"Henri Vincent LeBeau!"

Henri should have known this was coming. His currently very, very ferocious looking wife stormed into his office-bedroom-sanctuary. The door banged against the small table next to the door. The bookstack fell over, but neither spouse paid any attention to it whatsoever.

"You're Guildmaster for what, one week? No sorry. All of a week-and-a-half. And you've already merged with your office!" Luckily for Henri's eardrums she decided to lower her voice again "Do you happen to remember distractedly Uh-huhing to your aunt's proposition of a family dinner this evening? Because she remembered. And everybody else remembered too. And everybody's waiting. For you."

Mercy LeBeau could be an absolute spitfire. She usually wasn't. Usually Henri also loved watching her chew out her all-male colleagues, but in those instances he wasn't the target of her temper.

"I was planning on getting dinner with the rest of... the... fa... mi... ly...?" Henri had expected to get interrupted any second. He wasn't interrupted verbally but that "Sure you did" glare worked just as well as any yelling could have possibly hoped to do.

Mercy huffed. "Get up. Now."

Henri glanced at the ancient grandfather clock. It was in fact almost half an hour after the customary time for planned dinnertime festivities. Maybe, just maybe Mercy was justified in her outburst.

Walking into the dining room, Henri couldn't help but smile awkwardly as soon as he felt 10 pairs of eyes all focus on him simultaneously. -Brilliant. Not only have I almost stood up my wife and little brother, but also Tante Angélique, the entire Lapin brood, Theo and Tante Mattie.-

"Why the family reunion?" He walked over to his usual seat at the long dinner table, on the right hand side of one of the table's ends. The empty seat on his left was only highlighted by all of the other seats, except for his own, being occupied. Clarence Lapin had even improvised a twelfth seat, if you do not count the one occupied by Jean-Luc Lebeau's ghost, in between his two older brothers by adding a chair from a nearby room. The seating situation would have been even worse, had his uncle, Horace Marceaux, the Guild's Harvest Master, or any of the Lapin sons' families been able to make it. Mercy was already piling rice and gravy onto his plate.

"Sorry that we started without you" His little brother smirked at him from across the table, giving away that a joke would most likely follow "but we thought we'd starve before you showed." A glare from Tante Mattie prevented any further stabs at his tardiness.

"Henri, you need to actually talk to your people, starting with your family." From anyone but his Tante Angélique, or possibly, at most, Tante Mattie, Henri would've dismissed the advice, but if anyone who wasn't a Guildmaster themselves knew anything about the task of leading a guild, it was the two women that had been at his father's side for most of his long life.

"Give me a few weeks to settle in and I'll have more time to talk to everybody. I'm sure the clans don't need me to hover over their heads all the time."

"They don't. But even though you don't think that what you do right now is important-"

"I know it's important. Especially the Council, and the truce with the Assassins a-"

"Don't interrupt me, Henri. What I'm talking about is that you're making a first impression on your Guild, and soon you'll have to deal with the other Guilds. Do you really want your Guild to think of you as the kid who is desperately trying to fit in his father's shoes? Half the Guild barely even knows your face, they don't know how you act, or how you make decisions. If they don't know you at all, they won't trust you. You don't hit the ground running on this, somebody's bound to think they can manipulate you or do a better job." By the end of her lecture Angele Lapin stood, glaring Henri down as if he were a petulant toddler, not a grown man, and her Guildmaster if not yet officially, then at the very least in function.

Not quite willing to admit defeat, even though he could see where his aunt was coming from, he looked around the table for support. Seeing that nobody else was willing to talk back to Tante Angélique, he finally surrendered, hoping to be allowed to eat in peace.

"I will. I will talk to the council, plan a banquet, invite some clan representatives... or something like that, alright? Most of the important thieves do know me, anyways. I've pulled off jobs with near everybody worth working with in this guild."

Angelle Lapin appeared to accept that response with a nod and sat back down.

A just slightly uncomfortable silence spread itself over the table, seemingly undisturbed by Emil's whispering. The little he could make out from Emil's story reminded him that from now on he was also responsible for finding the sources of whatever illicit substances his little brother and cousin would get their hands on, and and at the very least trying to keep them from doing so again.

Theoren cleared his throat at almost the same moment as Clarence started talking, but still let his younger cousin speak his mind first.

"Well, now that there isn't really much of a relaxed atmosphere to preserve: I've got some stuff from that investigation into, yeah, you know…" Clarence slowed down towards the end. Even the Guildmembers who hadn't been personally close to Henri's father had been affected by his death, even if only because he had been a constant in everybody's life for several generations, and his family affected even more.

Remy got Emil to actually shut up for a moment. Henri figured that whatever information Clarence was about to share, would mostly be for his and Remy's benefit, as all of Clarence's direct relatives would have likely been receiving regular updates as the investigation was happening. -Or not- he mused -judging by how the entire table, including the Lapin's, seems to have shifted their attention towards Clarence.-

Henri rubbed the bridge of his nose, already expecting a headache, either from Clarence's news or from the shouting they would be likely to provoke. "Go on" he said.

"We looked at his, your father's office. We're pretty sure the assassin left through the window."

"I coulda told you that, too." The quiet grumbling seemed to come from Remy.

"Is there anything new you can tell me, Clarence?" Henri truly hoped that the whole investigation hadn't been as useless as to only result in that one tiny piece of information.

Clarence was looking more and more uncomfortable, and even a bit panicked, by the second. "Well, from what we saw we don't think the, uh, attacker came in from that window, or at least not the first time."

"The first time, what even-" Henri exhaled sharply "Just continue."

The easiest way to describe Clarence's grimace at that moment would have been 'please, pretty please, don't shoot the messenger'.

"Ah, we have those security systems around the main houses, you know and... they're there to stop this kinda thing from happening. Our attacker dodged or passed all of them. Didn't sound a single alarm. And we checked the cameras, and there was nothing there. Might have just as well been any other day. We gave the recordings to the computer people..." Judging by Theoren's confused look, Henri observed, he was not one of the 'computer people' consulted "...They haven't found anything unusual yet. So, the attacker must have either come in before and done something to our cameras and found out how to get by all of our security measures, or" Clarence hesitated, as if he didn't want to say it out loud "we might just have a mole."

A/N:

Guess who's back?

Ech, this took me a looong time... I'll try to figure what kind of update schedule I can manage while writing new chapters, but I doubt it'll be anywhere near once a week. But I'm still happy I 'only' needed a month to get this chapter done.