Season of Ashes Ch. 01-02

After a cursory sweep to get a sense of the surroundings, she stood with arms akimbo near the large double-doored windows opposite the entrance. She dipped her head forward, peering past the tulle curtains to get a view of the terrace just outside — and beyond that, the silhouettes of lindens that stretched away from the Impérial, forming a trail of verdant breadcrumbs that lined the broad avenue to distant horizons. Edward Newland was somewhere out there among the metropolitan lights. She had no time to lose.

For the next fifteen minutes, Milicent confined her investigation to the chief bedroom. Having donned a pair of white gloves, she combed through drawers, ransacked valises, rubbed her fingers along the narrow gap separating the mattress from the bed frame. There was no hint of disarray in his belongings: clothes were smartly folded, shoes were polished to a peerless shine, and toiletries were positioned in serried ranks like disciplined soldiers. Newland himself was evidently a neat guest, since Milicent knew he didn't travel with a valet. Where would a tidy man hide something precious?

She crossed her arms and leaned against the door frame of the bedroom. This was the only part of the suite where evidence of habitation was apparent. There were no personal effects anywhere else, no sign that he spent any time enjoying the splendours of the Grisaille to their fullest extent. If he was in the habit of keeping important documents on his person, then perhaps she would have to lie in wait until —

— She cocked her head, examining the escritoire pushed up against one of the windows in the main room. Its surface was bare apart from a small makeup mirror perched near the edge. Her eyes fixated on the front right leg of the desk; right next to the wooden foot, a solitary pen lay in repose on the floor. She approached the escritoire and tugged the chain of a nearby lamp, illuminating the immediate area with a soft flush of yellow. The light exposed the shallow characters engraved on the body of the pen: Franklin-Christoph. An American brand.

Though unremarkable in a room full of immoderate wonders, the desk was a striking work of craftsmanship in its own right. Its dimpled writing surface was a masterwork of intarsia — walnut and mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell mingled in geometric patterns to form a kaleidoscopic backdrop. Milicent opened the drawers and compartments comprising the base of the desk, but discovered nothing beyond a few layers of vintage dust. She frowned, disappointed, and placed a gloved hand on the surface. She wondered how many years, how many decades of writing the desk had absorbed; how many ambassadors and diplomats and royals and luminaries had swept pens across paper, marking the wood beneath with the benign grooves of their strokes?

As she swept her hand over the detailing, her fingers fumbled over an ill-fitting fragment of nacre that protruded ever so slightly from the otherwise level plane. Furrowing her brow, she pressed her fingers against the piece, forcing it down into place. Suddenly, the surface of the desk burst open like the boot of a car, launching the mirror into the air. Milicent managed to catch it before it joined the pen on the floor; she held it aloft in her hand, her mouth curling into a vulpine smirk as she examined the desk's newly exposed secret compartment. There, previously hidden, was a velvet-lined hollow harbouring hidden treasure — a box of cigars, a platinum watch, a blue binder. Jackpot.

She thumbed open the binder and managed to discern a single word — Energiewaffe — before a peripheral flash caught her attention. She glanced at the mirror in her hand: a vertical sliver of thin light was leaking from the main doorway behind her, partially obscured by a dark shape. A heavy chunk of ice roiled in her stomach; with an abrupt sense of dread, she realised she had neglected to lock the door.

This could be bad. No time to think. A blurry rolodex of gambits stuttered through her mind, threatening to paralyse her into inaction. Her fingers twitched. She assumed the worst. Instinct took over. The most effective way to disrupt a predator's ambush, Milicent knew, was to spoil the element of surprise.

She turned around partially, exposing the narrowest profile of her figure as a target, and stared head-on at the intruder.

"It's customary" — she spoke in Edward Newland's English, enunciating each syllable to coerce herself into composure — "to knock."

