“Illegal. Slavery.” Tom slapped a piece of paper onto a note board and secured it in place. On it, there was written the name of our next enemy: ‘Wolf Street Gang.’

“While they are known for their high quality … goods, they apparently … Pauline, do you have a question?” The whore, right next to me, wriggled on her chair and lifted her hand up in the air while snipping like a person everyone would hate.

“Yes! Why do they have high quality?” She asked while looking down at her own notes. One look over to these notes revealed quite a few questions and even when she had to ask them. Slightly bored already, I wondered why I was even in this shitty brothel in the first place. Well, Tom intrigued me by saying he would hold a ‘Power Point Presentation’, but neither could I see anything powerful here, nor did he make many points thus far.

“That´s a great question, Pauline. There are certain kinds of nobles who have rather unique tastes. For example, some like to torture other nobles or even very specific ones. It is quite hard to kidnap these though and because of that, they hire or buy a slave from the Wolf Street Gang.”

Even more bored about the redundancy of information I already knew, I snatched the whore´s notes out of her hands and began to read, although slightly faster than she did.

“Thank you, whore, for allowing me to ask these scripted questions myself. I really hate your voice. Going on … boring question … another boring question … oh that one is interesting: Who is Sirius?” I asked and ripped the notes to shreds in front of me. Sighing, Tom pinned a few more notes onto the wall and skipped most of his presentation altogether. At least he would hurry up considerably this way, I could already feel cancer spreading within me because of this prostitute next to me.

 “Hmm … great question! The simple answer is: We don’t know. The complicated answer is … we have fucked up somewhere. Our intelligence service collected vital intel that he is acquiring information about the White´s. Maybe we should need to improve your cover a bit.”

Which would probably entrail that my cover has been blown, otherwise they wouldn’t dare to go against a ducal family with the saint as its member. Except one of the churches asked them to ... But no, my cover was solid. The king couldn’t find out who I was and thus, there was no reason to assume someone else could.

“That’s questionable at best. I had thought long enough about this issue to know that I didn´t make any major mistakes.” I concluded.

“If you say so. Anyway, there may be another reason for this as well. The Wolf Street Gang is also wildly known for buying and selling sapphires like crazy. They are searching for a very specific one, not necessarily of magical nature, but apparently very important for them. By the way, they also gave back the sapphire ring they stole from us, so we cannot count on the help of the D’Antonio family at all.” So they didn’t need the sapphires for too long and whatever they needed to do with them didn’t damage the surface of these gemns. Honestly, I couldn’t grasp what went on in Sirius head at all.

“Maybe Mary has a sapphire. I´ll ask her later.” I said. Maybe we did have some huge sapphire that made them target my family … even though I never heard about it.

“Anyway, back to the main topic. Have you seen how he walked?” I nodded in response to his answer. Sirius dragged his right leg a bit with him as if he had some old wound, which shouldn’t be the case considering the natural healing abilities of his race. It did strike me as odd at that time, and I researched into this direction as well, but couldn’t find out anything. “Well, we consulted a medical expert … okay, we threatened him, but whatever. In any case, he assumed it was either a post-traumatic stress disorder or similar.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked while tilting my head with interest.

“He is a warrior.” He concluded as if I didn’t know already.

“Don’t you say.” Nobody who wasn’t trained could escape me this quickly. My guess was that he was from the military, but I also couldn’t exclude other possibilities.

“… which is perfectly in line with everything we found out about them so far. It is first and foremost an elite group of ex-soldiers who specialize in abducting special targets. This is how they make their money and this is also why we failed to gather more about them thus far.” Tom explained while putting another piece of paper onto the note wall.

“So you don’t have anything?” I concluded. So much to the point he was going to make.

“Yes …” He mumbled.

“Great, and why am I in a brothel then?” I asked while I stared with open hostilitiy towards the whore right next to me.

“Well, I wanted to make the powerful point that we can fight them without a large group of cannon fodder. I assume there are only twenty or so criminals in that gang, otherwise they wouldn’t need to use the information network I build up in the last few days.” Tom explained happily.

“You fucker…” I wasn’t found out. They weren’t even hostile to our underground group, but rather towards the White family directly, or me. “could have said so earlier. Did you give them anything?”

“Except that you are a horrible boss and don’t give out salary rises willy nilly?” He asked and ruffed his hair. At least he wasn’t dumb enough to give out anything crucial.

“For that, you get a pay cut.” I pointed towards him, stood up and then realized the whore was still sitting there. “And you get one as well.”

“I´m still not getting paid though.” As if I cared. She probably took part off the hundred gold coins Tom embezzled weekly.

“Is that so? Where is this nice sapphire necklace coming from then?” I reached around her neck, opened the closure and held it in my hands. It was certainly not a cheap item and as I had never seen her before with this jewellery, I assumed she must have gotten it somewhat recently. As she only breathed in sharply but didn´t complain at all, I put the item in a pocket and chuckled lightly.

That she was wearing something this very day where I would probably need such an item was quite the coincidence. I smiled towards Tom, hooded myself and left the underground room shortly afterwards. As I wasn’t wearing anything with a crown on it, I wasn’t on high alert as I stepped out onto the street, but nonetheless kept watch for anyone following me.

There were none. My underground organisation was safe. It was just Mary and Lucy White who were in danger. And these two were highly vulnerable to any violence. Reacting wouldn’t work this time.