"A thousand each?" Fir raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you didn't mishear, and she meant a thousand total?"

Kildare shook his head. He was still trembling, just slightly, as he reached forward to pick up his mug again. "I made sure to clarify. She means a thousand for each of us."

Mock whistled. "What's the catch?"

"Yeah, there's gotta be a catch somewhere," Snitch said. "That's a hefty price."

"She just said they figured it was fair, with asking us to spend nearly a week traveling and all. It'll probably take us close to two weeks to get this done, maybe more if we have to set up anything special like we did for the Lord Datheil job. Plus, there's the secrecy aspect of it. I figure they'd tossing a bit of extra in there so we'll be more tempted to keep our mouths shut."

Snitch frowned. "See, that's one of the things I don't like about this."

Fir reached out and lightly punched Snitch's arm. "Says the guy of many secrets."

Snitch elbowed him. "Having secrets of my own makes we even more paranoid. Besides." He looked Kildare right in the eye. "Isn't Serene from Do'or?"

The elation turned sour in Kildare's stomach. He swirled the remaining kafe in his mug for a moment before answering. "Ye-es. But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Oh for..." Snitch raised his hands and rolled his eyes. "How did you survive on the streets for so long?"

Mock narrowed her eyes. "You think that maybe Serene wants to take out her competition, and she hired this woman to lure us to Do'or?"

"Why would she need to lure us anywhere?" Kildare asked. "She could just as easily slip in and knife us in our sleep, if she wants." He looked over at Fir. "Remember the second time she showed up? Did you ever hear her coming?"

For sat back, a grimace crossing his face. Kildare resisted the urge to smirk. That had been the time Serene had triggered a trap right as he and Fir had been sneaking past it. She’d pranced right past them as they were busy trying to disentangle themselves. 

Fir shook his head. "Hate to admit it, but she's stealthier than any of us." He drummed his fingers on the table. "Maybe she doesn't want to get her hands dirty. Or maybe, she wants to use us a distraction. Set us up to get captured or killed while she does something elsewhere."

Kildare lowered his hands to his lap and bunched folds of his pants tightly into his clenched fingers. "Maybe she's not involved at all," he blurted out.

Mock, Fir, and Snitch all looked at him in various degrees of suspicion or skepticism. Kildare blew out a breath. How to phrase this...?

"We haven't see her for a while," he started slowly. "It's been...what? Two jobs since we've seen any sign of her? Three? How many months is that?"

Fir wiggled his fingers as he counted up in his head. "Five and a half months."

"Maybe," Snitch said reluctantly.

"So maybe she's done with us." Kildare looked around.

Mock wore a skeptical look—one eyebrow arched, head tilted back slightly. Fir frowned. 

Snitch snorted in disbelief.

Kildare sighed. "Look, how about this. Eras is waiting for me downstairs. I'll go down, tell her it's not a surety that we'll take the job yet, but we'll travel down to Do'or and look over the museum, see what we think. We can take a couple of days, sniff around to see if we can spot Serene. Any hint of her, any hint of something wrong, and we'll walk away."

Mock fidgeted with a hair bead spiraled around a lock of hair over her ear, her lips moving in what Kildare thought might be a prayer of seeking.

Fir sat totally still, his fingers twined together in his lap. The expression on his face… Kildare kept expecting Fir to say something, but the Alfaren only chewed on his lower lip. 

Snitch shrugged. "Well, at least we'd be out of the blighted cold you keep whining about."

"Kil, are you sure Serene—" Mock started.

"I'm sure!" he snapped.

She jerked back, face scrunching in hurt. 

Kildare felt a pang of regret lance his chest. "I'm sorry." He reached across the table and grabbed Mock's hand, squeezing it gently. "I'm sorry," he repeated. Should I tell them about Serene? Is this the time to do it, to come clean, to admit to them that she's the love of my life and...

Mock squeezed his hand back. "We're worried about you. She was targeting you...we've all just wondered why she stopped. The letters she left, the time she snuck up on you and Fir..." She sighed. "We're just worried, is all."

"You're just looking out for me." Kildare grinned. "And you have no idea how much I appreciate that, Mock."

Snitch snorted. "All right then, can we cut the gushiness? Go tell the woman that we'll accept the job on our conditions, already."

