Chapter Text
"Thank the Maker you're not that creepy thing with the deep voice."
The girl shifts from foot to foot, her hands fussing over her wrists in a restless rhythm. He notices, with a prickle of anxiety, the rawness of the gesture and wonders—could it be that the Mourn Watch now resorts to manacles? He fervently hopes not. Her hair, a pale, unruly veil of disarray, sways as she tilts her head. The frayed ends suggest a braid long since unraveled.
"Indeed," he replies. "I am not Vorgoth. They have, however, allowed me to speak with you."
"And you are?"
"Professor Emmrich Volkarin." One of his hands, rebellious and eager for liberty, begins to slip away from its restraint, held by the fingers of the other at his back, but he catches himself. No, he reminds himself. You do not extend a hand to a thief; you do not proffer an open palm. "At your service."
Her head tilts further, birdlike. "And what service might that be?" she says, smiling wryly. "Professor."
"The sort that might permit you to walk free." He lets the pause linger for effect. "Would you care for some tea?" he asks. "Our circumstances, as they are, do not absolve us of civility. And you do look rather cold."
Her nod is slight, an almost imperceptible gesture. But it suffices.
He steps to the door, warded, of course. A gentle but effective deterrent should she try to slip through. He cracks it open just enough to summon Manfred. "Oh, please, would you be so kind and fetch us some Stripweed tea? Do remember the sugar and cream, if you will."
Manfred returns with his usual enthusiasm, and the girl’s demeanor shifts instantly. The shadows beneath her eyes retreat, her face brightens with a smile too wide to contain. She clasps her hands together like a delighted child and, astonishingly, coos—coos, of all things.
"Oh, aren't you a cute dear," she says, her voice lilting with delight.
A pleased hiss escapes Manfred.
"And so polite," she adds.
The hiss deepens, tinged with shyness.
"And those goggles!" she exclaims, leaning forward for a better look. "And that little backpack! How impeccably dapper you are."
Oh no, he thinks, as her stream of compliments continues to flow toward Manfred, a pang of unwitting tenderness blooming in his chest. This, then, is how objectivity meets the gallows, swinging by the neck from the noose of sentiment.
The Mourn Watch has been robbed before. It is, after all, the nature of things. Accumulate enough glittering trifles in one place, mound enough mausoleums with the detritus of noble lives, and the pilferers will come, danger be damned.
This one, though, this thief, bears the air of repentance. She tried and failed, received her bloody nose, and presented her wrists for binding without complaint.
Sometimes, he intervenes. Sometimes, he does not. More often than he cares to admit, he indulges himself in trying to understand. Grave robbers disgust him, but the curtailment of opportunity disgusts him more. To cut it from the grasp of the young, who are perhaps simply desperate, simply lost—he cannot abide it. Redirection, not condemnation.
"Well, then," he says, as the tea cascades into her cup with a gentle murmur, "why don’t you tell me how you found your way into our vaults?"
"Three sugars," the thief says before he hands it to her, shaking her head. "No, make it four."
****
Her name is Rook. There is another name, she tells him one evening. A name she does not much like, a name she has not spoken in years, and for which she would be terribly cross with him should he ever utter it. Rook, as he comes to know her over the course of weeks—weeks of halting conversations, of moments stretched thin by silences—becomes a study in contrasts.
When he unseals the wards and allows her, at last, to step beyond the boundaries of their guarded truce, she reveals herself as a creature of porcelain fragility: skin pale as bone ash, hair caught somewhere between shades, and beneath her left eye, three freckles, enigmatic as ellipses at the end of a question left unanswered.
He asks her, in what he believes is a reasonable tone, whether she would prefer to make herself useful to the Watch while her fate is being decided, or if she’d rather languish in her little room. She looks at him as though he’s suggested she jump headfirst into a pit of spikes and responds with a question of her own: who, in their right mind, would pick the latter?
