' "Prying, and peeping, and listening are the natural
occupations of people situated as we are... The horrid
mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head
like liquor, and makes me wild." '

- Wilkie Collins, 'The Moonstone.'

Chapter Six: Into My Head

Nagira had returned to the room soon after Doujima had awoken from her dream, armed with a new pack of cigarettes and a bag of take-out from the seafood restaurant down the street. Doujima had spent a while picking at her plate of risotti di mare and seppie alla veneziana under the lawyer's vigilant eye, before she finally gave up on the food and pushed it aside, watching, instead, with a mild sense of awe, as Nagira wolfed down what was left of the cuttlefish with truly amazing speed.

The evening wore on. Twilight deepened into true darkness, and the street outside grew quiet as people retired for the day.

Doujima didn't sleep that night. In the morning, she called Marco.

She had been intending to let Nagira continue to sleep while she went to meet her fellow spy – unlike her, Nagira wasn't suffering from strange and disturbing dreams, and he hadn't had any trouble falling asleep the previous night. However, when she stepped out of the shower, she found him waiting for her, fully dressed and already holding a lit cigarette between his fingers.

The look that he gave her told her that he knew full well that she had planned to leave him behind. She shrugged apologetically and, just like that, her last-ditch effort to keep him out of SOLOMON's business was abandoned.

The early morning sky was still dark when they stepped outside, although there was a lightening along the horizon that told her that sunrise wasn't far off. Doujima thought that her associates at the STN-J would have been shocked beyond belief to see her up and about at such an early hour. At Nagira's urging, they stopped at a bakery to get coffee for her and an oven-warmed cornetto for him. In spite of her disdain for Venetian baked goods, she wasn't surprised to see him devour it quickly and without comment. Nagira was not a picky eater, and he had a stomach like a lead vault; nothing much damaged it.

Doujima had arranged to meet Marco at Alfonso's office, a decaying building in the sestiere of San Marco which had, until recently, housed the very core of SOLOMON Intelligence. She led Nagira through narrow, familiar streets, and they caught a ferry from the Dorsoduro side of the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco. From there, she hired a water-taxi, one of the speedy little motor-boats that charged by the hour. It wasn't quite as expensive as hiring a gondola to convey them around the city, but it came close. However, money had never been something that she had worried about, and now, with SOLOMON funding her, it wasn't something that she was going to start worrying about.

The water-taxi made its way back up the Grand Canal and into the network of smaller canals that laced the sestiere. Doujima settled into a seat for the ride, and Nagira didn't so much stand beside her as lounge against the back of her seat, alternately taking puffs on his cigarette and making grabs at the paper coffee cup that she still clung to. After her sleepless night, she stubbornly refused to share with him. The caffeine was too precious. Even if she had never really acquired a taste for the rich bitterness of cappuccino, she needed to be alert for the task that lay ahead. After a while, he gave up, lighting another cigarette and staring at the passing buildings meditatively.

Somewhat amused, Doujima realized that he was wearing his trademark white coat, even though July in Northern Italy was hardly cold. She remembered a time when she had hated that coat, had spent long hours teasing him about it, and speculating about what had been used to create the fluffy monstrosity (her favorite theory still being that he had, somehow, formed it out of his own bleached back hair). It had long ago ceased to bother her, fashion-driven as she was, and it even seemed kind of sexy now, a part of that strange charm that he had. It would have been pretty to think that she was the only one so strongly affected by him, but she wasn't. She had seen other women melt when his lips curled into a slow smirk, had listened as he talked his way out of a sticky situation with that wise-cracking film-noir-detective drawl of his. There was something undeniably attractive about a man who could act the part of a do-gooder while maintaining all the rough mannerisms and roguish appeal of a scoundrel.

Not that she wouldn't be overjoyed if the coat were to accidentally fall into the lagoon during their trip, and never be seen again.

The little boat zipped through the canals, no doubt breaking several of the city's speed regulations, and turned the corner onto the Rio di San Zulian so sharply that Nagira had to reach out and steady himself against her shoulder. The driver slowed down dramatically once they had actually reached the canal, and finally floated to a stop at their destination, a postage-stamp sized dock outside of a crumbling brick-walled building. Like many of Venice's older houses, the two-story building that held Alfonso's office had two main entrances. One entrance faced the street, and the other opened up onto the water.

