“Are you alright?” I asked concerned as Pauline and I walked out of the room while she held her red throat.

“I´ve had worse customers.” She said, but I knew I went too far. I couldn’t even look into her eyes anymore as we walked downstairs into the procurer's room.

“Wait? Is that Tom? How have you been, mate?” As I said, I was a regular here.

“I´m fine. What about you?” I replied.

“You know, this and that. My bones aren’t the youngest ones anymore, so doing all this stuff is quite tiring.” He showed me a bunch of paperwork on the desk in front of him.

“I have the perfect offer for you then. I want to buy your business.” I stated and placed a bag full of coins on the desk.

“Tom, I´m not willing to sell my life´s wor-,” he started, but then I opened the bag I carried with me. “Sold.”

And like this, I acquired ‘The Red Baron’ from a man who held no noble title whatsoever. I made myself a new home in one of the rooms and started to sleep with Pauline regularly. I avoided the mistake I did previously though and didn’t hurt her. And thus, my days of throwing money around began.

I also bought other brothels, intending to eventually create an all-encompassing network. There were only one criterion I used to judge if I should invest in a particular brothel: How frequently they were visited by rich merchants and even more importantly, where the employees of the headquarter went. Was I not brilliant?

I didn’t even need to bribe the employees this way, I just needed to put a few sweet words into the ears of my prostitutes and they would relay them to their customers. Using this way, I quickly collected a bunch of information about the headquarters and could already draw simple blueprints of the building using the gathered information. The vault though … was nowhere to be found. Sure, there were quite a few doors the employees in my net, didn’t have access to and one of these would surely lead towards the vault, but there were just too many doors. If we couldn’t pinpoint the exact location, this plan was doomed from the start.

And so I dug, not literally, but I dug in the past of the higher-ups who probably had access to the vault and weren´t guarded all the time. I soon found the perfect person, some guy who managed the maritime trade of the guild. The problem was though, I could neither follow him unsuspiciously nor abduct them under broad daylight alone.

My old underground contacts were quite useful here as I only had to ask a few acquaintances and I was soon introduced to an apparently rather skilled assassin. Our first meeting was quite interesting.

“Hi.” I said.

“…”

“So, my contact told you who I am?” I asked as no reply whatsoever came. Assassins were weird, so I rather left it at that as I seriously didn´t want to anger him.

“…” He nodded, or at least I thought so.

“We are going to rob the merchants guild, are you certain you want to take part in this?” I wanted to support my head with my hand as this conversation already started to tire me, but the mask I wore was sadly in the way.

“…” Another nod?

“Your task and payment are on this piece of paper.” I slid it over to him. He picked it up, read the contents carefully and nodded once again. Holding a conversation with someone who was lip-reading and couldn’t speak at all was incredibly hard.

“Alright, you are hired.” I said and we shook hands. I could be considered lucky to have found him because he was apparently one of the better assassins. He was already in this business for years and hasn’t been caught once. His only downside was that he never worked with others, no matter what. For whatever reason, he needed to have a separate task he could do alone.

His first task wasn’t to abduct the manager though, but rather to look for a person in the underworld. They called him the mole, a rather skilled earth magician who spent most of his work hours underground.

My assassin, Luke, couldn’t find him directly though and so I spent my day finding a good old friend. He was honestly a madman, always trying to blow up everything whenever possible. So often in fact that he already developed his own secret formula to make explosives nobody else could. Sadly, he was always short on money to finance his explosions and took every job available. After asking in a few bars he frequented in the past, I soon found out he worked for some kind of construction company. I contacted them by letter and he immediately got in contact with me.

Several days later, I arrived at a large warehouse on the outskirts of the city. He welcomed me with wide-open arms, a beaming smile and an exploding warehouse behind him. Needless to say, he was hired. Interestingly enough, Luke got into contact with the mole on the very same day and I didn’t even need to speak to the mole as Luke apparently managed to hire him on his own.

And so, it all began. Our first team meeting was a bit weird, I would say. Our assassin looked around constantly, trying to read our lips as much as possible although we weren’t talking that much. In fact, we were trying to warm up to each other which wasn’t that easy considering one of us wanted to set everything on fire, one didn’t talk at all and the mage of our group didn’t understand most of our jokes. We also weren’t talking much about our tasks. Nobody wanted to risk being imprisoned because one of us couldn’t hold his tongue.

We were progressing slowly, but steadily. The mole dug, the assassin gathered information alongside the whores and Mr. Explosive collected the stuff he needed to blow everything up. Meanwhile, I was searching for a very specific poison that suited our needs. One that produced symptoms like a very serious, sometimes deadly illness.