As she led him further into the house, she said over her shoulder, “We’ll be making copies of the recordings. All of them. The video footage as well as the mana recordings. We’ll also send you the results of the signature readings.”

“Alright.”

She scowled at him, still looking over her shoulder instead of waiting for him to catch up. “I want your master’s thoughts on it.”

As soon as she faced forward, Eblin rolled his eyes. As though he planned to hide them from Jacques. Although he was also perfectly capable of documenting and investigating these things as well.

He’d already cleared out two of the cases he’d claimed from their files. In fact, he’d been at the City Guard’s office to get paid when Michelle spotted him and dragged him here. For the Guard’s sake, it was probably a good thing he didn’t know where they were going until their carriage pulled in.

Money or no money, he would have thought twice about accepting this one.

The footage took a long time to watch. They fast-forwarded through most of it. After the initial interaction, the intruder spent the rest of the time destroying three separate rooms. If not for the soundproofing in those rooms, the entire manor would’ve known what was going on.

While much of the destruction was flippant, like knocking over a vase as she passed it, not everything she touched was haphazard.

Eblin noticed that sometimes she’d do something more deliberate. Like feeling the wall behind a shelf of books she’d just tipped over, or rummaging to the very bottom of the drawer at a desk, or ripping pillows and then feeling around inside the stuffing as she pulled it apart.

So he wasn’t entirely surprised when she found a sliding panel in the main office, flipped briefly through the ledger she pulled out, and boldly grinned at the camera as she waved the book triumphantly.

“Did we find that?” he asked, pointing at the book.

“Not that I know of,” Michelle replied dryly, fast forwarding the intruder going back to the nobelman’s room.

By then, the lord had squirmed off the bed and across the room, trying to open the door with his back to it. A few more minutes and he might’ve alerted the house. Instead, the intruder came in, smiled at him, and pushed him to the ground. With the door closed, he was once again encased in the soundproofed room.

“Areers,” the tiny Lord Calvin on the crystal screen shouted. “You let me go this instant or I’ll have you hanged!”

She scoffed. “If you can find me. Now that we’ve had our fun, it’s time to go to sleep.”

That was when she set the ledger on the table and brought his wine glass, openly dumping a vial of something into it and looking at the camera. “It’s a potion made from the zanie flower,” she said pleasantly. “It’s too mild to kill him.”

The look she shot him, though, said very clearly she wouldn’t have minded him dead.

Eblin glanced at Michelle, hoping she didn’t see his momentary regret. To his relief, the inspector was too intent on the screen to watch him.

“Areers,” said Michelle thoughtfully, pausing the feed on the woman downing her glass of wine. “We should look into prostitutes under that name.”

“Do you really think she used her real name?”

“No. But do you have a better idea?”

“Actually, I think I do.” He tapped the screen, pointing at the maroon book the intruder had left on the table. “That’s an accounting ledger.”

“So?”

“Arrear is a financial term meaning an unpaid or overdue debt.”

Michelle looked at him and then at the book. Her tired expression blanked for a second as she connected the same dots he’d just done. Then she slapped a hand over her forehead and began rubbing. “I’ll send someone in to find it.”

“Wait, let’s see what she does with it.” Eblin restarted the feed.

What she did with it was tuck it under her arm and waltz out of the manor.

“And there goes our motive,” he said with mock mourning.

“Didn’t she say something about giving his boss a message?”

Eblin frowned and rewound the feed to the beginning, but that’s all she said. “I just want to give you and your boss a message.”

“There’s a distinct lack of ‘message’ here.”

“Nah.” Eblin leaned back in his chair, raising it on two legs as he grinned and supported his head in his hands. “The entire incident is a message. Something like, ‘I’m going to destroy you and dig out your secrets.’”

“Is that so?”

Eblin’s entire body reacted, flinching so badly that he lost control of his chair and tumbled backward. When he scrambled to one knee, his elbow smarting from the fall, it was to face a man with graying hair and a deep frown.

His insides felt like they’d turned to ice.

Meanwhile, Michelle gasped and bowed to the visitor.

“Regent Trovinski! We weren’t expecting such a noble visitor.”

Her voice dripped respect and fluster. Eblin wished that’s all he felt. Instead, he had to hide his knocking knees as he stood up and gave a begrudging bow to the man.

“Why is it,” the Regent said coolly to Eblin, ignoring Michelle for now, “that I always manage to find you in a disgraceful position?”

Eblin’s ears burned, and he didn’t look up, reduced to being a 12-year-old once again.

“As for why I’m here.”

There was a mild ‘thud,’ and Eblin risked a glance up. The Regent had tossed a newspaper on the table, next to the feed monitor. While Michelle picked it up cautiously, Eblin struggled to regain his composure, taking deep breaths and telling his muscles to relax.

It might’ve worked, except that Michelle breathed in sharply and he tensed in response.

“What?!”

“Yes,” said the Regent coldly. “Exactly.”