Dominik

Fujiwara was good at forcing calm under fire. He'd been through enough to navigate the trickiest situations without breaking a sweat, relying on two decades of experience to guide him. Even so, he couldn't suppress the instinctive, gut-churning response to finding out someone else was in a room that he should have had to himself. Had the man given it more thought, he might have claimed it to be professional indignance — someone was making a clean job sloppy. His heartbeat pulsed in his ears, throbbing as time seemed to slow about him. His veins were running with ice water; the hair on the back of his arms stood on end as he eased the door open.

He pressed his back against the heavy door, edging into the foyer of the lavish suite. There was no sound from within, and the door swung open easily despite its weight; there were no creaky hinges in the Impérial, certainly not in the Grisaille Suite. Intent eyes drank in every detail, looking for anything out of place. Either someone had been in the suite since Newland left, or someone was here now. Neither boded well for his job.

Fujiwara hated complications. They ended up with him on the wrong end of a gun more often than not.

He could see straight down the corridor to the famed sitting room of the suite. Aristocrats and royalty had been received here for almost two centuries — he doubted the décor had changed since then. It was easy to picture the nobility peering from the bay windows as the revolutionaries stormed the hotel. That was probably part of the allure, a certain amused reflection on the past aristocrats who had the misfortune to be born in the wrong circumstances. The type of people who patronised the Impérial were like that. He'd come across their type often enough. Something about ennui lent itself to savouring morbidity.

He'd seen too many dead bodies to take pleasure in such things.

At the moment, he was focused on not becoming one himself. His fingers curled around the comfort of his knife hilt. He pulled it free from the waistband of his slacks, and stepped fully into the foyer. He eased the door closed carefully, placing each foot carefully as he made his way deeper into the suite.

The suite was on the verge of clutter, the ornate furnishings creating an outlandish landscape in the dim half-light seeping in from the streetlights of Paris outside the windows, and the glow of a lamp from around the corner in the main room. Eerie shadows were cast in the oblique lighting, lending the flowers and furniture a macabre character in the darkness. He knew how easily the human eye could be tricked into seeing things —

— but the woman standing next to the writing desk was not a trick of the light. He forced himself not to start in surprise as he rounded the corner fully, revealing himself to the woman. "I didn't expect to find someone skulking in the darkness. Someone else, that is." Fujiwara spoke with the hint of an accent, the vowels exaggerated enough to make his Australian twang known though it was tempered with years of practise.

He saw no obvious threat from the woman, at least not immediately. She was watching him carefully, fixing him with a careful gaze; a mirror image of his own. Neither of them belonged in the suite, and they both knew it. The woman wasn't Newland's wife, and intelligence suggested he wasn't the type to take mistresses.

Whatever or whoever she was, it was clear that she was cool under pressure. She was turned to present a slim — not to mention shapely — target to him, an elegant figure in the warm light cast by the lamp on the desk. Behind her, an open binder lay on the lacquered surface, some sort of engineering documents contained within. It had to be the same binder that Fujiwara himself was here for.

He sighed internally. This job should have been an easy one; it was just his luck that he was beaten to it.

"I couldn't convince you to leave that binder and forget you saw me, could I? It would be a shame to have to hurt a pretty thing like you." His voice was a relaxed drawl — a little too forced for his liking, but there was no easy way to talk his way out of this situation.

Carefully, with exaggerated motions, he raised the knife to where she could see it. There was a bureau next to him; he set the blade atop the white lace cover, and showed her his hands before crossing his arms over his chest. "I don't want to if I don't have to, but I'm not leaving here without that binder."

He was a tall, powerfully-built man with a face that could have been hewn from a weathered cliff. Dark blond hair was swept back in a haphazard concession to style, and while it wasn't strictly in line with the standards of the Impérial, a light dusting of stubble emphasised the chiselled outline of his jaw. Despite the uniform of the hotel staff, it was clear now that the facade was a meagre one — no bellhop put as much care as he did into maintaining his physical condition, particularly not with the sheer mass of hard muscle beneath his embroidered jacket.

