Raven rolled in a full hour after dawn, whistling. Fuyo caught his arm and said, in a voice Sagiri otherwise only heard directed by Shigure in his most stubborn moods, "I'd like a word with you."
Shigure glanced up from his seat and stuffed paper into his ears. He was funny sometimes; spying on cheating spouses and their lovers always made him blush, though he'd fervently deny any color change after the fact, but Raven and Luserina had taken him to an exciting new level of flustered. That was the point of family, maybe: hyperbolic reactions to things that didn't matter, and unwavering acceptance of things that did.
As Fuyo dragged her nervously bemused quarry toward her office, Sagiri slipped up to the crawlspace above it. Mr. Mouse scampered alongside her as she crawled over to the tiny peepholes in the ceiling. If Fuyo really expected privacy, she reasoned, this conversation wouldn't be happening anywhere near Sagiri.
In the room below, Fuyo held the door open, foot tapping against the floor. Raven regarded the abundance of lights set around the office and hesitated before coming inside, rune glowing ineffectually through his glove. Fuyo shut the door firmly behind him.
"Aren't these lamps lovely?" she asked. "They really do brighten up the place; I might have to consider keeping them lit all the time. Have a seat, please."
He had a seat, with palpable reluctance. As Fuyo strode behind the desk, he said, "Look, if something's missing, I didn't steal it. Thieves' honor."
"That's not what this is about." Fuyo set her palms on the desk, leaned forward, and loomed. "What did I ask you to do?"
"Stake out Luserina's room." Raven huffed and crossed his arms. "Just like I've been doing a damn good job of."
"And would you agree," she asked with metallic sweetness, "that surveillance might best be conducted from somewhere other than the subject's own bed?"
He scowled. "You never said she wasn't supposed to know I was keeping an eye on her."
"I never said not to seduce her, either, because some things just go without saying!"
"What the hell?" Raven's eyebrows drew together like jousting caterpillars. "Listen, she asked me to sneak in through her window. We've got history together. And anyway, how is that any of your business? I thought we were trying to figure out who's trying to kill her, not who's—"
Fuyo's unclear gesturing cut him off. Apparently she had been taken far enough off her guard to let her anger slip away; her voice was much less tight as she said, "I... all right. Look. If you're running off for a romp with your... girlfriend? No, I don't actually want to know what the word is. Anyway, you can't call it work. It's not actually work. And you've upset Shigure and Sagiri."
This was half-true. Sagiri had mostly just thought that it was nice to see Luserina enjoying herself for a change.
Raven scoffed. "Oh, they're upset. Next time they can tell me they're staking out my stakeout, and I'll close the curtains."
"Please stop calling it a stakeout. I can't send you on real stakeouts if that's what you think a stakeout is. A little professionalism, please." Fuyo rubbed her forehead for a moment, then continued, "But we've overreacted a bit, maybe. I don't think they'd care—I don't think I'd care—if they—we—didn't think of you as sort of... family." She cleaned her glasses to avoid watching his reaction, then cleared her throat. "So, yes. It's your business. As long as you don't let it get in the way of the case."
"No worries there."
"All right, then." Fuyo exhaled and set her glasses in place. "Well, congratulations, Crow. You're a dirty little secret."
He wagged his finger and flashed her a self-satisfied grin. "Ah-ah-ah, I'm a democratically elected mayor's dirty little secret."
Fuyo stared at him for a long, blank moment before shaking her head. "Just keep in mind that I'm not paying you for having sex. That's—well, itcan be work, I guess, but it's definitely not detective work."
Raven scowled, then brightened. "But I still get paid for thwarting that assassination attempt, right?"
The discussion moved rapidly out of the office, and Sagiri climbed down to follow it.
As promised, a rather subdued Bentwick let Fuyo and her detectives through without trouble. They made their way to Luserina's office, where she sat signing forms and Alvan brewed a cup of tea. He glanced at the visitors, refused to acknowledge them, and sniffed and sipped the tea before passing the cup to his boss.
"Hi," said Fuyo, finally capturing Luserina's attention. "Got a minute to talk?"
"I'll make one." Luserina set her pen down. "How confidential of a talk?"
Sagiri offered, "You may not want Alvan to be present."
