Chapter Text
Saihara withers away under the head maid’s stare.
“You’re the detective the master called for, I presume?” Only the slight upward inflection at the end gives the phrase away as a question, not a statement of fact. Other than that, her words are as icy and immutable as her eyes.
“Y-Yes, that’s me,” he says, feeling rather stupid at his lack of a wittier response. Not that the stammer really helped matters, either. “I’m Saihara Shuuichi, and I’m working with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.”
She purses her lips in a way that betrays her dissatisfaction with everything about the man standing in the entryway of this lavish, too-large western-style mansion. After all, when most people pictured a detective, they almost certainly wouldn’t picture someone like Saihara Shuuichi: middling height, gangly, a wallflower who shrank away from eye contact and into his oversized coat. And young—much too young to be dependable in his field of work, at only twenty-three odd years.
Saihara had seen that cold, disbelieving look before on many a client. If he were in their shoes, he would probably give himself that same look, too.
After another moment of strained silence, the maid simply bows her head and says, “Come in.”
He does. The foyer is even larger than it looked from the outside, almost absurdly so—just this single room alone was enough to fit half of his uncle’s Japanese-style home inside of it. It’s his first time seeing such an absurd display of wealth up close (even considering his parents’ lifestyle, which he had very much tried to distance himself from at a young age), so all he can do is try not to stare too much.
The maid holds out an elegant, black-gloved hand, and Saihara moves to hastily hand her his coat… but not his hat. She clears her throat, and he can actually feel the temperature in the room fall a few degrees as he continues to leave the hat right where it is. However poor her impression of him might have been at a glance, it was clearly worsening by the second.
But despite all that, the hat stays. He needs it to.
Once it’s clear that he won’t part with the hat, the maid sighs, turns her back on him, and signals for a passing member of the household staff with only a single finger. She gives the man short, clipped instructions to take Saihara’s coat and his luggage to the guest room where he’ll be staying, and sends him on his way in an almost intimidating display of effortless efficiency.
And then she turns back around and offers a much deeper, more courteous bow than the one she gave him in the doorway. “Welcome to the Kougetsukan, Saihara-kun. I’m afraid that the master of the house isn’t here to greet you, but you can call on me for anything you might need during your stay. My name is Toujou Kirumi, and I’m the head maid of this mansion.”
The choice in honorifics doesn’t escape his notice, but Saihara is careful not to let his surprise show on his face. Her words and demeanor are stern, almost severe, but her unlined face and sharp, short haircut make it difficult to determine how old she is—perhaps they were closer in age than he’d bargained for. Perhaps she simply didn’t respect him enough to use anything else.
Either way, he knows better than to mention it aloud. Instead, he fixates on something else she said that caught his attention. “The master isn’t home?” he asks, bringing a hand to his chin. “But I was told to speak to Togami-san about the note directly…”
“He’s not home,” she repeats, clasping her gloved hands together. “Master Togami already made plans to visit his family in Kyoto prior to this… so-called ‘phantom thief’ leaving his calling card. He could not afford to cancel his plans on such short notice, and as such, decided to leave me in charge of the estate in his absence.”
Saihara frowns. “And how long will he be gone?”
“At least a fortnight, perhaps a month. The business with his family simply couldn’t wait, you understand. But he does intend to make his way back by the date of this supposed heist. It is his collection that’s been threatened, after all.”
A month. It’s not ideal, but he can work with that. Ordinarily, the absence of a big-name client like this right after the phantom thief had dropped off a calling card at his mansion would raise all sorts of red flags—the timing was just a little too coincidental, too full of potential openings and weak points for the thief to strike at.
But this head maid—Toujou—assuages most of his worries. She’s competent and commanding almost to a fault, and not much seemed likely to get past her keen, steely eyes. Plus, even if she wasn’t particularly fond of him, at least she didn’t seem reluctant to answer his questions or tell him what she knew.