The weather-aged boards of the little dock creaked unsteadily as they stepped off the boat, so warped with constant exposure to the elements that Doujima could actually see the murky water below through the cracks in the boards. There was a little motor-boat tethered to one side, and unlike both the house and the dock, it seemed to be in good repair. One of the reasons that Alfonso had liked the somewhat decrepit building was because there were so many ways to get into and out of it. He had made a great many enemies in his line of work, both within SOLOMON and outside of it. He had always felt that a spy could never be too careful, and his paranoia, along with a wicked intellect and a keen instinct for trouble, had gotten him out of more tight scrapes than she could count.

Even that hadn't saved him, in the end.

She paid the taxi-driver an exorbitant tip, in spite of his reckless driving, and he sped off in the opposite direction, towards the giant, snake-like curve of the Grand Canal. Doujima watched the boat disappear, strangely reluctant to enter the building where her mentor had died. Not that her reluctance would stop her from doing her job. There was no real reason to be avoiding the site, every reason not to avoid it, and she was much more pragmatic sometimes than people gave her credit for.

Nagira made no move to hurry her inside, acting as though he had nothing better to do than leisurely smoke what was now his third cigarette of the day, and prod at the withered boards beneath them with the toe of his shiny black loafer. The boards creaked ominously, but that didn't seem to deter Nagira.

She watched him for a long moment, before reaching for the door. It swung open before her hand without her having touched it. Charlie stood on the other side.

Doujima hadn't seen the other spy since his brief stay in Japan and, outwardly, he was no different – a tall, twenty-something year old man with sandy hair and an unremarkable, sun-reddened face. When she looked closer, she noticed that there were shadows under his pale-lashed eyes, and lines around his mouth where there hadn't been any before. Grief was probably part of it, but it looked as though the past few weeks had not been kind to Charlie. That wasn't much of a surprise. With Alfonso dead, and her in Japan, he probably knew the most about the inner workings of SOLOMON Intelligence. He had been acting as Alfonso's assistant for the past few years, and although they had never shared the same close, mentoring relationship that she had enjoyed, she rather suspected that Alfonso had been primping the younger man as his replacement. It seemed that Charlie would be taking over earlier than expected, unprepared and ill-equipped.

Well, maybe she could help with the ill-equipped part. If she managed to find the personnel files, at least he would have an agency to run. Until then, he had no way of even knowing who his spies were.

Although, it seemed that until she was done with this assignment, Charlie wouldn't have to worry about running anything. According to Juliano, she was in charge until she located the files. It was an intimidating thought. Doujima didn't want to be in charge of anything.

"Hello," he said, awkwardly, she thought. He ran one large hand over his hair, flattening it to his head, and then reached out as if to hug her. He stopped short, and finally just stretched out a hand to give her a clumsy pat on the shoulder. "Are you alright?"

She shrugged, just as uncomfortable as he was. "Sure." Even though her voice remained carelessly good-humored when she spoke, it was a lie, and they both knew it. Hell, she was pretty sure that Nagira, who had stopped courting disaster with the dock in favor of watching their conversation, knew it. It was a rather unconvincing lie, as far as her lies went. "You look like death warmed over," she added.

"And here I thought that I was cuter than your other SOLOMON contacts," came the deadpan response.

"Oh?" Nagira asked interestedly from behind them.

Had she still been capable of it, Doujima might have been embarrassed. As it was, she had forgotten how to blush years ago. "Nothing," she replied, and gave Charlie the stink-eye.

The other agent's expression didn't change, but she suspected that he was snickering on the inside. He looked at her for a beat and then turned his attention to Nagira. He swept his eyes over the lawyer from head to foot with a shrewd, calculating look. Nagira didn't seem offended, possibly because he was giving Charlie an eerily similar looking-over. Once again, Doujima was reminded that she was quite possibly inviting her own discomfort by introducing Nagira to her fellow spies.

Charlie was the first to break the impromptu staring contest, turning back through the door even as he spoke to them. "Marco mentioned that Yurika had brought someone else along. Are you a member of the STN-J?"

Doujima gave his back a hard stare as she followed him into the building. Like her, Charlie had been given a chance to peruse the STN-J's files while they had been working on the Orbo case, and he had met all of her remaining coworkers in the week that he had stayed in Japan after the Factory's fall. So Charlie knew that Nagira was not a member of the Japan branch of SOLOMON, he was just digging for information. She couldn't really blame him. Digging for information was what they did.