And so, a few times a week, he tolerates her presence in his office, assigning her some menial, mind-numbing task meant to occupy her hands and keep her from, presumably, picking his pockets or setting something on fire.
Sometimes, though, he lets her be. He lets her read or sprawl in one of the armchairs as if it were hers, or wander about, poking at his belongings. Like today.
“Is that a Ferelden medallion of service?” she asks suddenly, her voice breaking the stillness as she moves across his office like a sparrow alighting on strange, unfamiliar branches. Her attention sharpens on a glass case, her breath fogging the pane as she leans closer, the reflection of her pale face softening its polished surface. “Blessed Age, no less. Well, well. Collectors would part with their eyeteeth for one of these.”
“Yes,” he says absently, his focus still tethered to the paper beneath his quill. The scratching does not falter.
She cannot keep still. Her movements are a flurry of restless energy, the birdling flitting to another perch. Her eyes catch on the next display. “And that’s a whisperstone pendant. Orlesian, obviously.”
"Why do you say that?"
“The scrollwork,” she explains, “is the giveaway. It’s fleur-motif, pure Orlesian. Popular for, oh, five or six years about two decades ago. Look at the lines, thin and twisting, like ivy trained over an archway. They love that sort of thing in Orlais. Too delicate for Tevinter, not bold enough for Ferelden. It’s supposed to look effortless, organic, but anyone who’s worked a piece like this knows the hours that go into balancing something so deliberately asymmetrical.”
Her hand drops, like she's determined not to smudge the glass with the sweat of her fingertips. “And then there are the lions. Orlais loves its lions. Family sigils, coats of arms, even their coinage can’t resist. That one there, on the clasp? That’s no random decoration. It marks the guild that made it. These pendants weren’t just jewelry; they were status. They told the world exactly where you came from and exactly who you wanted to be.”
She's looking at him now. “Pieces like this still turn up in minor noble vaults, or in the kind of backstreet shops where the owner offers you a drink before asking how you came by it. But you have to know what you’re looking at. And more importantly,” she adds, even clicks her tongue, “you have to know who not to sell it to.”
“Very good,” he praises.
She catches his expression, the barest flicker of something flaring in her eyes. Annoyance, amusement, indifference, exasperation. Some chimera of all of them combined. “What?” she asks. “Did you think I wouldn’t know? That I’ve been wandering through life, plucking shiny things without understanding them?” Her voice dips, accusatory now. “Just because I take something doesn’t mean I don’t know its worth.”
“I did not mean to assume,” he murmurs.
But she is already elsewhere, taking flight again, now drawn to a small coin, unremarkable to all but those who know. “This, though,” she says, pointing with a single finger for emphasis. “Why are you holding onto a scratch?”
“A scratch?” he echoes, confused.
She scoffs, shaking her head. “A mark, a burner, a ghost penny. Whatever you call it, Professor. Don’t tell me you’ve been keeping it for fun.” She opens the case to retrieve it before he can stop her, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. “This little bastard? Hot property, and not in a good way. Back when the South was all lit up with mages losing their shit, these were the passkeys. Something to slip in the mitt during a handshake, or drop in a pocket on a bump. Showed you were on the up, you know? A way for apostates to clock each other without opening their mouths and getting their tongues ripped out by templars.”
He watches her, bewildered, as she keeps going, the coin flickering between her fingers like it’s weightless. “Look at this edge,” she says, tapping it against her nail. “Filed all uneven—good for catching in fabric, see? Makes for an easy slip. And feel this heft.” She tosses it lightly into the air before catching it again, as though proving a point. “Double-poured. Just heavy enough to nudge a scale. Perfect for making someone think it’s worth more than it is, or fucking with anyone weighing their odds. And here—this? The sigil? Off-center.” She tilts it toward him like the detail should be obvious. “That’s the dead giveaway. Any idiot would think it’s just a mint error, but someone in the game? They know. It’s a marker. A way of saying, I’m with you. Or, you know, I’m about to get you killed if the wrong pair of eyes sees it.”