“So, um, the calling card…” He trails off, unsure of how best to bring it up.
“…is upstairs, still stuck to the frame of his next target.” She purses her lips again, though this time thankfully not at him. “I thought it best to leave it where it was, so that you could examine the scene as we encountered it last night.”
Saihara just nods. That was actually the right call, as it turned out; the less it was moved, the lower the chance of disturbing any potential evidence. That always seemed to be a hard lesson to get through to the police whenever he agreed to work with them, sadly.
“You’ll have free reign of the place while you’re here. If there is any part of the estate currently closed off that you feel would be conducive to helping your investigation, let me know and I will open it up for you.” Toujou pauses, and though her face is impassive, there’s a sharpness to her voice as she adds, “That is, assuming it’s actually pertinent to your work.”
“Of course.” He tries not to wilt a little at the baseless accusation. Clearly, the sooner this conversation came to an end, the better, or he was liable to lose his motivation before he even started. “U-Um, shall I just… begin looking around, then?”
“There’s no need to go on your own.” She gives him a terse shake of her head, looking down the bridge of her nose sternly. “You still don’t know where your quarters are located, correct? And considering the size of this mansion, it would be far more efficient to send you with someone who actually knows the layout of the place.”
“Oh, er…” Saihara tenses, already dreading the idea of spending any more time under Toujou's piercing stare than he needs to. “I—uh, suppose…”
But much to his surprise, she instead turns around again and beckons another member of the household staff who happens to be passing by—a young maid, this time. “Yuuma,” she says, “come here and show our guest around.”
The other maid stops in her tracks and turns around, a look of mild surprise on her face. But Toujou must not like having her orders questioned much, because all the young woman says is, “Of course, Toujou-san,” before quickly bowing her head and approaching the two of them.
The first thing Saihara notices about this new maid is her height. It’s rather hard not to, seeing as she’s nearly a whole head shorter than himself. Just like Toujou, it’s difficult to determine her age at a glance, although for very different reasons. Her long, braided hair and thin-framed eyeglasses paint a picture of someone more or less around his own age, of course—but her short stature and the cute, checkered bow tied behind her head seem to hint at a more childish streak hidden behind that mature and responsible surface.
Unlike Toujou, whose height and demeanor are as sharp and intimidating as the rest of her, the young woman in front of him seems much more approachable, a little softer around the edges somehow. Or maybe it’s just the fact that she’s not glaring daggers his way immediately after meeting him.
Toujou gestures towards the other maid. “Yuuma will escort you around the estate. If you have any questions, feel free to ask her for clarification—she’s more than capable of filling you in on any details about the way this mansion is run. And I trust she won’t interfere with your work, either.”
Saihara shoots an awkward glance at Yuuma (who still has her head bowed, very pointedly avoiding his eye), then looks back at Toujou. “Um… n-no, I don’t foresee any problems with that.”
“Very well.” Toujou sounds about as ready for this conversation to end as he feels, her tone dry and tinged with just the slightest hint of impatience. “I’m afraid I have other matters to attend to at the moment, so you must excuse me. You may call for me should any urgent business arise.”
The head maid turns on her heel and walks away without even giving him an opportunity to say farewell, and Saihara and Yuuma are suddenly left alone in the foyer, save for the occasional hustle and bustle of some other, lone member of the household staff on their way from one side of the mansion to the other.
But no sooner are they alone than Yuuma lifts her head and gives Saihara an easy smile, dropping most of the stiff formality from a moment ago. “Sorry for the ice-cold welcome. Toujou-san takes some getting used to, huh?”
Saihara lets out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding, about half the tension slowly draining from his body. “I, er… don’t think she likes me very much. Is she… uh—”
“—Always like that?” Yuuma asks wryly, as though reading his mind. “Not really, no. I mean, she’s strict, to be sure—but she’s been in an extra foul mood since last night, what with that phantom thief’s calling card and all.”
