Frankie smiled a little, then laughed, and kicked his feet back and forth playfully before swinging them up onto the table to sit cross-legged. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.

"That wasn't why I was asking, no." It would be harder to talk to the man if he didn't really understand, but... well. Frankie could make it easy to understand. He looked at the man for a moment, hard, calculating, then straightened and pushed up the sleeves of his henley shirt and leaned forward to pull down the collar to expose the skin right over his heart. His forearms were covered in intricate black tattoos, twisting lines that curled around and through each other in complex runic bracers, beautiful and sinister. The pattern was echoed on his chest, but in a more simplified circle, and somehow even more ominous than the markings on his arms.

"These," he said softly, "are binding marks. There's a more complicated explanation behind them, involving rituals and spells and sacrifices and so on, but it all boils down to this: I belong to them, and whatever order they give me, I'm forced to obey." He dropped his hand from his collar and slowly pulled down his sleeves again. "You asked me what I do. The answer is, quite simply, whatever it is they tell me to do. Often, like tonight, it happened to be murder, but it's been a wide range of other things too."