Individually, the words make sense; familiar, harmless little syllables he can almost shake hands with. But once she starts weaving them together, they transform into some mysterious incantation.
He’s clinging to the meaning of one out of seven, cursing the fact that no amount of Mourn Watch training prepared him for this whirlwind of criminal jargon and verbal acrobatics.
“A marked coin,” he echoes faintly, feeling distinctly moronic as he stares at her. It’s as though he’s been thrust back into his student days, ill-prepared for a lecture after a night spent debating spirits over spirits, when nothing the instructor says quite lodges in his brain.
“And this here,” Rook adds, rubbing the rim of the coin, “is cut just shy of clean. Means it’s been circulated, right? Used. This isn’t fresh. Someone’s run it through a few hands.”
He blinks, entirely lost now. “I’m sorry,” he says hesitantly, his tone carrying the tentative cadence of a man trying not to appear completely ignorant. “Rough edge? Double-poured? I don’t quite follow.” He clears his throat, searching for firmer footing. “Though I assume, based on your expertise, that you know precisely what a marked coin entails?”
“I certainly hope so.” She shifts on the balls of her feet, a pendulum of anxious energy, her braid swaying like a pale metronome behind her. “For a while, every magister in Tevinter wanted one. What, with the mage rebellion in the South and all. Secretly circulated by apostates”—here, she raises her hands in a flourish, a sarcastic mimicry of respect—“as a way to identify one another without attracting templars. Oh, the drama.” She flashes him a sweet, empty smile. “So there you go. Clear enough for you? All cleaned up, polished, made palatable for delicate ears. Or should I write it down in footnotes with a nice little bibliography for your academic sensibilities?”
The coin is returned to its resting place.
"Indeed," he replies and now he's rising too, joining her at the display. His hands rest behind his back, loosely clasped, the pose of a lecturer before an expectant audience because he dares not appear any more casual with her. "Do you care for history?"
"I do. Else how would I know what to steal?"
"And beyond your… profession," he presses. "Does it hold no further allure?"
"It does," she echoes. "But allure doesn’t butter bread."
Her voice carries a fine thread of melancholy, delicate and tensile, twined with something wistful that lingers in the spaces between. She tilts her head, gives him half a smile, half a shrug, and then looses a quiet joke, soft, self-effacing, its edges blurred by irony. He catches only the cadence of it, but the shape of the humor is unmistakable.
It is the humor of diminishment, the same wry armor he himself had worn once, years ago, in the shabby theater of his youth. A jest, no doubt, about being the child of a nameless so-and-so—a dead so-and-so at that—so how could she possibly aspire to this or that? He feels, almost against his will, the phantom strain of her efforts, the scrunching and clawing, the slow contortions of the self, twisting and binding and knotting into some shape that might, with time, evoke respect.
He knows it too well, this ceaseless labor. He had worn it like a second skin, had endured a thousand little degradations until the day came when he was not merely himself, but Professor Emmrich Volkarin. A name weighted now with prestige, spoken in tones of quiet admiration, while the raw scaffolding of his origins lies forgotten by all but himself. He does not speak of it, though he does not bury it either. It sits in the attic of his memory, gathering dust but never entirely out of reach.
"Would you like to?" he whispers suddenly, his voice carrying a fragility that surprises him. The words escape him spontaneously, drawn out by the girl before him, this audacious girl, this pretty girl with her deft, restless fingers and her bold, broken ambitions. There is something in her that holds him, something in the tilt of her chin and the shadow in her eyes that reminds him of himself, and, far more painfully, of all those who were not as fortunate, who scrabbled and clawed and yet still fell short of the summit.
She twirls, a pirouette of insolence, her smile lopsided and guarded, then softer, coy. Her hand glides up to her hair, fingers threading through the pale, disheveled strands in a careless choreography.
"And what," she says, her voice soft, sing-song, "do you have in mind?"
"I can carve you a place in the Mourn Watch, dear," he offers.