Ah. That did make sense. “With Togami-san gone for the month, she must have a lot of extra work on her plate, I imagine,” Saihara says.
But Yuuma shakes her head, throwing her long, dark braid back over her shoulder. “It’s not that. That woman thrives on work—I bet she’d do it twenty-four hours a day if she could actually manage it. But, see, she’s the head maid. And the phantom thief somehow got in on her watch. No one’s angrier about that than she is.”
Saihara smiles a little, getting more or less the full picture now. Pride was a powerful motivator after all, as he’d discovered on many a case, with both clients and criminals alike. “I suppose I’m just glad to hear she doesn’t have a grudge against me, specifically. Thank you, uh… Yuuma-san, was it?”
“Yuuma Iwako, at your service.” Instead of bowing her head again, she gives him a wink, and that same, easy smile from before. “You can call me without honorifics, if you’d like. Or would a first-name basis be easier?”
“N-No, um—”
Her grin widens a little, the corners of her mouth turning up in a manner that’s almost catlike. “Just kidding. People might get the wrong idea pretty fast, y’know. But just Yuuma really is fine, if you want.”
Saihara swallows, more than a little taken aback by the sudden informal tone that the conversation was taking. Not that it was entirely unwelcome, after the frosty welcome that Toujou had given him. “I-I think I’ll stick to Yuuma-san, if that’s okay.”
A moment later, he finally realizes that he still hasn’t given his own name. “I’m—er, well, I’m the detective who was sent here.” I’m the detective? he thinks, horrified. She had to have already known that much, considering the whole mansion had been expecting him. “M-My name is Saihara Shuuichi,” he tacks on hurriedly, hoping against hope that he isn’t coming across as a bumbling fool.
But Yuuma just taps a finger to her chin in thought, as though trying to remember something. “Saihara-kun, hm? Saihara Shuuichi… ah!” Her eyes light up, and there’s a palpable hint of excitement in her voice. “So you’re the detective I read about in the papers? The one who was assigned to the phantom thief case because no one else could catch him?”
Her reaction is so unexpected that Saihara almost stares, despite his usual aversion to eye contact. Not many people ever reacted this way when he told them his name, or his profession. Prior to being brought on this particular case, he had mostly worked a string of infidelity and missing pets cases—smaller, less noticeable cases that no one in their right mind would be impressed by. Those were typically his bread-and-butter, after all.
So it was only happenstance, really, that he’d also happened to solve a handful of cold-case murders over the years. He’d only been at the scene of the very first one by accident, back in his youth, accompanying his uncle in order to learn a little bit more about the trade. And it was the same even now. He just happened to have a good eye for noticing details that other people tended to overlook. That was all.
…Or so he’d like to say, but the feeling of recognition without any accompanying hostility or resentment is so rare that he finds himself a little embarrassed. And, well… he’d be lying if he said it was unpleasant.
“Yes, that’s me. I mean, it’s true that I was brought onto the case recently, but…” Saihara trails off, finding himself at a loss for words.
But what? Even if it was true, he could hardly just come out and say that his newfound consulting position was due to a handful of recent retirements and some lucky timing. That would hardly be reassuring, when he was here to stop a crime before it even happened. He might as well hold the front door open for the thief and just let him walk right in, for all the good that would do.
“...I wouldn’t say I’m the only one who can catch him,” he finishes lamely. “But if all goes well, I should be able to catch him in the act this time, yes.”
Yuuma looks him up and down, quirking a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s not what they said in the papers. They called you a detective prodigy, you know?”
Saihara offers a wry smile that borders on apologetic. “The papers do love to exaggerate.” He leaves unspoken the fact that sending him to investigate the thief’s mark in advance all by himself would also make him an excellent scapegoat, should anything go wrong.
“Well, you look young enough to be a prodigy to me.” Yuuma shrugs, then half-turns as she beckons him onward. “Come on, then, I’ll take you to that calling card. Guess we can’t keep putting it off all day, or Toujou-san will have my head.”
