Mueler’s Brokerage sat quiet in the night, its sign turned to ‘Closed’ and its shades tightly drawn. Karsten mingled at the back of his dimly-lit shop, arranging and rearranging the display of designer compasses he kept in a large glass case behind the counter. He had decided it better to occupy his mind with repetitive tasks rather than entertain his worries. If his judgment was correct, then Sheah was set to return to him within the next day or so. All he needed to do was hold out hope until that time, and then everything would at last be okay once more.

  Just then, the shop door creaked, followed by the tolling of the bell.

  Karsten yelped, startled by the sudden sound. “Goodness me,” he breathed. “I thought I had locked that…” Quickly puzzling at how he could have missed such a basic part of his closing routine, he wheeled around to face his belated customer. “I’m so very sorry, but the shop is clos—”

  Karsten froze. In his doorway stood a shadow. It was a wraith of a woman, trim and lithe, adorned in a black-and-white frock coat hemmed with delicate frills. Caging her face was a haunting apparatus: a skeletal gas mask molded over her skull, veiling her eyes behind a pair of round, polished lenses. She fixed her stolid glare on Karsten, her metallic breath hissing across the room.

  Immediately recognizing the unmistakable figure in his foyer, Karsten steadied his frazzled nerves. He slapped on a friendly face and cheerfully greeted his returning patron.

  “Ah, Madame Vogel!” he sang. “What an unexpected pleasure! I had no idea you had left the capital.”

  Latching the door behind her, Vogel slinked into the aisles with feline grace.

  “You’re more than welcome to look through anything you want,” Karsten said, maintaining a professional, friendly tone.

  “The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Mueler,” Vogel softly breathed, her accented voice filtering through her mask, lightly garbled by radio compression. “Of all the shops in Bruckhaven, yours has always been my favorite.”

  “To what do I owe this visit?” said Karsten. “Research for an upcoming expedition? I imagine your duties as Operations Director must keep you quite busy. Verloren must have a lot of exciting projects in the works, especially if the rumors are to be believed.”

  “Oh yes, we have our sights set on a great many things,” she said as she stalked between the shelves, her manicured fingers, glistening with antique rings, gingerly caressing the woodgrain.

  “Well, is there something specific I can help you find? If you don’t see it on the shelves, I may have something in storage you could find useful.”

  “That is the thing, Mr. Mueler,” said Vogel. “It is not something you have. It is something that we do not.”

  Karsten scratched the back of his neck. “I’m… afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Last week, a pair of my field agents were in this store. Do you remember?”

  Karsten thought for a moment, running through a mental list of customers from the previous week. Of them, nobody seemed to remotely fit the profile of a Verloren field agent, thank goodness. “I can’t say that I do,” he said, coming up empty.

  “Mm, such a pity,” Vogel pouted. She gently pulled a small music box from the shelf and turned it over in her hand. “The agents were new to the company. A talkative duo. They had just returned from a significant find, out near Dremaseah.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Karsten invisibly reeled, feeling a shudder in his chest like a gunshot. At that very instant, he knew exactly which two men she was referring to, and just what kind of trouble might be waiting for him. Undermining Verloren Industries—what had he gotten Sheah into?

  “Do you remember?” Vogel repeated.

  “Oh, um, I vaguely recall something of the sort,” he said, casually hiding the sweat collecting on his brow. Playing it up, he snapped a finger. “Ah, yes, now I remember. Two young men, very flashy, yes? And they were your agents, you say? Odd, they… didn’t strike me as such.”

  “Lower standards, I’m afraid.” Vogel emerged from the row of shelves and slowly prowled towards the counter. “These children, as they were, found in those hills deserted ruins matching the description of a long-forgotten settlement: the final resting place for a group of ancient tribunes. It was a site I had been striving to find for quite some time. For you see, surviving sources told of a certain document there, one treasured by the village elder and subsequently buried with them, a document of such vital importance to the company that I felt it imperative to dispatch our finest ship to recover it—at great expense, I must add. But when we arrived, all that we found was an opened, raided tomb. The item, it would so seem, had been pilfered from the dead by a common gang of plunderers, leaving nothing behind but their own clumsy footprints.”

  Vogel arrived at the counter, pushing herself in close. She loomed over Karsten, her mirrored eyes reflecting his stifled fear right back at him. “I will ask you this now, Karsten Mueler of the Brokers: Whom did you tell?”

  “I—I didn’t tell anyone!” Karsten stammered, fighting to maintain eye contact. “Was there something to tell? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Vogel cocked her head, hissing indignantly. She bore her glare into him, her rhythmic breathing scraping at his soul.

  “I will not ask you again,” she growled.

  And just like that, Karsten was cornered. He wordlessly sputtered for a moment, hoping to find some miracle way out. But in the end, he understood his only real choice was to submit. Everyone in the business knew there was no hiding anything from Lilith Vogel, not without incurring her considerable wrath. Out of options, he threw his arms up in defeat. It was time he got this over with.

  “Okay… okay. I admit it,” he said, his fears slowly turning to relief at the truth. “I broke the code, I passed along information, I took a side. If you want to assemble the IHS board, bring me up on charges, take away my license, so be it. I’ll have to live with that. But know this—I will never tell you who I told.”

  Karsten stood straight, puffing out his chest. He glared back at Vogel with defiance, dropping his years-long act. At long last, he would get to say to her all the things he’d ever wanted.

  “There is nothing you can do to make me talk,” he declared. “And that’s because you, and your boss Metzer, and all of your Verloren Industries ilk, are nothing but a pack of slime-sucking brigands. So go ahead, ruin me, I don’t care. But you will never find them!”

  Vogel flicked her wrist. A delicate knife snapped into her fingers. Before Karsten even had a chance to react, she swiftly slashed him deep across the throat.

  Karsten reeled, windless, unable to scream. He fell backwards, slamming his back into the display case, staring at Vogel in terror. Clutching his neck, he felt the warmth leave his body, dribbling through his fingers and soaking into his shirt.

  “I am afraid I do not have time to deal with you properly, Mr. Mueler,” Vogel sighed. She leaned in closer, her voice almost a whisper. “But rest assured, I will find them, it is only a matter of when. And once I do, they will not face a painless end. Oh no. For this I shall give them a long, slow farewell. Your miserable pack of thieves will beg for death before I’m finished stripping the flesh from their bones. This I promise you.”

  Karsten’s body weakened, his heartbeat grew faint. He dropped to his knees before finally collapsing onto the floor in a crumpled heap, a pool of shimmering scarlet bathing the tiles beneath him.

  Vogel calmly strode behind the counter and pressed the handle of her knife into Karsten’s palm. Seemingly satisfied with her task, she wiped the blood from her hand with a dark handkerchief and pulled out a pocket radio. She made her way towards the exit, speaking into the receiver as she did.

  “Search the docks,” she coldly ordered.

  As Karsten lay there, choking on his final breaths, his mind turned to Sheah, and the terrible mess he had just gotten his niece into. He prayed to the Angels, with every last drop of his life, that she would get out of this, and that somehow, someday, she might possibly forgive him. His vision fading, Karsten spent his final moments staring up at Vogel, her hands crusted with his blood, as she passed through the threshold and sank into the dark void of the night.