Her lips twitch. "I already have one, don’t I?" she asks, her voice bending toward mockery. "A trial looms, doesn’t it? A sentence, perhaps? Another dark little cell waiting for me?"
"I can soften that fall."
The amusement shatters. Her brows draw together in a severe V. Her lips curl into something ugly, something venomous. The air between them changes, now brittle and cold. She regards him with narrowed eyes, a predator studying a misstep.
"Let me guess," she drawls, "all I have to do for that is spread my legs."
Her words strike like a slap. No, a punch. He feels the ground sway beneath him, the breath stutter in his lungs. For a moment, he is floundering. He wants, desperately, to tell her she is wrong. He wants to take the acid from her words, to wipe that frown from her face, to assure her that her hair, her eyes, her beauty—none of it is the foundation of his interest. He wants to tell her that he sees something else entirely.
Instead, he retreats, three deliberate steps backward, his hands raised as though warding off the very weight of her accusation.
"No, no," he murmurs, voice trembling with urgency. He wants to tell her of the others—the forgotten, the broken, the unpolished—whom he has taken under his wing. He wants to tell her how he has eased lives, even when his kindness was not wanted, even when it went unnoticed. He wants to explain that these gestures were, and are, echoes of his own unfulfilled longing, the help he wished someone had offered him.
She regards him with a feline gaze, the kind that leans back on its haunches and waits for the world to tilt in its favor. She holds the pause; holds it far longer than she has any right to. She, who walks free only by the grace of his interference. She, who was caught with her long fingers deep in the treasure chest, red-handed and unrepentant. A little criminal, a pretty criminal, the sort who would—he knows this as surely as he knows the weight of his own name—smash every glass case in his office and slip away with the gleaming contents if his eyes faltered even for a moment.
"Why not, then," she says at last. "That does sound rather nice."
****
So very noble, the oily voice within him jeers. His favorite little fiction, is it not? This fantasy of himself as savior, a knight of silk and roses. Has it not lingered since his youth, when he first discovered how words could bloom upon his tongue? His very first talent. Waxing poetic, kissing a girl’s hand, offering her flowers heavy with fragrance she neither asks for nor desires.
Or perhaps the boy. Ah, yes, the boy. Impress him, dazzle him, sweep him out of the gray tide of his days. Save him. Save them all. From their plight, from their folly, from the clutches of their own undoing. So that, at last, they might turn to him, lashes heavy with gratitude, and murmur, Oh, Emmrich, what would we do without you, dear Emmrich?
Because that is how one builds a family when one has none. You cast out your nets, spun from yearning, and hope, with a ferocity you scarcely admit even to yourself, that some bright and broken soul—one that quickens the blood, one that makes you ache—might, in their wandering, stumble into your snare and, perhaps, decide to stay.
And here he is once more, draped in the threadbare robes of his savior complex, taking on yet another project; a pale-haired, pale-eyed charity case, something delicate and broken to be mended under his careful hand. Merely because she reminds him of himself.
No, not at all, the voice slithers up again. It is because he is lonely, it sneers, because he is pathetic, because he needs someone to need him, to wrap their frailty around his strength, so he can pretend, if only for a moment, that he is vital.
He ignores it. He presses on, through the labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy, through forms and signatures, through the interminable tedium of legality.
The Mourn Watch does not only need mages; he knows this. She cannot wield the Fade, cannot thread its shimmering, dangerous loom. That much he had discerned early on. But the Watch is not merely summonings and rites. It is also ink on parchment, chronicles meticulously penned, the preservation of histories fragile and sacred. And she loves these things, he has seen it; the way her gaze lingers over old texts, the reverence in her fingers as they trace the edge of a page.
Maybe he can give that to her.
****
“What are you reading, dear?” he asks, half-curious, half-irritated by the peculiar quiet she’s wrapped herself in.
She has been silent for hours now, a feat so out of character it feels almost ominous, ignoring every minor task he’s sent her way.