Saihara follows her lead, up several winding flights of stairs and down numerous hallways until they reach a room far-removed from the rest of the mansion, tucked away in a corner of the third floor. The layout of the house already feels much larger and more confusing than anything he was expecting, but Yuuma’s sense of direction never falters, her footsteps surprisingly quick despite the length of her dress and apron.
They finally come to a stop outside the room in question, where two men are stationed on either side of the unassuming wooden door. Saihara can only assume that they must be more members of the household staff, posted here on guard duty by Toujou after last night’s events.
His suspicions are proven right when Yuuma throws them both a nod and a friendly wave, and asks one of them to unlock the door so she and Saihara can look around. On Toujou’s orders, of course. That’s all it takes for the two men to agree, no doubt wanting to avoid getting on the head maid’s bad side. One of them fumbles around in his coat pocket before finally pulling out a thick, bronze key—one surprisingly large, in fact, for such an unassuming door.
But the door pushes open all the same when the key is inserted into the lock, and then Saihara is finally allowed a glance of what’s inside.
It’s… fairly empty. Almost completely barren, in fact, save for the small painting that dominates the center wall of the room. The painting itself is hardly what Saihara was expecting either, unexpectedly small for the source of so much trouble. To be quite honest, the ornate gold frame in which it was kept looks far more valuable than the painting itself.
And stuck to the right-hand side of that frame, of course, was a small piece of paper.
Saihara takes a deep breath and approaches the painting slowly until he can verify the calling card with his own two eyes. Sure enough, it seems legitimate: a single playing card from a standard deck, the kind that one might find anywhere. The Joker… to be more precise.
“Is it him, then?” Yuuma asks, and there's a note of something like anticipation in her voice. “The phantom thief?”
“It seems… fairly likely,” Saihara agrees, examining the card from all sides without ever actually touching it. His earlier nerves have subsided, replaced by the same uncanny sense of calm he always feels when immersing himself in all the details of a crime scene. Sure enough, there’s a date scrawled atop the face of the card in loopy, over-embellished handwriting: October 31st. Roughly a month from today’s date, he notes absently.
The maid walks a little closer to his side, her arms crossed as she frowns. “I didn’t want to say it to Toujou-san’s face, but couldn’t it be a fake? Like, someone pulling a prank? I mean, anyone could get their hands on a deck of cards.”
Saihara just shakes his head. “The papers have mentioned that the phantom thief always leaves a calling card, but they don’t know the full story.”
“What do you mean?”
“The police intentionally withheld a few details from the press. Like the fact that the thief always uses the same brand of cards, for example. The design of this card matches the ones that were left at his previous heists.”
“But that could still just be a coincidence,” she points out.
“It could, but that’s not the only detail they withheld. See, look closer.” He points above the scrawl on the card, toward the clownish, smiling face of the Joker. There’s a doodle on the Joker’s face, a small tongue poking out, drawn in the same ink as the rest of the calling card’s message. “It’s tiny, so it’s hard to make out, but there’s a bit of an illustration on the face. And the thief always prefers to, um, deface his calling cards.”
Yuuma pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and leans in until she sees the doodle in question. Then she sighs and steps back. “Not a fake, then?”
“I’m afraid not.” Saihara hadn’t come here expecting a false alarm or a copycat anyway, but it was good to eliminate all other possibilities at the beginning of an investigation.
He slowly moves his search outward, from the center of the room to the sides, examining every nook and cranny of the walls and floor as he goes. The room really is strikingly empty, other than the painting that it holds. In fact, the only other thing that stands out almost as much as the artwork is the lack of windows or doors to the adjoining rooms.
A mostly-empty room at the end of a series of twisted hallways. Three floors off the ground, no windows. And as far as he can tell, only the one door going in or out. Hmm…
He decides to go ahead and ask. “Yuuma-san, is this door usually kept locked?”
