Chapter 3
As much as I wanted to head straight to investigating my potential lead, I couldn’t. If I left right now, I was sure to be a suspect for the break-in. After committing a crime, the best way to avoid blame was to be at the center of the investigation to redirect as needed.
After an early morning stop at the cobblers, I headed toward the Syndicate safehouse, scuffing my new shoes so they appeared older, and found Brent halfway down the cobbled lane, also heading the same way. He lifted a hand in greeting, cheerful as ever.
“Morning, Gil,” he called. “You look unusually clean today. Did you finally take a bath?”
“My mam forced me, and I figured I’d try it to see if I liked it,” I answered. “But I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
“Girls like it,” Brent told me with a grin.
I let out a noise of disgust. “I don’t care about girls. Everyone talks about how expensive they are, and I prefer to keep my coin for myself.”
He barked a laugh. “Well then, it’ll help if your targets can’t smell you coming from a mile away.”
We fell into step together, boots striking the cobblestones in easy rhythm. Brent looked at some of the reward posters the Nightsworn had tacked up all over town. A few matched the ones that the Syndicate had listed, but a few others were different, including several for notable bounty hunters.
“Didn’t you get a new mission?” Brent asked. “You just finished with Silas yesterday. Knowing you, I figured you’d be halfway across Berkway right now, tracking down a new target.”
My shoulders slumped. “I think I forgot to sign the bounty slip for Silas,” I said, frowning as though trying to recall.
“I remember Ambrose saying he’d put the money in my account, but I can’t remember doing the paperwork.
He was telling me about some Rodney Vale or something.
You know how Ambrose is about paperwork. ”
Brent groaned in sympathy. “Ambrose will have a fit if you didn’t sign.”
“I know. I hope I already did, but I’d rather check to be sure,” I said. “And I wanted to see if there are any new bounties up. The ones I saw yesterday weren’t good options.”
Brent gave a grunt. “If there are any good ones, Ambrose probably gave them to Elvin already.”
As the Syndicate’s house came into view, I let my gaze travel upward, slow and casual. The window to the Employer’s study still sat just slightly ajar.
I slowed, reaching out to catch Brent’s sleeve. “Do you see that?”
He followed my gaze. His expression shifted from confusion to a frown. “Is that window open? On purpose?”
“Looks that way. Was it like that yesterday?” I asked.
“Ambrose never opens anything,” Brent said slowly. We exchanged a look and quickened our pace.
Inside, the safehouse hummed with its usual morning sluggishness. Elvin was nowhere in sight, and a few early morning bounty hunters lounged at the long table.
“Ambrose!” Brent called out the moment he was over the threshold. “Ambrose, we need to talk to you!”
Ambrose didn’t answer right away. When he did finally emerge from his office, he looked irritated and sleepy.
“What?”
“The window to the Employer’s study is open,” I told him. “Brent and I saw it when we were coming up just now.”
Several bounty hunters looked up, instantly curious, and Ambrose froze, suddenly much more awake than a few moments before.
“Maybe the Employer finally turned up,” one of the hunters said with a guffaw.
“You said you saw an open window?” Ambrose asked. “You saw it when you came in just now?”
“Yeah,” I said, injecting just the right amount of unease into my voice. “We saw it. Did you open it to air out the room or—”
“No.” He turned and ran toward the study door so quickly that he sent a side table toppling. “No one is permitted in that study without my supervision.”
“Exactly why we thought you should know,” Brent said, following hot on his heels. Immediately, all the other hunters rose and followed, each just as eager as the next to see what mysteries were hidden within the Employer’s study.
Ambrose strode down the corridor and reached out to try the handle.
The study door was still locked.
Pale as a ghost, Ambrose fumbled for his keys and after a great deal of clattering the key in the lock, the door creaked open.
He rushed inside, eyes darting from desk to shelves to cabinets, then crossed to the window and stared at the undone latch.
All the bounty hunters clustered around the door, hanging in to look and each appearing just as disappointed as I’d felt the night before.
“Thought there’d be something a little more interesting in here,” one of them muttered.
“Maybe Ambrose just forgot to lock the window,” I piped up.
“Yeah, right,” someone behind me chuckled. “Someone must’ve broken in. Maybe even one of the Nightsworn. They might’ve found our base. Did you hear anything, Ambrose? You sleep here every night.”
Ambrose’s former paleness gave way to bright red as he flushed. “There must be a mistake! It was all quiet last night.”
“Did they steal anything?” I asked. “I bet they were creeping through the whole house.”
“Nah, the door was locked and the window was the only thing open. They couldn’t relock it from the outside.”
“But they couldn’t have opened it from the outside, either,” Brent pointed out. “Not without breaking the glass, and it was intact. So it must not have been locked. And it wasn’t the Nightsworn or they would’ve taken everything.”
I let out a low whistle. “But why would someone come in here?”
“They must’ve been curious, then been just as bored as everyone else. There’s nothing valuable here to steal.” Brent pointed near the wall. “What’s that?”
Ambrose picked up the two pomegranate seed pods and blinked. “What are these doing here?” he muttered to himself.
I tilted my head. “What are they? Hold them up, I can’t see.”