"No," Nagira said, and smirked around his cigarette. Charlie's back was to them, so he didn't notice, but Doujima rolled her eyes.

"If you have a question, you should just ask," she added.

Charlie turned, so that he was walking backwards. "Ah, but that would be far too straightforward. Besides, would I get an answer if I just asked?"

"Probably not," Doujima admitted.

Nagira made a very rude sound in the back of his throat, and shut the door behind them with a little click. "I'm not a SOLOMON anything. I'm just with her." And secretly working to protect witches from SOLOMON, but he wisely didn't say that. "How do you two get anything done when you can't even have a damn conversation? It's like watching snakes flirt."

One corner of Doujima's mouth jerked upwards, as she twisted her head to look at him. "Yeah, I wonder about that too, sometimes. Then again, the last time that Charlie worked on a project with me, you and I ended up dodging bullets and almost getting caught under a bunch of collapsing rubble, so maybe our communication skills do need to be worked on."

"Thanks, Yurika. That's reassuring."

"I aim to please."

The room they had entered was large, taking up almost the entire first floor of the house. It was empty, except for a row of filing cabinets against the back wall, and a desk that probably belonged to Charlie shoved into the corner. Even from across the room, she could see that someone had emptied the filing cabinets, taking the drawers out completely and leaving yawning holes in the metal framework that had held them. Next to the desk was a set of stairs, old and curved like the back of an aging woman, but clean, and sturdy looking even though wood at the center of each step was worn down and gray.

"Where's Marco?" Doujima wondered, her smile fading as she surveyed the room. "He was supposed to meet me here."

"In Alfonso's office," Charlie said. "He stumbled in about half an hour ago, and told me to wait downstairs for you. I kind of suspect that he went upstairs to catch a nap."

They found Marco upstairs, sitting in the oversized leather chair that had once belonged to Alfonso, not asleep, but not alert either, and obviously displeased to be there so early in the morning. He started when they entered, then glared at them out of bleary eyes.

"Good morning," Nagira said, far too cheerfully for the older man's liking.

"Maybe for you," he grumbled, as he heaved himself out of the chair with effort. He turned heavy-lidded eyes to Doujima. "Since when do you wake up at this hour? I remember, in Japan, I was lucky if you contacted me before noon."

Doujima shrugged, an elegant rise and fall of the shoulders. "That was in Japan."

"So I should expect this to be the routine, while you're investigating this?"

Her smile showed more than a hint of tooth. "Maybe."

The sound that came out of Marco's lips sounded suspiciously like a snarl. "Fine. I'm going downstairs to investigate the insides of my eyelids. Ciao."

"Grump," Doujima muttered, then turned to take her first real look at the office. Like the downstairs, it was just one big room, two of the walls covered floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. The back wall, which overlooked the canal, was studded with windows, with more filing cabinets set between them. An enormous oak-wood desk dominated the center of the room, kept bare of everything but a blank pad of paper and a pen. While Alfonso had been alive, the place had been kept scrupulously clean, with everything in its proper place, and without a speck of dust in sight. However, she saw now that the office had been pillaged, no doubt in an attempt by SOLOMON to find the many things that the spymaster had kept hidden. The books had been removed from the shelves, neatly, methodically, and left in stacks on the floor. The bookshelves looked lonely and barren, empty of everything except the few knickknacks that Alfonso had kept on the shelf nearest to the desk: a decanter of brandy and a set of glasses, a canister of shoe polish, a shiny silver cigar-cutter and a lighter, as well as a half-empty wooden box filled with fat cigars. Most men would have kept those things tucked away inside their desk, but Alfonso had liked to have them on hand. She suspected that he had used the lighter and shoe polish more often than he had the pen and paper on his desk.

The drawers had been removed from the file cabinets and carried away, like they had been downstairs. The desk drawers had been likewise removed. On the wall near the door had hung the room's only painting, a framed copy of John Sargent's splashy water-color depicting the Bridge of Sighs. It had been carefully removed and propped up against the wall, to reveal the hidden vault behind it. The door to the vault hung open to reveal an empty interior, but Doujima doubted that they had found anything of interest in there. Alfonso never would have kept anything of importance in such an obvious hiding place.

Likewise, she didn't think that they would glean anything of interest from his little-used computer, which had sat, neglected, on the wooden table beside the door. The computer was gone, now. Whoever had combed over the place had taken that with them as well.

"Wow," Doujima breathed, softly.