“Oh, every night. Toujou-san always insists on locking the rooms where the valuables are kept.”
“What about the keys to this room?” He paces a few more steps around the room, his eyes carefully scanning for anything that might be out of place. “Is Toujou-san the only one with a key, usually?”
“Toujou-san keeps a master key that can open any room in the house, but the individual keys to each room are usually hung up in the staff room on the ground floor. We only borrow them when we need them after reporting to her first.” She pauses for a moment, and then tacks on, “Master Togami keeps a master key too, of course, but it’s always on his person. He never lends it out.”
“There aren’t any copies of those individual keys, are there?” Saihara asks, still trying to account for any and all possibilities. “What about the key the guard had?”
Yuuma taps a finger to her chin in thought. “There’s only one copy of each individual key—Toujou-san gave the one for this room to the guards on duty now.”
“Are those guards always posted outside this room, then?”
Yuuma shakes her head. “There are always guards patrolling the grounds of the estate, but they don’t usually patrol inside. Toujou-san brought a few of them in after she found the calling card last night, and supposedly they’re going to stay until the thief’s been caught.”
“I see,” he says. “And… I just need to ask this to be sure, but… there aren’t any hidden doors or passageways in this room, are there? Nothing that leads anywhere else in the mansion?”
She actually laughs aloud at that, as if he'd just told a hilarious joke. “What, like in a two-bit mystery novel? I read those sorts of books too, you know, but there’s nothing like that in this mansion.”
Saihara nods, pressing his fingers gently along the walls in search of possible crevices or indentations and finding none. He hadn’t thought there actually would be any, but he’d still wanted to get confirmation from someone who worked here. “So, in other words… there’s only one way in or out of this room.”
When he turns away from the wall, he’s met with an unexpected glint of excitement in Yuuma’s eyes. “Saihara-kun, are you trying to say this was a locked-room case? Nothing’s even been stolen yet and there’s already a mystery?”
He rubs at the back of his neck, feeling more than a little sheepish. “It, uh… well, it seems that way. If there aren’t any other windows, doors, or passageways out of here, and the door is usually kept locked, then, um, this would have to be…” It feels almost silly, trying to voice words like a locked-room mystery out loud, but he can’t deny that he feels far more in his element now. “I-In any case, it’s very likely that leaving this note was an inside job.”
Yuuma arches her eyebrows high up above the rim of her glasses. “An inside job? Do you actually think the phantom thief is someone who works here?”
“No, not necessarily.” It was probably best not to jump to conclusions until he had more evidence to go off of, for the time being. “But it’s possible that the thief may have bribed someone here into helping him. He’s been known to work with, um, a group of associates. A big mansion like this would normally have a lot of contracted help, right? So maybe he or one of his group had a staff member deliver the calling card for him.”
“Hmm…” The maid crosses her arms, tilting her head slightly. “Well, you’re right that we do get a lot of contractors out here. A mansion like this needs a lot of upkeep. And Toujou-san probably has a list of the ones that come by… but I don’t think it’s going to be easy to tell if any of them tried to contact one of the staff.”
He’d feared as much, but that was probably where the bulk of his investigation would lie. “I guess that’ll be my job to find out. With any luck, maybe I’ll be able to find a lead back to the phantom thief if I can find someone he made contact with.”
Yuuma sighs and shakes her head. “See, that’s the part I just don’t get.”
“What is?”
“I thought calling cards were supposed to be something people leave after they’ve committed a crime, but this phantom thief went ahead and left one before he even stole anything. Now everyone knows where he’ll strike next, and the security’s been upped tenfold. Isn’t that pretty risky? The papers keep calling him some kind of genius, but it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Saihara cups his hand to his chin, lost in thought as he considers her words. That was certainly the reaction a normal person would have—leaving an advance notice of your crime was usually just an invitation for the police to catch you sooner rather than later. But in this case…
“I think… he likes the risk,” he says, still mulling his words over. “With anyone else, this kind of stunt would usually get them caught right away, but this is his way of… of bragging, I guess. Of being cocky. He’s saying that he can still pull it off, even if all the odds are against him. A normal heist would be too easy, so he wants the extra security and attention.”