Kildare elbowed him as he got up, snatching his empty kafe mug from the table. As he carried the mug back down to the common room, he had to work to school his face back into a polite, professional smile. It was hard, especially with the giddiness tumbling his insides and threatening to spill out into a grin and a light footedness. 

One more job. One. And then Serene would be free from her contract. 

He placed the mug on the bar and walked over to Eras. He didn't bother sitting—he knew he couldn't without squirming like a schoolboy. "My team's interested," he said mildly. "We have our own conditions, though. We'll come down to Rohondeish and check the place out for ourselves. If we get a whiff of anything wrong, we're walking away. No tricks, no betrayals, we'll just leave and you'll never hear from us again. Your employer will be safe from us—I don't even want to know his name until I decide if we take the job or not. Deal?"

Eras pursed her lips to the side. Then she unhooked a small pouch from her belt and tossed it on the table. It clinked with the sweet tone of gold. "We wouldn't want you to feel taken advantage of. Consider this traveling expenses and a consulting fee—even if you decide not to take the job, we'd appreciate any feedback you and your team might be able to provide."

Kildare picked up the pouch and weighed it in his hand. There had to be at least a hundred goldmarks in the pouch—more than enough for traveling expenses and a consulting fee. He flashed a grin at Eras. "Thank your employer for us—this is most generous. We shall be down in Rohondeish by the end of the week."

Eras stood, bowed her head in a slight nod, and headed out the door. Kildare tucked the pouch into his own belt, pausing a moment to clamp his hand tight around the soft leather. "Thank the Aspects," he whispered.

Their timetable had moved up by a year or more. Maybe now, when he finally did introduce Serene to his team, he could introduce her as a free woman.

***

Kildare sat on his bed, using the small side table as a writing desk. He smoothed away the wrinkles in the ad he'd taken from the tavern's front gates—an apothecary looking for manipulator healers—and retrieved the bottle of invisible ink from the hidden pocket he'd sewn into his rucksack. He could've sent Serene a wind message, but those were so imprecise, giving emotion more than details. Better to write a letter.

He smiled. Funny how Snitch should mention the letters Serene used to leave them, often folded into an envelope and placed into the case of the item she'd stolen minutes before they'd gotten there, or slipped under their door at night. For the first six months, Kildare had only seen the surface of the letters...the written taunts. And then, one night when he'd thrown the latest letter into his fire in a fury, he'd seen the hidden message. The words written with ink only activated by heat. He could close his eyes and still see the flash of those words, red against the dark background of ink and parchment, blazing for a split second before the letter was consumed by the fire.

Help me. Please.

Kildare swallowed down the lump in his throat. Blinking, he set his pen to the paper and quickly scrawled words over the ad. For a brief second he could see them as a light stain against the darker ink.

Love,

We're going to Do'or. There's a job waiting for us in Rohondeish—a big one. We may finally achieve our dreams.

Then they faded. Shorter than he wanted. Shorter than he needed to convey the excitement bubbling inside of him. It would have to do until they could talk in person.

Kildare let the ink dry, then crossed the room to his window, opened it, and shoved the advertisement into the slats of his shutters. It was unlikely that whoever cleaned their room would see it. Most people who happened to look up and spot the advertisement would think it just a piece of trash stuck in the shutter. 

Kildare closed his window and repacked the ink into the hidden pocket, then shoved his clothes in on top of it. He tucked what was left of the coins Eras had paid them under his clothes—he'd already distributed the rest to the others to hide among their clothes and luggage as needed—and tossed the rucksack over one shoulder. One quick glance around his room, and Kildare opened the door, walking out into the living area.

Fir looked up from rifling through a stack of books. "We're still stopping on the way out of town, right? At the book seller's?"

"If you need to," Kildare said.

Fir nodded and set three books aside. He swept up his copies of the blueprints of Lord Datheil's keep and crumpled them, one by one, into the cracking fire. Kildare glanced through the other bedroom door, where Snitch was packing away his and Mock's things.

"Mock go down to find horses?" he asked.

Fir nodded, weighing one book in his hand.

Kildare's lips twitched into a smile. On one hand, it looked like a typical move. Burning the evidence of their schemes. Moving on. Getting rid of the books Fir no longer needed for research. But this time, it was different.

Next time, he might be able to put down roots.