Eblin, still not saying anything, accepted the paper that Michelle passed to him. There, on the front cover in bold letters, “Corruption in the Houses! We Have Proof!”

Dazed, he skimmed the article. A ledger had appeared on the steps of the newspaper, detailing the corrupt practices of a certain nobleman—everything from buying items from the black market to tax evasion. They didn’t skimp on the details. Even from the short snippets he read, he could almost feel the reporter’s smug delight.

Meanwhile, the Regent was staring Michelle down, causing the inspector to flinch and back up into the monitor table. After a tense thirty seconds, enough time for Eblin to mostly finish his speed read, he spoke.

“How did this happen?”

“My lord—” she stuttered.

“This scandal will be a source of upheaval. Do you understand the consequences of this?”

“M-my lord—”

“Lord Calvin is a major player in the shipment of goods and materials. If he’s publicly disgraced, so will his business. It could cause a major economic disruption in the city! If this had been handled quietly, then we could have removed him without causing a stir—”

“My lord,” Eblin interrupted, mouth dry and flinching when the Regent turned to him. “If I may—”

“My lord?” the man said coldly. “You may have neglected your duties for your silly whims, but I have never given you permission to disassociate from me.”

Eblin swallowed. “Father,” he said carefully, the word feeling like acid on his tongue, “we only just discovered the existence of a ledger before you came in. It was the intruder who orchestrated this mess.”

The man pressed his lips together, burning Eblin with his gaze. Then he sighed, put a gloved hand in his pocket, and raised his chin a little higher as he looked back at Michelle. Her shoulders hunched in surprise.

“I apologize, Inspector,” he said pleasantly, his expression smoothing out. “I’m just a little stressed, but I should not have taken it out on you.”

Eblin flinched. It still sounded like a reprimand to him.

“What is being done to apprehend the intruder?”

Michelle hesitated, but didn’t seem to share Eblin’s sentiment about still being under reprimand. She relaxed and started detailing their moves so far.

“We’ll be sending people out to investigate the brothels, especially the one this woman supposedly came from. I intend to confiscate the ledger the newspaper has and to follow any other leads we find from the readings.”

“Good. Where is Inspector Jacques?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “He has yet to arrive.”

“When he does, send him to me.” The Regent turned away. “Meanwhile, contain any and all information not already leaked.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Regent left, and the room suddenly had air again. Eblin drooped against the monitor table, feeling like he’d just run three miles. His nerves were shot and his muscles exhausted.

“He’s… intense,” Michelle whispered when she was mostly certain the Regent was far enough away not to hear.

“You have no idea.”

***

Amicus: 17 Years Old

She was dying.

Or, rather, she should have been dying.

There were people all around her. But, worse, she remembered snippets of how she’d gotten here. It made her panic whenever she was awake. And she didn’t know whether to act like a beast, growling and snarling at her newest captors… or a scared young woman, crying herself back to oblivion.

They’d carried her from the arena. Vaguely, she remembered fighting the mother troll, motivated by her own madness and maybe a touch of fear. No, a lot of fear. Because it was all she could do to hold onto her sanity as they dragged her to the body pit. 

This was the real reason the gladiatorial arena was called ‘the Pitts.’

Behind the building was a big field. People who weren’t superstitious of ghosts and spectors would sometimes camp there as they waited, trying to get into the arena itself or for others to come out and give them a rundown on what happened.

She’d never seen the field until then, but she’d heard the stories by listening to her handlers and the guards.

There were spectators out there, too. People who laughed as the bodies of slaves and beasts were thrown into deep graves. The graves were covered in a spellstone that encouraged quick decomposition, so in two years they could reopen the grave and find nothing, redoing the work all over again.

It made her sick then.

And it made her sick now as she half remembered being dragged out there, almost dead and people watching. Her mind would go black, sometimes in madness, but mostly from pain and loss of blood.

They’d tossed her in, right on top of something, someone, she thought she, herself, might’ve killed that day.

They weren’t even waiting for her to finish dying. She even felt the spray of dirt as they tossed a shovelful on top of her.

“Tanya’s god,” she’d whimpered, one last plea to a Being who had never heard her.

The next thing she knew, she was not in the grave.

It took her months to piece together what happened. It came from her fragmented memories and the evidence around her. Months during which she’d seen the same Academic students and researchers coming in and out of her room.

Someone had been in the field that day who normally wouldn’t have been there. She still didn’t know what the elf was doing there, only that he’d, for whatever reason, demanded her body.

Thinking she was dead, or close enough to dead that it didn’t matter, the guards had given it over.

Legally, she was a free woman. They couldn’t have stopped the elf even if they wanted to reject his pay.

The healers had taken care of her body. She vaguely remembered, or thought she remembered, their exclaimations over the horrible job ‘previous healers’ had done. She’d laughed over that, scaring the healers into backing away.

Previous healers, how hilarious!

There had been almost no previous healers. She healed herself. Mostly. It had been difficult because of how careful she had to be.

If she’d been caught, she would’ve been killed.