Chương 5: Chapter 4: A Change of Plan

When they entered, Jack was listening at the other door. One hand braced against the stair, ear angled toward the wood. The stairwell carried sound differently from the open floor. Boots softened by distance, voices blunted by beams and stacked air. The guards were still moving. Still unhurried. Only then did he turn back to the room. Aldric stepped in first and stopped short. His eyes went to the thin smear of blood near the desk, then to the rise and fall of the man's chest.

"Is he dead?" Aldric asked.

"No," Jack said.

"Just unconscious. But we need to decide what to do with him next." Aldric moved to check on him. The man lay bound on his side, wrists secured behind him, ankles tied with care rather than haste. Jack had done it right. No circulation cut. No knots that would panic when the blood came back. Alive. Breathing. Aldric exhaled, tension easing from his shoulders, though his gaze lingered a moment longer before he straightened. The relief didn't settle. It shifted concern had replaced it, heavier and harder to ignore.

Seraphine closed the exterior door behind them and slid the bar back into place, careful to leave it looking untouched. Then she turned, eyes moving from the unconscious man to the scattered papers, the open ledger, the charcoal marks worked and reworked into the wood.

"If he saw you," she said quietly, "this leaves us exposed."

"He didn't see me," Jack replied. Aldric frowned.

"How can you be sure?" Jack didn't hesitate.

"Trust me." He nodded toward the desk.

"And he wasn't just guarding the ledger. He was deciphering it." That made Seraphine pause. She turned to look at him a mild panic crawling across her face.

"He didn't have much yet," Jack continued, "but he wasn't going to leave until he did. That much I'm certain of. I couldn't let him discover more." Seraphine studied the notes again, the careful clustering, the places where the work stalled and resumed. Her concern shifted, not gone, but redirected. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"How close?" Aldric asked.

"Close enough," Jack said. Silence settled over the room as Jack crouched beside the unconscious man, once again checking his bindings. It looked like he was bound with what the office provided cord pulled from a bundled ledger stack, a strip of canvas torn from a crate cover. The knots were placed with care rather than urgency. Secure. Considerate.

"He's a loose end." Seraphine decided.

"Loose ends are dangerous when left unchecked."

"We are not killing him, Sera." Aldric said with a feverish resolve. Sera looked as if she would argue when…

"He's a loose end," Jack said calmly as he worked.

"Just not ours." Seraphine watched him for a beat, then nodded once. Jack finished testing the last knot and rose smoothly to his feet.

"We deliver him to Harris," he continued.

"Something tells me our clerk will know what to do." Seraphine studied him, then smiled faintly.

"Clear thinking under pressure, I like it." Aldric frowned.

"The result will be the same."

"Maybe," Jack said.

"But it won't be on us. It'll be on Harris. And who knows, the man might surprise us." Before Aldric could argue, a shout echoed from below.

"Hey! You see him?" Boots moved. A crate scraped. Another voice followed, closer.

"I'll go ask him." Seraphine went still.

"Hide," she whispered, already drawing a breath. She let the spell slide over her features as footsteps reached the stairs. Aldric and Jack hauled the unconscious man behind the desks just as the office door opened. The man who had been reading the ledger was pacing in front of the desk, rubbing at his temple as if the numbers refused to settle. She had copied him perfectly, down to the charcoal smudges on his fingers and the faint streak along his cheek where he'd dragged a hand across his face in frustration.

Even the way he stood was right: shoulders tight, weight shifting, irritation restrained rather than spent. When he spoke, his voice matched just as precisely. Jack didn't know how she'd managed that without hearing him first. He stopped trying to parse it and filed it away. He cataloged it with most things that brushed too close to magic. He decided long ago that magic was to be acknowledged, respected, and left alone.

"Well?" the newcomer demanded.

"You get something or not?"

"Not," Seraphine snapped irritably, not looking up.

"Turns out it's just sloppy accounting. Whoever wrote this should be fired."

"I thought you said—""I was wrong, if you want to stare at that cursed book all night, you do it," she cut in, tossing the fake ledger to the intruder. It was a bold move and one that Jack was thoroughly impressed by.

"He won't like that you wasted his time. You told him we found something." The man huffed, uneasy.

"We shouldn't have stayed here longer than necessary."

"Then move the goods," she said.

"Tonight." He muttered under his breath and turned away, but not before setting the ledger down on a crate, footsteps retreating down the stairs. Seraphine let the disguise fall, and then she slumped into the man's vacant chair. Clearly exhausted due to her use of magic, she gathered the ledger and the scattered notes, then shoved the remaining papers aside, just enough disorder to sell panic. Just enough absence to suggest flight.

"He ran," she said quietly.

"Took what he found and left the rest. Thieves get double-crossed all the time." They moved the unconscious man out the back, stashing him in an abandoned boathouse along the way to the docks. By the time they slipped back into the fog, the warehouse guards were still walking their loops. And the story of the night had already been rewritten.