. I’m starting to believe the broom knows more than the rest of us.”
Vincent didn’t press further.
He nodded once, more to himself than to Ezra, and walked back toward Rousseau’s without crossing the threshold, the same restraint Davina herself had shown three nights running.
Ezra said nothing to her about any of it.
The Sight was his alone tonight, a secret with only one owner, and he intended to keep it that way for as long as keeping it served him better than spending it.
He could coach her from the margins eventually, feed her one read at a time so the help never looked like more than a lucky guess.
Tonight the only thing the Sight had given him was a precise catalog of how many ways he could die in a room full of people who had no idea he was the apex of the board they were all busy climbing.
═══ THE ROLL OF STANDING ═══
STANDING — #1
PREROGATIVES SEATED — 1 · TRUE-RANK SIGHT
OWNER-SIGHT — TRUE STANDING · SUPPRESSED ABILITIES · LOCKOUT STATE
LOCKOUT CALENDAR.
LIVE
═══════════════════════════
He leaned the broom against the doorframe and watched the sandbagging vampire circle a lesser fighter, patient, waiting to spring the tier he’d hidden from everyone but the one man who could actually see it.
Ezra didn’t warn anyone.
Warning meant explaining how he knew, and that meant admitting there was a hand behind the board at all.
A nightwalker drifted past on his way out, pausing long enough to jerk a thumb at the circling vampire.
“That one’s better than his number. You can feel it if you watch him move.”
“Maybe.” Ezra didn’t look away from the floor.
“Numbers lie sometimes.”
“Everything in this city lies sometimes.” The nightwalker shrugged, unbothered.
“You’d know, wouldn’t you? Sweeping this place every night.”
“I know less than you’d think.”
“Sure you do, manager.” He grinned, unconvinced, and kept walking anyway, too incurious to chase the doubt any further than a joke.
Ezra almost smiled, because it was truer than the man knew.
He’d spent two weeks learning this board’s dialect of lies: the confident number hiding a sandbagged fighter, the volatile spike hiding a witch nobody could read correctly yet, the question mark over his own name hiding the biggest lie of all.
Every one of them was a weapon that couldn’t throw a punch or block a blade, only tell him, with perfect clarity, how each person around him might eventually kill him.
He picked the broom back up.
The vampire on the floor sprang his hidden tier three minutes later, exactly as the Sight had promised he would: a burst of speed that closed six feet in less time than a heartbeat, and the lesser fighter he’d been circling went down hard against the carved wall.
The crowd gasped at a reveal Ezra had already priced into the board an hour before it happened.
The fight didn’t stay contained on the floor where it belonged.
The losing fighter’s arm came up in a last, wild swing, missed its target clean, and the momentum carried him stumbling backward through the doorway itself, close enough that Ezra had to step aside fast to avoid taking an elbow to the throat.
For half a second, close enough to smell the blood already drying on the man’s knuckles, Ezra remembered how little the Sight would have done for him if that elbow had connected.
Knowing a blow was coming and stopping a blow from landing were two very different skills, and he possessed only one of them.
“You alright?” the losing fighter asked, righting himself, already embarrassed.
“Fine.” Ezra’s pulse said otherwise.
“Watch the doorway next time.”
“Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to bring it out here.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“You move fast for somebody who just sweeps floors.”
“Adrenaline. Same as you.” Ezra kept his voice level enough to make the lie sound like nothing worth remembering.
The fighter studied him another second, still catching his breath, then shrugged the whole thing off, same as every loser in this city eventually learned to.
“Guess we both got lucky, then.”
“Guess we did.”
“You ever get tired of sweeping up after us?”
“Every night. Doesn’t change the job.”
The fighter limped back onto the floor to accept his loss, and Ezra swept the spot where he’d nearly been hit like it hadn’t happened, because that was the only version of tonight anyone else was allowed to remember.
Davina passed back through the doorway as the floor emptied out, pausing just long enough to glance at him once, the spike in her number finally easing toward something steadier than it had read an hour ago.
“Good session?” Ezra asked.
“Better than most.” She studied him a beat too long, the same doubt Vincent carried, dressed differently.
“You always this observant, or is that new?”
“Observant’s the whole job description.”
“Sure it is.” She walked out without waiting for more, and Ezra let her go, adding the exchange to everything else the Sight had given him that he couldn’t yet use out loud.
Knowing first had never once been the same as being safe.
But it was, for a mortal man surrounded by immortal predators, the only edge he had, and he meant to spend it like it mattered.