Charlie nodded curtly. "They came in only hours after I found the body. Really ransacked the place."

"That's nice," Nagira commented, and crouched down to look one of the stacks of books. He ran a finger delicately over the leather-bound spines, his white coat spread out behind him.

"Not nice, but necessary," Charlie said with a shrug, and Doujima made a vague sound of agreement. She crossed the room, weaving cautiously through the maze of books, until she reached the desk. She sat in the chair, sinking back into its arms. It was so large that her feet didn't even touch the ground, and smelled faintly of leather and smoke. She felt a moment's unease when she realized that this was probably where Alfonso had been sitting when he had died, and resisted the urge to spring out of the chair and brush herself off, as if to remove some invisible taint of death.

To keep her attention off of the inherent... well, grossness... of sitting in a place where someone had breathed his last, she scooted forward in the chair to look at the room again. "I'm surprised they didn't find the files. He used to keep them here, and it looks like whoever searched the place was pretty thorough." She watched as Nagira stood, and followed the same path that she had taken across the room in order to inspect the shelf that held Alfonso's knick-knacks. He picked up the cigar-cutter, clicking the blade experimentally.

"Maybe he moved them? It's been a while since you were last in Venice." Charlie sighed. "I don't know, Yurika. Whatever the case is, we need to find those files. You just got here, but SOLOMON has been breathing down my neck about it for the last two weeks, and I'm at a loss."

"We'll figure it out," she promised, with more confidence than she felt. Alfonso had been a tricky old man, and even she didn't know all of his secrets.

Nagira had moved on to fiddling with Alfonso's lighter, turning it over between his fingers and flicking it open and shut. Charlie was watching him now as well, in much the same way that an anxious salesperson would watch a potential shoplifter. The next thing that Nagira picked up was the cut-glass decanter. He plucked the stopper out with long fingers and sniffed at the ruby-colored brandy in the decanter, before wrinkling his nose and quickly replacing it on the shelf.

"Can liquor spoil?" he wondered, and ran a finger over the edge of the stopper, where it was still damp from being inside the decanter. He held his finger up to his lips, as if to taste, but Charlie reached out one gangly arm to snatch the stopper.

The spy pushed the stopper back into the decanter, apparently having had enough of watching a strange man paw through his boss's possessions. "I don't know, and that's probably not the best way to find out." Charlie sniffed, even though Doujima doubted that whatever Nagira had smelled was strong enough to linger in the air, then he shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe Alfonso liked some weird, stinky kind of brandy?"

He caught the look that Doujima shot him, and chuckled. "Yeah, I know. We Americans have no appreciation for fine wine. Or so Alfonso always told me."

She sniffed disdainfully. "Go back to your Budweiser, Skippy, and leave the wine alone."

"Yes ma'am," Charlie replied meekly, and she couldn't help but think that meek really didn't suit him. Charlie might act harmless but, like her, he was a lot more dangerous than he appeared. The same could probably be said of all of SOLOMON's members, especially its spies.

She couldn't help but notice that he left the room very quickly, once she had given him an opening to do so. Perhaps, like her, he didn't want to linger there. Or perhaps it was just her imagination; Nagira certainly didn't seem bothered by the prospect of poking around a dead man's office. Usually, she wouldn't have been bothered, either, but this wasn't just any dead man.

Doujima waited to be sure that Charlie was gone, before sliding forward in the chair until she was leaning against the edge of the seat instead of sitting in it. She was glad the other two had left, because it would have been awkward to find a way to clear them out of the office. There were some things she knew about Alfonso – and his many hiding places – that she saw no reason to share with others.

Nagira leaned against one of the empty bookshelves, and watched her curiously. He didn't offer to leave, and she didn't ask him to. She might worry about sharing potentially sensitive information with her fellow spies but, in this case, she was strangely unworried about Nagira. It probably should have been the other way around, considering the fact that she and he were technically enemies, and the others were her coworkers. Then again, of the four people in the building, she knew who the trustworthy one was... and it wasn't her, or either of the other spies. If Alfonso's secrets got out, it wouldn't be because Nagira had told anyone.

Not that she planned to give him any sort of valuable information about SOLOMON. He might be trustworthy, but he also wasn't the sort of man who would ignore a weapon when it was offered to him. There could be no mistake; Nagira was dedicated in his fight to save the witches, and if she was foolish enough to inadvertently hand him the keys to the kingdom, he would have no qualms about using them.