Ted Mullins could draw attention away from it with his slouch and the habitual shuffle, but the man who stood before her was straight-backed and proud, carrying himself with an almost military bearing. His wolfish features were impassive as he looked over the blonde, save the hint of an amused smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

Milicent

The unlit gloom of the night had been, since time immemorial, the most powerful accomplice to fear. It had something to do with the inevitability of it, the unmapped nature of it. The darkness would always follow the sun's demise, would always encompass the world in its somber fog, would always shapeshift benevolent vistas into their baleful counterparts. Milicent had tasted that fear when she was young. She recalled the alienating panic that visited her at the end of each day when the horizon shrank and the sturdy oak that stood sentinel in front of her childhood home transformed into a spindly horror. But it had been years since she'd spent any time away from the blinding halos of cities. The fear of the night — the true night — had become unfamiliar.

Until now.

The streetlights of Paris may as well have occupied a different planet. Even the lamp at her side was betraying her, leaving her exposed, vulnerable, and visible in the warm hue of a spotlight while augmenting the menacing shadows that danced around the stranger. He said something about the darkness. She should've been paying attention.

Instead, she was mesmerised by him — the way one might be mesmerised by a cobra. He was tall in a manner that made his upright posture redundant. There he stood, a veritable colossus, guarding the far corner like a goalkeeper. Her eyes dared a sweep across his figure, noting the characteristic elements of his uniform...but his words and his accent immediately betrayed his true purpose. Labouring at a hotel clearly didn't represent the height of his ambition.

Milicent said nothing. She was trapped. Fighting the panic — the urge to run away or dash straight at him — absorbed every last morsel of her willpower. Her muscles were screaming for action. She narrowed her eyes, struggling to concentrate on his words, even as her racing pulse threatened to drown out his remarks with the steady weight of percussion blasting against her eardrums. When the blade of the knife glinted in his hand, she felt a chill run up her spine; her shoulder flinched; her eyes didn't return to his face until the weapon was situated on the bureau.

Still, Milicent said nothing. The silence lengthened. She scrutinised his face, lashes fluttering just a smidge as her eyes danced around his features. Like some out-of-time physiognomist, she assessed the set of his brow, the tautness of his jaw, the dangerous curve of his mouth. Friend or foe?

Those hands could crush her neck without much resistance, so he didn't need to play at diplomacy the way he was doing...though he probably did prefer to keep her from shrieking until he was within pouncing distance. If there was one imperative guiding her through the cloud of adrenaline, it was the need to maintain the span between them.

All at once, with the abruptness of the sun breaking through storm clouds, Milicent's expression softened. She turned fully to face him, exposing the Rorschach stain on her dress, and smiled, dimpling her cheeks and exposing a row of pearly-white teeth.

"Oh, this?" She cocked a brow, her hand reaching back to blindly exchange the small mirror for the binder. Much to her relief, her voice came through light and airy — the perfect complement to her studied look of casual indifference. "All yours. But." She angled her chin forward and lifted her eyebrows like a schoolteacher accustomed to doling out careful instructions to wayward children. "You have to forget you saw me, too." Much to her chagrin, she probably couldn't win in a fair fight against this man. But she could wait for an unfair moment to strike.

Especially if she could convince him that she was no rival.

"It's all in some foreign language anyway," she continued. "I'd much rather steal the watch —"

— Milicent felt it on the back of her neck: a kiss of cool air, a zephyr's caress along her nape. Her knee-length dress fluttered, obeying the influence of an inexplicable wind. Was there an open window? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the impressionistic outline of a figure clad in black.

A second man. An accomplice. This was an ambush.

He held something — something which, in that fleeting, solitary moment, looked absurdly phallic. Frost filled her veins as fear set in. Time seemed to relax its pace. She felt as though she were suspended in honey: everything was slow. Too slow. She was too slow.

She opened her mouth, eyes wide, and began to step forward.

Twang!

The crossbow bolt soared behind her, grazing her neck and ripping through her chignon. A sudden tension seized her scalp for a moment. Half a heartbeat later, she was on the floor, scrambling for cover behind a sofa. Her shoulder was numb from the impact of her drop. It was probably damaged. Probably. She didn't have the wherewithal to register pain. Flight was the prevailing instinct. Her nails clawed across the parquet floor, knees burning against the edge of a carpet as she crawled farther away from the window.

