Chapter Text
Anxiety crept through her as Neve read through the ledgers Rook had stolen off the dock master, spreading through her veins like a frost creeping over water. Inexorable. A phenomenon that neither sense nor willful lack of recognition could stop.
The day had started so well, too. A hazy memory now.
Sun filtered in lazily through the small window of her apartment, dust dancing in the beams of light to the accompaniment of Rook’s slow breaths as she threaded her fingers through the mussed curls atop his head.
She’d once said that of everything she’d seen as their ragtag little team had taken on the Evanuris, it was Assan who’d been surprising. And, she thought with a pang, that was true. But sitting here, now, the most surprising thing to have come out of one of the most fraught years of her life — not an easy accolade to achieve — was this moment here. Quiet. Soft. Endless.
Until it was, and it always was, broken. Then it would feel like it had passed in an instant.
And there were always plenty of options for what would intrude on their time together. Her work. His inability to remain still. A shared propensity for trouble.
It was only a matter of time. Really, she was surprised they had this moment at all. The odds didn’t favor it.
He hummed quietly against the skin of her stomach. “I can feel you thinking,” Rook murmured.
“Is that so?”
He turned his head to look up at her, hazel eyes blinking blearily as he became accustomed to the light. “Mmm. Thinking about me or about a case?”
Neve smirked lazily as she continued to play with his hair. “Someone has a high opinion of himself.”
“So me then.”
She dragged her nails gently across his scalp and Rook shuddered. “Should I stop what I’m doing and walk you through it?” She teased.
“Nope. No. I’m fine just knowing the truth in my heart.”
She opened her mouth to needle him only for the moment to finally be shattered as a familiar knock sounded at her door. Rook groaned.
“Gonna buy Rana a bell to wear or something, so I know she’s on her way and don’t get my hopes up.” He muttered with exaggerated offense.
“I should have pretended I wasn’t home,” she muttered. Neve marked down yet another instance of a ship marked with an owner’s name so ubiquitous as to be meaningless and an “S” in the margins beside it. The cold inside her rendering her fingers numb, despite the temperate humidity that was ever present in Dock Town.
She hadn’t, though. Couldn’t. Dock Town needed not to be forgotten, needed something to count on. It deserved better than Neve could provide, but she would at least try. Even now.
Even with this.
The information blurred together as she catalogued the lines with an S or a T beside them, a bureaucratic record – however unintentional – of a brewing war between the Threads and another gang.
When Rana had arrived at her door with a missing persons case, Neve hadn’t thought she’d be trawling through the dock master’s books by nightfall.
“How did you get these?” Rana asked as Rook laid the dock master’s books in front of them.
“Borrowed them,” he replied with a shrug.
Neve recognized the curiosity in Rana’s gaze as the other woman opened her mouth, and interrupted what would surely be another digression that Rook enjoyed far too much. “And you brought them because…?”
“Right!” Trouble flipped the top book open and rifled through the pages. “So the usual stuff is in here, right? Fakename Fake-ius, fees that are wildly inconsistent…exactly what you’d expect at a Minrathous port.”
Given how inconsistent the day had been so far, Neve felt almost relieved as he recited consistent corruption. At least it was dependable.
“There’s several entries marked with ‘T’, throughout. Every book. Figure that’s our friendly organized criminals here in Dock Town.” Neve nodded, looking down the ledgers as quickly as she could while Rook tore through them for what he wanted to share. “But…here!”
He pointed at a line marked with an “S” halfway down the page. “This marking starts a few months ago. And then it appears as often as ‘T’ does.”
“Not a criminal mastermind, is he?” Neve said wryly, pulling the book towards herself so she could verify Rook’s words.
“They didn’t teach you subterfuge in the Circles?” Trouble asked teasingly.
“Oh, they did. Though it wasn’t a formal part of the curriculum.”
Fortunately, the dock master hadn’t learned it well. Better than some – being a dock master in Minrathous was far from the worst a Laetan mage could do – but had he a talent for intrigues he’d likely have ended up in a position he found more agreeable than Dock Town.
With her final entry recorded, Neve finally shut the book with a thud that echoed in the small space. Her head dropped back, and she let out a slow breath as she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose to ward off the headache forming.
“So.” Trouble was back. She heard him stacking his purloined port records and setting them on the floor. “Are you ready to talk about it?”
“Would you accept ‘no’?” She asked, not entirely sure if she meant it or not as she turned her head to face him. She cocked an eyebrow at him in question as she opened her eyes.
Rook sprawled next to her on the sofa lazily, unconcerned to the untrained eye. But his leg was bouncing, ever so slightly, and his fingers twitched where they laid on the top of the piece of furniture. “I might.”
“Promising. Reassuring, even,” she said dryly.
“I try.”
The cold dread that had spread through her over the course of the day was nearing a turning point. It would crystalize or dissipate. Becoming hard, solid…brittle. Or melting away, over time.
Rook’s eyes were soft, warm, and Neve sighed as some of her anxiety dripped away. He reached over to tangle his long fingers with hers and tug her up onto his chest as he leaned back.
“You’re allowed to be upset,” he reminded her as she tucked herself into him.
“I barely speak to him,” Neve pointed out.
“So?” There was a hint of challenge to his tone, even as his fingers combed gently through her hair. “He’s still missing.”
She shouldn’t have opened the door that morning. If she hadn’t, she would have never met with their new client, whose son worked the docks and came home each night until he hadn’t.