Luckily for her, and for SOLOMON, she wasn't that foolish.

This conflict of interests was undoubtedly a hitch in their relationship, but it also added an undeniable spice to it. After all, sleeping with the enemy was a long-standing espionage tradition, if she was to believe what she saw in the movies.

Of course, in real life, such an arrangement usually ended with a lot more tragedy, and a lot less romance than it would in a movie.

Doujima dismissed that thought as absolutely too depressing for further consideration. One of the disadvantages – or one of the benefits, depending on how you looked at it – of being a spy was that you became much better at deception. All sorts of deception. Self-deception was not something that she usually allowed herself to indulge in (or so she told herself), and it had been something that Alfonso had always frowned upon, but sometimes she considered it a necessity.

Like when she had a job to do, and couldn't afford to be distracted.

She reached one hand through the hole in the desk where the upper left-hand drawer had been, running her fingers over the smooth wood on the underside of the desktop. If SOLOMON hadn't raided the office, she would have had to open the drawer and crane her elbow to reach, but the fact that the drawer was missing made things simpler.

She continued to run her hand back and forth over the underside of the desk, searching. Just as her arm began to ache from holding it at an angle, she found what she was looking for. A crack in the satiny smoothness of the polished wood, barely a ripple under the sensitive skin of her fingertips, and not visible to the naked eye at all. Doujima followed the crack along, until she came to a place where it was subtly wider, just wide enough for her to worm the tips of her fingers into it. There was a moment's struggle, and then a hollow click when the catch released. It was followed by a soft, sighing sound, as the desk's hidden compartment dropped down slowly, into the space that the drawer would usually occupy.

"Yes," she hissed, triumphantly. Nagira raised a brow, still leaning against the bookshelf, his arms crossed over his chest.

The compartment was small by necessity, about the same size as the box of cigars on the shelf. The front was open-ended, but with the desk overshadowing it, it was too dark for her to see the inside of the compartment. Instead, she reached inside, hunting around with her fingers until she found something.

The first thing that she pulled from the compartment was a slender, gray-bound book. There was nothing on the cover, but a quick flip through the pages showed them to be filled with Alfonso's blocky copperplate printing.

The second item that Doujima found was Alfonso's pocket watch, which made her frown. She couldn't remember him every taking it off. It had always remained attached to his suit jacket by a thin silver chain, and she couldn't even begin to guess why it would be in the secret box in his desk. She had never even seen it up close. She turned it over in her hand, running her fingers over the cool metal of the cover. On one side was etched a picture of Venice's mascot, St. Mark's lion, clutching his book. One the other side, there were four words, carved gracefully into the otherwise unmarred silver. Much to her surprise, they were in English, rather than Spanish, or even Italian.

The hell within him.

"Cheery thought," she muttered. There was an odd, sinking feeling in her chest, like sorrow or dread.

Nagira had come up behind her, and he squinted over her shoulder in order to make out the delicately chiseled words.

"What do you think?" Doujima asked.

"I know a guy who could fence it for you for a tidy sum."

"Ha ha," she replied, deadpan.

Nagira shrugged. With him behind her, she couldn't really see the gesture, but she could feel the movement at her back. "Don't ask me. I didn't know the guy. What do you suppose it means?"

"I don't know," Doujima murmured, and ran her thumb over the words again. She didn't know, but she could guess. Alfonso had been a craft-user, although she couldn't remember him every using his powers in front of her. It had always bothered him that he possessed the Craft, and not much had bothered Alfonso.

Like many of SOLOMON's agents, he had believed that a witch's powers were inherently evil, even if those powers were being put to use in hunting other witches down. He had seen how those powers could destroy a person from within, eating away at their humanity, until someone who had once hunted the witches became a witch. It had taken her a long time to realize just how much he feared that he would loose control to the taint in his blood. How deeply he had hated that taint, and how he had hated himself by extension.

It was a peculiar sort of self-hatred, but by no means rare among those who worked for SOLOMON. In fact, after she had seen how an Inquisition worked while in Japan, Doujima had started to suspect that the organization encouraged this sentiment in its agents.