Yuuma blinks at him slowly. “You talk about him like you know him pretty well.”
Saihara pauses, and then stammers as he realizes how his words must have sounded. “I-It’s not that,” he assures her. “I just… in order to do this job, I have to try and put myself in his shoes. I can’t catch him unless I know how he thinks.”
“And do you?” she asks. “Know how he thinks, I mean?”
“I’ve been on his trail for… some time now,” he admits. “So I’m pretty sure I know him well enough to catch him.”
“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing that,” the maid says sweetly. “Everything’s been in such an uproar since last night, so I’ll just be glad when he’s caught. You really do sound like a detective right out of a mystery novel, you know?”
Saihara ducks his head and keeps his attention focused on the wall before him, poking and prodding for secret crevices and hidden passageways that he already knows don’t exist.
Yuuma Iwako says all the right things, in all the right places, at just the right time.
That’s par for the course as a maid working in a wealthy estate like this one, and doubly so for any maid worth her salt working directly under Toujou. Nod, smile, don’t talk back, keep your head down and your nose clean—and if you couldn’t handle that much, you’d never get the job in the first place.
That isn’t a problem for Yuuma. Nothing has ever been a problem for her, as far as she’s concerned; challenges only ever helped to make the work more entertaining and keep her from getting bored. If anything, she welcomed them.
And so she, reliable maid that she is, handles the work of at least three people with plenty of ease and a friendly smile on her face. Anything from cleaning the stair bannisters, to mopping the kitchen floors—to yes, even leading awkward, gangly detectives around the mansion and showing them where the phantom thief had promised to strike next.
She and Saihara part ways not long after he’s taken a look at the painting for himself. She shows him all the way to his guest room, makes sure to fill him in on a brief run-down of the household rules for mealtimes and curfew, and then bids him farewell with a wink and a promise to come check on him again soon. Because of course, taking care of such an important guest was just one more of Yuuma’s many responsibilities.
By the time she makes it back to her own quarters, though, Yuuma Iwako is nowhere to be found. After all—she only existed as long as the façade was necessary.
In her place is Ouma Kokichi: risk-taker, liar, phantom thief extraordinaire.
A surprise? Not really, to anyone with a keen eye who thought about it for long enough. A cliché? Maybe. But what sort of self-respecting phantom thief would he be if he wasn’t a master of disguise? Not a very fun one, that much was for sure.
Ouma closes the door behind him and stretches his arms above his head, feeling every bit like a cat who was just allowed to bat around a mouse for an hour or two. And much like a cat, he’d love to take a nap after all that playing around. There’s no time for that though, so the most he can do is bask in the opportunity to take his mask off for a bit.
“Hee hee… I really hope I’ll get to play for a bit longer, though.”
There’s no one else in his meager quarters, but he still can’t help voicing the thought aloud—talking to yourself was something of an inevitable side effect when you grew up in a mismatched family of ten and were used to noise and chaos at every given hour of the day. Noise helped him think, kept him focused.
And thinking is nothing if not his specialty. Before the chase has even begun, he’s always felt the need to be one, two, ten steps ahead of everyone else. Always quick on his feet and even quicker with his wit.
Today is no exception. For Saihara Shuuichi, their first meeting had been unassuming, nothing more than a brief respite before he began working on a new case. For Ouma, it was the result of months of careful planning, the opening move to a long-awaited chess match in which he’d already studied everything there was to know about his opponent.
The only thing that gave him pause… was the possibility that he might have overdone it. If this was a chess match, then he was starting out with his pieces already moved across the board, the enemy king already put into check. His poor detective was already at a disadvantage in every sense of the word—not that Ouma had ever exactly concerned himself with playing fair.