“Fausta Bellius.” The woman straightened in her seat as she introduced herself. Fighting, Neve suspected, the exhaustion that had caused the dark circles beneath her red-rimmed and wary eyes. Her clothes were immaculately kept — clean, pressed, no stray threads or rough edges — her hair carefully styled. But the clothing was worn, even so. She’d dressed in what Neve felt comfortable presuming was her best for this meeting, but there was no way to avoid thread going bare over time without enchanting it. A surreptitious glance confirmed that the woman had no staff or scepter in reach. Not a mage, but based on the cleanliness and quality of the clothes, not a resident of Dock Town either.
So she had sought them out from one of the other Soporati districts. Presumably because of Rana’s advertisement. (And fine, it had worked, but she wasn’t going to admit that to Rana or to Trouble, the latter of which had handcrafted a frame for the thing and hung it in his room at the Lighthouse.)
“My son, he’s gotten some jobs down at the docks,” Fausta began, slow enough that it seemed like she was weighing each and every word, while she stared at the table.
She drummed her nails nervously, the uneven edges of having been chewed on in stark contrast to how put together she looked otherwise, as she spoke. “He goes down there each morning with some other boys from the neighborhood. And then he’s home by nightfall. Except, one week ago, he wasn’t.”
“Did the other boys come back?” Neve asked. A single missing dock worker wasn’t, in and of itself, evidence of foul play. An accidental drowning or injury, a bender, an intimate acquaintance…any could explain several days gone. Especially at the docks, where safety of the workers was a low priority for the dock master.
Of course a disappearance did not need to be a murder to be worth investigating. Still, without evidence of something darker, Neve did not want to promise a resolution that was more cathartic than reality was likely to provide.
“Two did.”
Rana, taking notes assiduously to Neve’s right, glanced up at that. “Did they say what happened?”
Fausta’s jaw clenched as her knuckles went white where she pressed her hand against the scarred wood of the table, the remainder of her nails catching in the grooves. Pink rose in her cheeks, and Neve suspected if the woman had met her eyes she’d have rage burning in them. But she smothered the momentary irritation before saying, “No. They’re avoiding me.”
Well, that shifted the calculus, didn’t it? At least a bit. Multiple men missing, and two more who were hiding out rather than offering even a flimsy excuse for why.
Fausta swallowed audibly, and Neve got the sense she was steeling herself as she looked through the table. Still, when she finally met Neve’s eyes, there was fire there. “My neighbor said you’re a detective. That you might be able to help me find him.” Another hard swallow. “I don’t have much, but…”
Neve glanced over at Rana who nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Well look into it,” Neve said, and Fausta all but collapsed.
“Thank you.”
It had taken little time to learn which regulars hadn’t been seen in a week.
Bellius.
Nonius.
Gallus.
All Threads, according to Elek. All last seen a week before heading to Dock Town from their neighborhood on the other side of Minrathous. All not heard from since.
“He is still missing,” Neve agreed.
And the motive for their disappearances didn’t seem difficult to parse. Three Threads, all living outside Dock Town, the Threads’ territory. Evidence in the dock master’s ledgers of another group possibly trying to move in — either making the first move, or retaliating against perceived encroachment on their own territory across the island. A city whose underground elements were vying for power, filling the void left as the Venatori collapsed.
Of course the why didn’t explain the how or the where.
Which meant that Caius Gallus, her elder brother who she spoke to rarely and saw even less, had been missing for a week and other than the letter S, a motive, and some names, Neve had little to go on.
The Soporatum was less a neighborhood, the way Dock Town was, and more a district. Broad and sprawling, a city within the city. The only district, Dock Town aside, in which Soporati were permitted to own property.
Neve wasn’t sure why the law was necessary; not only because it had no basis, though it didn’t, but because few Soporati could have afforded a home outside of it.
She’d spent time there, but she didn’t know it the way she knew her own neighborhood. Didn’t have the same connections, the same reliable informants. Rana had some. But she too had been largely in Dock Town for the past several years. The Soporatum wasn’t entirely foreign, but it had a hierarchy and culture and language of its own, and Neve was not fluent in it.
Neve leaned back a bit, so she could study Rook’s face as he studied hers. His gaze was steady, and she wondered (neither the first nor likely the last time) what he was reading in her her soul.
Neve and Rana didn’t live in the Soporatum. But Rook did, if only by technicality these days. And he’d lived there recently; right up until he’d spent a year with Harding and Varric and had come crashing into her life.
“Trouble, if I said organized crime and S, you would say…”
“The Snakes,” he answered easily. “Assuming you don’t mean us Shadow Dragons, who are fine and upstanding citizens of the Imperium. Maevaris said so.”
Neve snorted, but felt the slightest bit of warmth melting the ice in the pit of her stomach. A small smile played around Rook’s lips. “Did we just crack his code?”
“An initial isn’t a code.”
“He thinks it is. If he thinks at all.”
Neve leaned back against him. “You’re extending him too much credit.”
She felt him shrug. “Probably not the first, based on those ledgers.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, as Neve thawed and Rook waited patiently for her to process her discomfort. With the situation. With Caius. With what she knew would have to come next.
She and Caius didn’t speak often for a reason. Or, rather, a lifetime of reasons they’d never put to rest. At their best they managed to shelve years of argument and resentment. At their worst they could be mistaken for mortal enemies.
Or maybe they had been mortal enemies.
“He’s family,” Neve said, more to herself than to Rook. “This should be easier.”
He squeezed her gently. “It would just be a different kind of hard.”