It was not a sentiment that she, herself, shared. Although she was a Seed, no one seemed to think it likely that she would awaken, and her parents' position within the syndicate had kept her sheltered from some of the nastier aspects of SOLOMON brainwashing – no one felt the need to tell her that witches were evil and that anyone with witch blood was contaminated and a potential danger, because they figured that she would be getting that information at home. To a certain extent, she had, and a great many of those teachings had stuck... but not enough to keep her from remaining cynical about some of the views that the Assembly encouraged among the ranks. The fact that a lot of the people working for SOLOMON felt that they needed to redeem themselves guaranteed a level of devotion that bordered on the fanatical, in many cases.

Fanatical. That was a word that described so many of SOLOMON's agents, whether they had witch blood running through their veins or not. Her thoughts wandered to Zaizen, who had himself been free of the taint, but so dedicated to his convictions and the doctrine taught by SOLOMON that he had performed atrocities in the hopes of eliminating the evil of the witches once and for all.

Witches were evil. Their powers could cause great harm, and a disturbing number of them seemed to lack any sort of conscience at all. Doujima had seen all of this for herself while she was in Japan, and no matter what Nagira seemed to believe, there was something too intrinsically dangerous about the witches for them to remain un-policed. If anything, the time she had spent hunting should have reinforced what SOLOMON, her parents, and Alfonso had been teaching her all along.

But if that was true, and witches were evil, where did people like Robin fit in? Even now, knowing what the young girl had been capable of, she couldn't believe that there was anything evil in Robin. Hell, even after being declared a witch by SOLOMON, the girl had retained more in the way of personal virtues than Doujima could delude herself into thinking that she had ever possessed. Even though she had been sent to Japan as a spy, Robin had never betrayed those who had trusted her. Doujima had done so repeatedly, and she had done it with a smile on her face.

What did that say about SOLOMON's teachings? That the witch whom they had hunted turned out to be a much better person than the human who was still in SOLOMON's good books?

Robin and the Orbo had changed everything. Doujima was now questioning things that she didn't really want to question. Things that were dangerous for her to question. It would be for the best if she were to shove this to the back of her mind, and ignore it now as she had ignored it on the night of the Factory's collapse, and before. But the truth was, she was tired of ignoring it. She was so very tired of turning deaf ears to that nagging little voice that she thought might, just might, be her conscience.

She stared down at the watch in her hand for a moment longer, and then shook her head violently. Who was she kidding? Conscience was all well and good, but it wasn't for her. In the end, she knew where her allegiance would lie. She had been listening to SOLOMON longer than she had been listening to her conscience, and she had been taking orders much longer than she had been questioning things.

In the end, Doujima was not the sort of woman who would challenge the way that her world was ordered just because some of the pieces no longer fit. She was simply not that brave, which reaffirmed her belief that, of the two of them, Robin was the better person.

She could no longer ignore the fact that her opinions were starting to conflict with those expressed by SOLOMON, but she also couldn't remedy that conflict. 'For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.' Words that SOLOMON lived by, and words that anyone who thought of betraying the syndicate would do well to remember.

"Yurika?"

Doujima jerked in the chair when Nagira's voice broke through her thoughts, and nearly sent the gray-covered book in her lap sliding to the ground. She had been silent for too long, long enough to worry the lawyer into speaking. "What's up?" he continued. "You look like your puppy just died, or something."

No, just my entire belief system, she wanted to say.

"I'm fine," she said instead, and smiled around the lie.

Lying was almost comforting, even if lying to Nagira was not. Here was something that she was good at. She might not be brave enough to rock the boat, so to speak, but she was a damn good spy. Whatever doubts she might have about SOLOMON, one thing that she didn't doubt was that Alfonso still had possession of that tiny sliver of loyalty that she was capable of. It was almost enough to kill her smile; even from beyond the grave, her mentor could manipulate her.

Thoughts chased each other wildly through Doujima's head. Alfonso, the hold he had on her, and his mysterious death. Nagira, his trustworthiness, and the rather disturbing hold that he seemed to have gained over her, almost without her noticing.

SOLOMON.

"Who do you trust?"

Oh, if only she knew.

Declaimer: I don't own Witch Hunter Robin. Or anything else.

Notes: First off, a big warm thanks to PuckRG, who was good enough to beta read this chapter. She was very nice and patient, even though I told her that I'd send her the next chapter 'in a few days' for at least a month. Risotti di mare is a kind of grain dish with seafood, and seppie alla veneziana is cuttlefish served in its own ink. A cornetto is a type of pastry. Assuming that I get the next chapter done in a more timely manner: The Average Man, detailing the amazing adventures of Nagira and Marco.