A heavy tome landed next to her, barely missing her head. She looked at it, saw the sharp spire of the bolt poking through its torn pages, noticed the delicate threads of saffron coiled around the shaft, and recognised — with a bit of disrelish — that the threads were her own hair.

Outnumbered two to one. This was it. She was going to die.

She reached underneath the skirt of her dress, nearly ripping the fabric of the hidden pocket. Her hand seized the comfortable, cold metal of her balisong. Her fingers twirled in a muscle-memory flurry of legerdemain, exposing the narrow blade before taking hold of the twin handles in a forward grip.

She growled. She could taste iron in her mouth. This was it. She was going to die. But she was going to do everything in her power to make life hell for these men — to avenge herself with one final, perfect act of malice.

Dominik

Silence lingered between them, and Fujiwara watched the woman as she calculated her options. He could see the cogs turning in her mind, her gaze analysing him. She was cool, he had to give her that — she didn't show the signs of overt panic, though the tautness of her bearing showed that she was struggling to entirely suppress it. He couldn't blame her. He was much the same way.

He'd been on the wrong end of underestimating someone too many times to entirely dismiss her as a threat, slight though she was in comparison to himself. It didn't take stature or strength to hide a handgun in a thigh holster, and there was enough muscle beneath the elegant cut of her dress to hint at her physicality. He had the advantage in weight and sheer power, but there was no way to tell who would come out on top in a contest of speed or agility. Dominik didn't want to find out if he didn't have to.

Her eyes held him with the wariness of a wild animal cornered, mirroring the intensity in his own. It was clear that they were both not quite what they appeared; the elegance of her dress was at odds with the way she had been skulking around in the darkness of the Grisaille. His heartbeat thumped in his ears as the tension stretched in the dark suite. What was she going to do?

He saw it happen, her face flickering through a sudden shift as the woman made up her mind. The slight furrow in her brow and the almost-imperceptible surprise in her eyes melted away, and she became someone else entirely in the blink of an eye.

Oh, she was good.

Good enough that he almost, almost considered the possibility that she wasn't a threat. As she turned to face him, the lamp cast its warm glow on her dress to reveal the stain across the fine fabric. A glowing smile parted her ruby lips. Her voice fluttered across the intervening distance between them, casual and unconcerned with such things as the knife atop the bureau, or the fact that she'd been caught in the wrong suite. This woman could have passed for an average dilettante, a bored trophy wife indulging in harmless kleptomania.

The way she slipped so easily into her new role dismissed that possibility. His eyes narrowed a hair's breadth, holding her gaze as she smiled winningly back at him. She knew what she was doing, and she knew the effect she could have if she played it up. Even as wary as he was, he could feel that realisation in the back of his mind, an appreciation not just for the artistry of a fellow craftsman, but for the end result.

This was a lovely woman, and she employed her allure with the same precision as any weapon. His appreciation wasn't entirely professional, but she must have been used to that.

She was too casual about the binder; her voice was too light and unconcerned. He had enough sense to know when someone was looking for an opening, and he was determined not to provide her with one —

— and then a shadow in the window moved.

Fujiwara responded without thinking, snatching the knife from where he'd set it moments before, and diving toward the intruder. He didn't have time to calculate what he was doing. Even with the way adrenaline slowed the world around him, there wasn't enough space between each passing moment for him to think. These were the moments when training led to action, when instincts ingrained over decades of blood and sweat were called into play. There was no time to strategise; he had to trust himself.

He recognised the pistol crossbow just as the string snapped; the silhouette was wrong for a firearm. It was a weapon for someone who didn't anticipate multiple targets — and certainly wasn't expecting a trained response. Had Dominik been given enough time, it would have been amusing. It wasn't aimed at him; he didn't have time to look back at the woman as he threw his mass at the black-clad figure, bringing the knife forward in a sharp lunge.