The bureaucrats who grudgingly approved his impassioned plea to let this little thief walk free would probably spontaneously combust if they saw her now. All that paperwork he’d dumped on their desks, reams upon reams of it, and the endless, self-righteous arguments he’d made.
If they caught so much as a glimpse of her, lounging like a particularly insolent cat, they wouldn’t just revoke their decision. No, they’d march into his office personally, boot him out of his chair, set fire to his credentials, and make sure he was escorted out so fast he wouldn’t have time to pack his pen collection.
He repeats the question, louder this time, and is rewarded only with the faint, wet sound of her tongue flicking over her fingertips as she turns yet another page.
Before he can stop himself, he leaves his desk to stroll over. Standing behind her, he peers down over the back of the armchair where she's grown roots, tilting his head to read the title printed neatly at the top of the page.
The Comprehensive Register of Nevarran Nobility: Lineages, Landed Estates, Funeral Plots, and Legacies, 8:05 Blessed - 9:42 Dragon
"Why the sudden interest in aristocracy?" he asks, eyebrows raised in suspicion.
"So I know who to rob, obviously," Rook mocks. He can’t see her eye-roll, but he can practically feel it, as though synesthesia has chosen this precise moment, after five long decades of decorum, to embrace him. Her sarcasm tastes purple, the kind of purple that clings to royalty and treachery alike. "I'm trying to find you," she admits after a moment.
"What?" He blinks, thrown off.
"You," she repeats, slowly. "I'm. Trying. To. Find. You." She taps two fingers against the book’s cover for emphasis. "Why isn’t your family mentioned in here, Emmrich?"
"That would be because we have absolutely no business being mentioned," he says, gesturing grandly around the room as if it were all of Nevarra. "Anywhere. In anything. You will not find my name in there. I assure you, the authors of that tome would sooner catalogue a particularly distinguished barn animal than bother with my ancestry."
She sets the book face down on her thighs and twists halfway around to stare at him, her brows furrowed in genuine confusion. "You’re not a noble?" she asks. "You strut around with a name like Vol-ka-rin and expect me to believe you’re not a noble?"
Before he can stop himself, he starts laughing. And it’s not a polite chuckle or a dignified snicker; it’s an absolutely obscene laugh. Loud, wheezing, and horrifically undignified. It tears out of him with all the grace of a whipped mule, painful in his throat. He sounds, and is completely certain he looks, like a squealing pig being hauled off to slaughter.
Dragging himself to his desk, he collapses into his chair, clutching his stomach as the laughter continues, unstoppable. "My dear," he manages between gasps, wiping at his eyes. "My dear. No, no, you speak to the son of a butcher."
"Stop laughing at me," Rook snaps.
"I’m not laughing at you," he tries to say, but it is choked out between more laughter.
Except he is laughing at her. Entirely, unequivocally, uncontrollably laughing at her. And he can’t stop. Tears spring to his eyes, his ribs ache, and he’s certain he’s about five seconds away from either sobbing hysterically or coughing up a lung.
"Oh, fuck you, Emmrich," she mutters, slamming the book onto the floor with enough force to make it bounce. She stomps toward the door, frustration personified. "I’m going to teach Manfred to boil water in just the right spot to give your ceiling mold."
"Rook," he gasps, still giggling, his voice a desperate wheeze. "Rook..."
But she’s gone, and he’s left there, laughing like a complete moron. Laughing himself stupid. Laughing himself lightheaded. Laughing until he tries to stand, trips over the chair leg, and very nearly breaks his nose attempting to retrieve the book she manhandled so violently.
Beneath the absurdity, there’s something else. A strange, heady sensation that sticks with him even as the laughter finally subsides. He feels, for the first time in what seems like forever, very, very alive.
****
"Dear Rook," he says, his quill pausing mid-sentence, its ink bead trembling at the tip. "Would you care to be my assistant?"
"Until your Mourn Watch decides what to do with me?" she asks, her tone a delicate balancing act between nonchalance and sarcasm.