Ambrose closed his hand over the seed pods to hide them, but Brent let out a snort. “They’re pomegranate seeds. Elvin has been eating those things constantly.”
Ambrose’s mouth tightened and he glared at Brent. “Correlation does not equal guilt. Gil was asking about Roderick’s file yesterday. He knows I keep bounty files in here. Maybe it was him.”
I let out a squawk of indignation. “But it wasn’t,” I said, spreading my arms wide. “I didn’t take a file and you told me he would be too difficult to catch. I told you I’d find someone else and I asked you to post a bounty.”
“You could’ve just told me that to let the matter drop then come back to break in.”
All the other bounty hunters were snapping their heads back and forth to follow the argument like we were at a badminton tournament.
“If I had broken in, why would I come back?”
“Maybe you didn’t find the file you were looking for.”
I rolled my eyes. “I might be young, but I’m not that dumb. It would’ve been in one of those filing cabinets, either R for Rodney or V for Vale. Check it. If he has a file, it should be there.” Then I thought. “Unless Elvin wanted you to think I took it and he took it himself to frame me.”
“I’m sure Elvin wouldn’t take it,” Ambrose grumbled, riffling through with ever-thinning lips until he found the correct file and pulled it out. “And it was Roderick Vane, not Rodney Vale.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have as good a memory as you do.”
Everyone was quiet and watched from the doorway as Ambrose went through the entire file, checking each page and finding every scrap of information exactly where I’d left it. Ambrose exhaled slowly.
“Well?” Brent prompted him.
“It’s all here,” Ambrose admitted.
I shrugged again. “I told you I didn’t do it. Maybe whoever opened the window was interrupted and ran before they got inside.”
“That still doesn’t explain the seeds,” Brent pointed out.
Ambrose frowned at the seed pods in his hand. “Someone could’ve come in and copied or memorized information. Gil, why are you here today?”
I rubbed the back of my neck and shuffled my feet. “I think I forgot to sign the slip for Silas yesterday and I was coming back to check.”
Ambrose looked at me again, suspicion fading from behind his lenses. “You did sign it. Don’t you remember?”
“Nah, I can barely remember what I had for supper last night,” I said. “My mam always says I have more muscles than brains.”
“That’s not saying much,” one of the hunters laughed, slapping me on the shoulder. “Don’t boast too loudly, son.”
Finally, Ambrose closed the file and returned it to its place. “I’ll question everyone,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah, best not let the Employer know that someone got in,” I said with a quick grin. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to me, I added, “Did Elvin leave late last night? After everyone else?”
Ambrose hesitated. “He did.”
Several people exchanged conspiratorial looks.
“That’s not so suspicious,” Ambrose said, but he didn’t sound certain.
“It is when combined with the seed pods,” Brent pointed out.
I chewed on my lip. “And Elvin has been more ambitious lately.”
“Ambitious?” Ambrose echoed.
“Yeah, I heard him talking about wanting more responsibility and how he understands the Syndicate better than other people. He said he could streamline operations better than you could.”
I let that little nugget of falsified information simmer and could almost feel Ambrose’s blood boiling from where I stood.
“You know, I remember him talking about how he thought he’d be better at your job than you are,” Brent told Ambrose. “Maybe he was hoping that the Employer would find out you’d slept through a break-in and could replace you.”
Ambrose latched the window and began shooing us out of the study. “This is all speculation, and I’ll have none of it. We can’t prove that Elvin did anything, and he isn’t even here to defend himself. I’ll speak with him.” He locked the study door then added, “I’ll be speaking with everyone.”
“Better speak with them before they break in and actually steal something,” I told him, mouth twitching. “You might need to start sleeping lighter or they’ll steal the socks right off your feet.”
There was some sniggering and smothered laughter as Ambrose glared and everyone returned to their original spots. Brent leaned close as we walked back down the corridor.
“You really think Elvin would try something like that?” he whispered to me.
“I have no idea. The only one who would sneak into a place like that would either think something valuable is hidden there or be after information.” I tilted my head. “Granted, I think that some information is more valuable than gold.”
Brent thumped me on the back. “Well spoken. See, you’re getting older and wiser by the day.”
I shot him a look through narrowed eyes. “Did Elvin really tell you that he thought he could do Ambrose’s job better than he could?”
Brent’s mouth twisted into a smug smile. “Not quite. But now Ambrose might start holding some of the better bounties for the rest of us. It seems that Elvin’s pomegranate seeds might have been planted to sow doubt about his loyalties.”
“I should feel bad for him,” I said with a mock expression of concern that twisted into something more impish. “I should…but I don’t.”
Brent gave a hoot of laughter. “I always knew I liked you, Gil. Do you have any plans for today?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought I’d go catch a fight or two down by the docks this afternoon. Ever since I turned in Tyrone for that bounty last year, I’ve missed the fights he used to host on his ship. They were a lot of fun.”
“Have a good time,” he told me with another hearty slap to my shoulder. “Keep your nose clean and bloody the other person’s.”
I laughed and waved as I left the safehouse. “I’m just going to watch; I don’t plan on fighting. I’ll be studying technique today.”
I might not know where to find Roderick Vane, but I had an inkling where I’d be able to find his red-headed accomplice.