Still, he wanted this match to continue for as long as possible. What was the point, otherwise? Months and months of plotting every little detail of this heist from start to finish, of growing his hair out in order to make his disguise more believable, of setting ‘Yuuma Iwako’ up with this position as a maid well in advance of leaving his calling card, so as not to arouse suspicion when he finally made his move… all potentially down the drain. All because his plan may have been a little too perfect.
A completely one-sided game was no fun at all. A thoroughly crushing victory was satisfying, yes, but only as long as there was some factor of risk involved. Only as long as the possibility of losing was even on the table.
“He’s saying that he can still pull it off, even if all the odds are against him. A normal heist would be too easy, so he wants the extra security and attention.”
Those words reassure him, though, that maybe this match won’t be entirely one-sided after all.
“I-In any case, it’s very likely that leaving this note was an inside job.”
Ouma smirks, remembering that unexpected little theory. So unsuspecting, yet so close to stumbling across the truth. Just when he’d been starting to wonder if his expectations were entirely misplaced, he’d felt a metaphorical bullet graze close enough to his ear to ruffle his hair. Saihara Shuuichi had been full of a few surprises of his own.
Perhaps his dear detective wasn’t aware that the chess match between them had already started, or of the fact that his king was already in check—but at least he was still willing to sit down and play a match with the elusive and mysterious phantom thief himself.
Good for him, if Saihara was actually trying to read his opponent properly. It was still too little too late, but Ouma didn’t mind throwing him the occasional bone. After all, he still knew so much more about Saihara than Saihara would ever know about him.
“Boss, I dunno about this. None of us have ever scoped out a mark for a heist this far in advance. And you’d just be living there for what, months on your own? I don’t like it.”
In the early morning quiet of his room, Spades’ voice comes back to him nonetheless, shrewd and down-to-earth: a right-hand man in stark contrast with Ouma’s own fickle, whimsical nature.
“What happens if he catches you, huh? This is way too much risk for just one heist. Too many things could go wrong, and none of us would be there to pick up the pieces if something happens. You’re playing with fire, boss.”
It was true. Ouma hadn’t bothered to deny it, even at the time. He liked playing with fire, had always loved the thrill of fireworks, of explosions, of swiping his finger through a lit match too quick for the flame to even touch his skin. When all other games became dull and the boredom came creeping back in, fire was the perfect way to add a little risk back into the mix.
Never too much, though. Never enough for the match to leave a burn.
Ouma remembers that warning that Spades had left him with, remembers the feeling of forlorn disapproval that had hung low and heavy over the group on the day he’d left to come here and work as ‘Yuuma Iwako,’ but he can’t back down now. There’s no reason to, when his mark is finally in sight and all his carefully laid plans are finally falling into place.
Because the real objective of this little heist was never some stupid painting. Paintings and jewels and piles of gold meant very little to a phantom thief who had already seen them all before, already snatched them right out from under the noses of the rich and elite more times than he could count.
No, what he wanted was a real challenge—something that had eluded him for what felt like ages, until a certain detective had shown up hot on his heels and started piecing together all of his past heists. In all this time, no one else had ever come so close to figuring out his modus operandi, to throwing such a huge wrench into all of his plans. How could he pass up an opportunity, then, to finally meet the man for himself, face-to-face?
Ouma wanted to meet the detective prodigy who had so very nearly captured the phantom thief. Not as himself, of course, but as Yuuma. It was the perfect ruse to keep a close eye on every detail that the detective uncovered as he carried out his investigation.
More importantly though, it was necessary to the core of this little heist itself. Because Saihara was always the real mark, from the very beginning. If Ouma could just get close to him—charm him, schmooze him, hang on his every word…
…If a phantom thief could steal a detective’s heart right out from under him and thoroughly crush it before he even knew it’d been stolen, what could possibly make for a more exciting game between them?