"Until then." Until he can get them all to change their minds, to see her as he does: a shard of something valuable beneath the rough edges.
Until I can make them see reason, until I can unravel their blind judgments, until I can save you.
She perches on his desk. Her hands drift through the carefully ordered chaos of his papers, scattering them like dead leaves in a sudden gust. "That makes me feel so important," she says.
He watches her, the corner of his mouth twitching against his will. He supposes that’s a yes.
****
She is shelving; a task he gave her without much thought, a mundane distraction to keep her occupied while his mind turned elsewhere. He has almost forgotten she is there, so quiet and precise are her movements, until he hears it: a huff, sharp and scornful, followed by a single muttered word.
“Hypocrite."
“What’s that now?” he calls.
“Nothing,” she replies, her voice gilded with feigned innocence. She is perched midway up the rolling ladder, her profile framed against the shelves. Even from this distance, even at this angle, he sees the great theatrical roll of her eyes beneath the sweep of her lashes.
He sets down his papers, nudging aside the heavy brass stamp meant to seal them, and leans back in his chair. "Come again," he says, his tone low, the kind of tone that suggests he will wait as long as necessary for the answer.
Rook sighs, an exaggerated, exasperated sound, and finally angles her chin downward to look at him. Her fingers drum an annoyed staccato against the book's spine. “You don’t eat meat, Emmrich,” she begins. “But vellum is fine?” She lifts the tome higher, waving it at him as if brandishing evidence at a trial. “Do the calves die for your ideals, or does their sacrifice conveniently not count?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, exhaling through his teeth, the gesture measured but weary. “I did not write that book, Rook,” he replies. “Nor did I oversee the particulars of its production. If you were to examine the edition notice, you would find it was published some thirty years ago, long before my hands ever held it.”
“But you own it,” she counters, her eyes narrowing with the predatory sharpness of someone who smells blood. “You keep it here. You display it. You benefit from it. So tell me, Professor, how are you any different from the butcher who sold the animal?”
He straightens in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him, his expression faintly exasperated but composed. “My dear, young Rook,” he begins, his voice slipping into a familiar cadence, the gentle, rehearsed rhythm of someone accustomed to winning debates by attrition. “It is a fallacy to conflate complicity with endorsement. Were I to purge this collection of every volume printed on vellum, or indeed paper from unsustainable sources, I would be left with precious little of academic worth. As scholars, we must engage critically with the materials we inherit, regardless of their origins. To do otherwise is to bury history beneath the false pretense of moral clarity.”
“So you pick and choose,” she concludes, the words dripping with faux understanding. “That’s what I thought. Hypocrite.” She slams the book back into place, the sound resonating through the room like a gavel punctuating a final judgement. “But it’s fine. Really. We’re all hypocrites. I’m a hypocrite. That student who came to see you this morning? Definitely a hypocrite. Just at different times, for different reasons.”
She descends the ladder with a hop, her braid swaying behind her like the tail of some sleek, amused creature. When her feet touch the ground, she doesn’t look at him again. Instead, she moves to the next shelf, leaving the faint scent of derision in her wake.
He thought he had entombed this part of himself in the past, locked it away with the rest of his youthful embarrassments, the tender, foolish things he had outgrown. But no, here it is again, clinging like sap to his every thought. He feels small, diminished, absurdly lesser. And yet, by all the cold logic he so often clings to, he knows he ought not to.
She is the one with the sticky fingers, the one caught in the tangled thorns of the law, the one whose morality seems to shift like sunlight on water, here and gone. He, on the other hand, has tried—oh, how he has tried—to construct his life around kindness, or at least its semblance. To soften the sharp edges of the world where he could.
And yet, it does not matter. None of it matters. Because in her presence, he is no longer the man he believes himself to be but someone else entirely, years younger, vulnerable, self-conscious. He is that boy again, the one who lingered too long over his notes, waiting for his classmate to look up, to stay a moment longer, to let their fingers brush as they reached for the same book. He remembers the tremor of his heart, the terrible, exquisite ache of wanting something as simple, as impossible, as the boy’s hand in his own.
