Grieverkland

He left the office a little after two in the morning, the list of things still needing verification folded twice and tucked into his coat, and walked rather than took a cab, because his mind rarely settled properly unless his legs were moving at the same time it was working. The city at that hour had thinned down to its essentials — a handful of late carts, a drunk or two arguing quietly with a lamppost, the occasional cat picking its way along a wall — and none of it demanded his attention the way the two pages on his desk had, which was rather the entire point of walking in the first place.

The Crimson Orchid's lanterns were still lit when he reached it, red light spilling out across the wet street the same as it did most hours of the night, and he let himself in through the side entrance the staff used, nodding to a doorman who knew him well enough by now not to ask questions.

He found Suyin on the fourth floor, between guests, seated at her private table with a pot of tea gone cold beside her and a book open in her lap that she wasn't really reading. She looked up when he entered, and something in her face eased immediately at the sight of him, the particular warmth she reserved only for the handful of people in this city she'd decided, over the years, were actually worth the effort of caring about.

"You look terrible," she said, by way of greeting, closing the book without marking her page.

"Thank you. You look wonderful, as always." He dropped into the seat across from her with the familiarity of a man who'd done this exact thing more times than either of them bothered counting.

She was, by any honest measure, the most striking woman on that floor, voluptuous in a way the silk robes did nothing to disguise and everything to flatter, her hair falling long and dark and impossibly glossy past her waist, black enough to look almost blue where the lamplight caught it, like a piece of night that had simply declined to end when the sun came up. But it wasn't her beauty that had made her his closest friend in this city, and both of them had long since stopped pretending it was. It was the mind behind it — sharp, patient, unshockable in the particular way only someone who had spent years listening to powerful men confess their worst secrets over pillows could become, and kind in a way that had somehow survived that same profession fully intact, rather than being worn down by it the way it wore down so many others.

"You've got that look," she said, pouring him tea from a fresh pot without asking whether he wanted it. "The one where you've found something and you don't know if you actually want to have found it."

"Is it that obvious?"

"To me. Not to most people. Most people can't read past whatever mask you've decided to wear that day." She pushed the cup toward him. "Tell me."

He hesitated, turning the cup slowly between his hands, and she waited him out the way she always waited him out, patient, unbothered by silence, letting him arrive at his own words in his own time rather than pulling them out of him before he was ready.

This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"I think I found the Smilar heir," he said finally, quiet, testing the words aloud properly for only the second time that night.

Whatever she'd been expecting, it clearly hadn't been that. She set her own cup down slowly, her full attention arriving on him now, sharp and serious beneath the softness she usually wore for guests. "The missing one. Fifteen years missing."

"That one." He exhaled, some of the tension he'd been carrying since his desk finally easing out of his shoulders now that someone else knew. "Except it doesn't sit right, Suyin. Everything fits and nothing fits, both at once. No record of him anywhere in fifteen years of gang violence, which should be impossible for a boy supposedly raised the way rumour says he was raised. Hidden well enough, long enough, that a family with the Smilar name's resources never once got close, which takes money and patience that boys like that don't usually have access to on their own. And on top of all of it, he's ended up working a post connected to Marianne. Liu Teng's own people."

Her brow furrowed properly now, following the shape of it with him. "You think someone placed him there. Deliberately."

"I think someone's been protecting him, or using him, or both, for a very long time, and I don't yet know which." He rubbed at his eyes, tired in a way sleep alone wasn't going to fix. "And I don't know what happens if I'm wrong and I say something anyway. Or what happens to him if I'm right and I say the wrong thing to the wrong person."

Suyin was quiet for a long moment, turning it over with the same careful patience she brought to everything, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone gentler, though no less clear-eyed for it. "You already know what you're going to do," she said. "You wouldn't have walked all the way here at two in the morning if you didn't. You're not asking me what to do, Hummingbird. You're asking me to tell you it's alright to do it slowly."

He looked at her a long moment, something in his chest loosening at being read that precisely, that easily, by someone who'd clearly known him far too long to be fooled by anything less than total honesty. "Is it?" he asked. "Alright. To do it slowly."

"It's the only responsible way to do it at all," she said, reaching across to squeeze his hand once, brief and warm. "A boy's whole life is sitting on the other side of whatever you decide next. Slow is kind. Slow is careful. The people who love fast answers are usually the ones who've never had to clean up what a wrong one leaves behind."

He let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding, and for the first time since he'd laid those two pages side by side on his desk, some of the weight in his chest eased into something he could actually carry.