"Can I not be present?" asked Shigure.
Luserina glanced between the two of them, then turned a firm stare on Alvan. He returned it for several seconds before sneering and heading for the door, catching Fuyo's toe under his cane on the way with intentional precision. She bit her tongue against a yelp and glowered at his back until the door closed behind it.
Fuyo took the seat Alvan had vacated and leaned in near enough to lower her voice. "Someone tried to kill you again last night, didn't they?"
From the look of Luserina's face, she hadn't slept much afterward. "Yes. Someone sneaked into my bedroom with a knife while I was asleep, and, well, it didn't work." Obviously she hadn't made a minute to construct a plausible version of the story.
"It just didn't work?" asked Sagiri.
Shigure made a face at her. "Yeah, sure, drag this out. That's fun."
Fuyo cleared her throat. "Did it maybe not work because the assassin ran into the invisible body curled up next to you?"
Luserina stiffened, suddenly very intent on her tea. "You heard this from Raven."
"He didn't exactly volunteer it, but we figured it out." Probably better not to mention the eye-witness portion of the figuring. When she remained silent, Fuyo added, "It's okay. We're not—"
"It's not like that," Luserina blurted, and Fuyo had no idea what "that" had been implied. Her fingers laced and unlaced as she picked her way through an explanation: "We started talking, back during the war—I used to go down the kitchen at night for tea, and sometimes he was down there, and—please don't look at me like that—I wanted someone to talk to, and it would have been selfish of me to burden the prince..."
"So this is why Oboro said we needed a counselor," Shigure muttered.
Luserina's cheeks darkened. "And it was wartime. People were doing all sorts of things."
Fuyo sighed. "You talked to Kyle, didn't you?"
The blush drained away as Luserina frowned. "And you've been talking to Euram, haven't you? This is—he's—" She took a deep breath. "With all due respect, I'm an adult. As long as I'm not continuing the family line, it is absolutely none of his business who I'm not continuing it with." She had her mayoral face on now; no unwanted color stood a chance of making it to the surface of her cheeks. "I'm very sorry that my brother wasted your time."
No sense holding the bag closed once the cat had bolted. "That's not actually what he hired us to investigate," Fuyo said. "Believe me, we're not hard enough up for business to investigate a friend's love life."
Luserina tilted her head, then sighed. "He thought Alvan was trying to kill me, didn't he?"
"Which was incorrect," said Sagiri. "But someone is trying to kill you."
"Actually," Luserina began, then glanced at the door and dropped her voice a little lower. "Alvan told me that he did want to kill me, before he came here. Nothing personal—he wanted to wipe out the entire Barows line for killing Lord Rovere."
Fuyo scarcely resisted the impulse to crow that she had figured that much out.
"After he realized that Lord Rovere wouldn't actually have wanted that, he just wanted to destroy us by revealing our dark secrets to the world. Now that he's been here a little while, I think he's realized that the world already knows them all."
In the ensuing silence, Shigure coughed on what had been a poorly timed smoke ring. "And he told you this because...?"
"We've bonded. Didn't you notice how well we were getting along when you came in?"
Another pause. "You get very confessional when you're tired," said Shigure.
"She's also been taken off-guard," Sagiri added, "and she's obviously under stress."
"Speaking of which," said Fuyo, hoping to put the conversation back on course, sensible segue or no, "whoever came after you ended up on the wrong end of that knife, so we should be able to pick out a suspect by checking for fresh stab wounds. It's almost certainly somewhere who works here."
Luserina frowned. "I haven't seen anyone wearing bandages or unusual clothing today. Or limping—it was hard to tell in the dark, but I think Raven stabbed the attacker in the leg."
Shigure hummed around his pipe. "Maybe we should check for clues by seeing what's been planted in Alvan's office today."
"What's the empty bottle equivalent of a knife?" Sagiri locked eyes with Shigure for an instant, and Fuyo could almost feel pieces slotting into place between them. There was something half-magic about them in these moments, as if they had little runes burned into their brains.
"No rats," said Sagiri.
"Can't beat Crow in a fight," said Shigure. "Tell Alvan to tackle Bentwick; he'll probably get a kick out of it."