Now, the memory blends, folds into her; the pale arc of her braid, the brightness of her laughter cascading around him. He wants to hear that laughter again, to see her look at him as she had in that fleeting, golden moment, as though he were something worth seeing.
It is foolish. Worse, it is pathetic. And yet the craving remains, threading through him, burrowing itself into the marrow of his thoughts, until it feels as though it has always been there, waiting, quiet and patient, for this exact instant to bloom.
“You told me not long ago,” he begins, the words rushing out as if propelled by a force outside himself, slipping past the usual gates of his restraint, “that you know who to take from, what to take, and who not to sell to.”
"I did. I do."
"Show me," he requests.
"Why?"
"Scholarly curiosity." He wags a finger at her in mock chastisement. Perhaps she'll find him funny; perhaps she'll stop frowning. "To recognize the telltale signs, should I ever find myself in your orbit during a moment of professional... inclination."
She studies him for a moment, her expression neutral. "Fine," she agrees.
She lifts two fingers, curling them toward herself in a gesture that feels more command than invitation. Her eyes scan him, a slow, methodical sweep that feels invasive in its precision.
“For someone like you,” she says finally, her voice brisk, clinical, “I’d start with the basics.”
“The basics?” he prompts.
“Your purse,” she explains, as if to a novice. “If you had one, I’d cut it. Quick and quiet. If the straps were reinforced, I’d slice them close to the stitching. Easiest spot to compromise. If it were deeper in your robes, I’d bump you, make it feel incidental, and you’d never think twice. Easy mark.”
“Alas,” he says, arms parting, “I carry no such purse.”
“No,” she agrees, her gaze sliding to his vest. “Which means I’d take the simplest alternative.”
"Which is?"
Her smile unfurls slowly, a crescent of mischief, her eyes shining with the light of some private joke. She begins to circle him, her presence orbiting his like a shadow with weight. And then she stops, extending her hand toward him, her brow arching in invitation. For a moment, he hesitates—what is he allowing?—but then his gloved hand falls into hers, soft as surrender.
“Oh, it would be quite simple,” she explains. Her fingers drum lightly against his wrist before gliding upward, and then she tucks her arm through his as though they were promenading through a sunlit boulevard. “I’d say something like, oh, won’t you take me for a walk, sir, after running into you at a flower shop, or a tailor’s, or wherever it is you haunt when you’re not holed up with books and ghosts.”
Her fingers adjust against his arm, claiming their place. She tugs him forward gently—three steps, no more—as if testing the rhythm of her imagined scenario. “You’d say yes,” she continues, not asking but stating. “Because you’re you. And then you’d talk to me about…” She pauses, her nose wrinkling faintly, as if rifling through her mind. “Skeletons, I suppose.”
“It’s a rich topic,” he defends, his voice slipping into the earnestness of a man who cannot quite resist the urge to justify himself.
“It’s a creepy topic,” she counters, her pace languid as she completes a slow half-circle back to his desk. “But sure, I’d indulge you. Let you ramble for a while. When I’m done feeling you up”—her hand slides briefly over his upper arm—“I’d tell you it’s time for me to leave. By then, I’d know exactly what you’re carrying, where it is, and whether I could get to it. Not without first remarking on how terribly kind you are, though, how amenable, how gentlemanly. And do something like this.”
She wraps her arms around him, swift and certain, before his thoughts have a chance to catch up, before the usual tide of decorum and reason can rise to the surface. He should disentangle himself; he should murmur some gentle reprimand about propriety and distance, about the barriers that ought to stand between them. But instead, his arms lift and close around her with a quiet inevitability, instinct overtaking intellect in the way that it sometimes must. What else is there to do when another body presses so near, when their cheek rests softly against your chest, when their breath comes sweet and warm, mingling with your own?
She holds him tightly, as though she had sought this closeness without even realizing it. And then she laughs, right into his vest, a lovely little sound, intimate, just his to hear, vibrating faintly against his ribs.
“You smell nice, Emmrich,” she says suddenly, her voice softened by the remnants of laughter. “That’s not part of the script, by the way.” She tightens her embrace, inhales deeply. “What is that? Moss? Flowers? Tree sap? Gods, where did you find any of that in the Necropolis? Oh well, doesn’t matter. I approve.”
For a moment, he wants to reply, to tell her so do you, that she smells faintly of his books, of his world, of the quiet smoke that clings stubbornly to the corners of his office. But before the words materialize, she steps back, her hands slipping away, her expression entirely too pleased. And there, dangling from her fingers, is his pocket watch.
“Oh,” he says, faintly startled.
“This pocket watch of yours,” she begins, holding it up, her tone shifting into something more technical, more precise. “Two-tone. Mother-of-pearl dial. Golden hands. Expensive, obviously. A clean pawnshop could move it without asking questions. You’d be annoyed, maybe, but you wouldn’t lose sleep.”
Her fingers shift, letting the chain slide through them until the watch swings gently at the bottom. “But the chain,” she continues, her voice softer now, though no less analytical, “is the opposite. Ugly design. Base metal. Clearly not worth anything on the market. However,” she says, tilting her head, her eyes flicking to his, “this is the piece you care about.”
"Why do you say that?"
“The watch is scratched,” she says matter-of-factly, pointing to the bezel. “You drop it, you bump it against furniture, walls, whatever’s in your path. But the chain?” She swings it back and forth the way a hypnotist would. “This, you keep in pristine condition. No knots, no bends. You polish it. You’re careful. If I took it, you wouldn’t be annoyed. You’d be angry.”
“It was my mother’s,” he admits softly, the confession slipping out before he can consider its implications.
Her expression shifts—no slyness now, no mischief—just a brief, almost imperceptible softening, like a sharp-edged mirror fogging over. Her fingers find his, and she takes his hand with a quiet confidence, placing the watch gently into his palm. Her fingers curl over his, pressing down lightly, as if to seal the object, and the moment, into place.
“Of course it was,” she murmurs. Her eyes drop to the chain, her thumb sliding over its links. “Your watch,” she resumes, slipping back into the brisk efficiency of her trade, “I’d sell in an instant. Easy money. Simple. Clean. No second thoughts.”
Then, with a sudden, bright laugh, she lifts his hand and presses her lips to his knuckles. Not a kiss, not quite, but something more ephemeral, more maddeningly intimate.
“But your chain..." She snickers. “Yes, your chain…That, Professor,” she confides, her smile broadening, “I wouldn’t sell. No, no, no. That wouldn’t be nearly satisfying enough. I’d extort you. Not a sale in the ordinary sense, true, but something far more profitable. For me, of course.”
She breathes the final words into his skin, her voice dissolving there, an invisible tattoo of warmth that vanishes the moment her fingers slip away. His hand drops too quickly, the weight of the watch tugging it down, though what presses heavier is the absence of her touch. A little anchor suddenly gone.
He feels the faint stirring of the arrows beneath the dial, their delicate clicking like the beating of wings trapped in glass. What are they rushing toward? He cannot stop himself from wondering, absurdly, helplessly, if they are not marking the passage to something waiting just ahead; a moment, a breath, a flicker of time when her hand might meet his again.
How sickeningly poetic.
Would it stay next time? Would her touch press against him with more weight, less pretense? The thought unsnarls itself, separating into a hundred fragile ribbons, each climbing him like vines to dangle from the ceiling above, waiting for him to pull up a chair and finish the work of his own undoing. It is achingly tender, unbearably foolish, and yet it clings to him, wrapping itself tightly around the soft places he would rather keep hidden.
"Oh, Emmrich," Rook whispers, shaking her head with a smile that’s almost sad. “Never go to a brothel. They’ll eat you alive, and not in the fun way.”