Blackmail is easy. People make it easy. They spend their whole lives committing sins and then act shocked when someone notices.
The man across from me has been sweating for eleven minutes. Lord Aldric Voss – third son of the Voss merchant dynasty, four warehouses, two legitimate wives, one very illegitimate problem. He is doing his best impression of a man with a clean conscience.
It's a bad impression.
His brand runs up his neck in thick, dark lines, curling toward his jaw like ivy strangling old stone. Avarice. Not the quiet, embarrassed kind that most people carry. The kind that has been fed and indulged and celebrated until it's the only thing left. Aldric Voss doesn't have a skeleton anymore. He has greed wearing a man's clothes and calling itself a lord.
"You said you had information," he says. His fingers are flat on the table with practiced stillness, the kind that costs something to maintain. "About my business partners."
"I said I had a piece of information. One specific piece, about one specific problem you've been pretending doesn't exist for the past four months."
He reaches for his wine. The brand flickers. It always does when they're running numbers, calculating odds, deciding how dangerous I am. "I don't know what problem you mean."
"Lord Cassen has a Lector."
The wine glass stops halfway to his mouth.
There it is.
I let the silence sit. Silence is a weapon most people forget to load. They rush to fill it, and what pours out in that rush is always more honest than anything rehearsed.
"That's–!" Voss sets the glass down very carefully. "That's not possible. Lectors belong to the Church."
"Lectors are people. People have prices." I tilt my head. "Lord Cassen is very good at finding prices. He's been especially motivated lately, given how much of his gold ended up in your warehouses instead of his vaults."
The brand blazes. Every dark line vivid now, hungry-looking.
Here's the thing about Avarice – its real terror isn't pain. It isn't death, or exposure, or the public ruin that keeps other sinners up at night. It's loss. Strip away the money, the warehouses, the accumulated weight of a life spent grabbing, and you don't break a man like Voss. You erase him. There's nothing underneath to survive it.
I know this because I can see it burned into his skin.
"What do you want?" he asks. Flat. Decisive. The sound of a man who has chosen to live.
"The eastern warehouse ledgers. Two years back. A copy, tonight, delivered to an address I'll provide."
"Those ledgers–"
"–contain exactly what I think they contain, yes." I lean forward just slightly but it was enough to make the candlelight shift. "Lord Cassen's Lector reads people, Aldric. I read paper. Let's find out which one of us does more damage."
He stares at me the way they all stare while hunting for the trap, the church seal, the hidden blade. There isn't one. I'm just a man in an ordinary coat who knows things he shouldn't.
That's so much worse, and he's starting to realize it.
"Who are you?"
"Tonight?" I stand, flicking a coin onto the table for wine neither of us touched. "The most useful person you've ever been afraid of." I pull on my coat. "Address under your door in an hour. Ledgers by dawn, or I assume you've picked Cassen's Lector over my considerably quieter help."
I leave him sweating.
𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒
Varenthis at night smells like canal water and roasting meat and the sickly-sweet drift from the Silk District perfume factories – the city's lifelong attempt to smell better than it is. I've always respected the commitment, if not the result.
I'm three streets clear of the Gilded Crane, already turning over the next move, when I round a corner and nearly walk face-first into a sword.
Sheathed. But present.
Its owner is a woman in the silver-grey cloak of the Argent Wing, currently in the middle of questioning a merchant who looks like he'd rather be literally anywhere else. Her back is half-turned. She hasn't noticed me yet.
I notice her.
I notice, specifically, that I can't read her.
My ability does not just fail. It has never failed. Every person I've looked at since I was fifteen – the brand is there. Seared into skin, dark and undeniable. Greed. Cowardice. Cruelty. Lust. The full miserable ledger of what people are underneath all their silk and ceremony, written on the body whether they like it or not.
Her sleeve has ridden up at the wrist.
Nothing. Clean skin. No brand, no lines, no dark thing quietly feeding in the deep.
I actually stop walking.
She catches it – knight's reflex, quite fast and automatic – and turns to face me fully. Sharp brown eyes. A face that made a decision somewhere along the way to just be honest and never looked back. Old scar on her chin, barely worth noticing.
I look. The way I always look – digging for it, the wound that names a person.
There's nothing.
Except–
Something. In the line of her jaw. At the base of her throat. Not a brand. Not any sin I've ever catalogued. Something that looks like a scar that never quite healed right, so faint I could almost argue myself out of seeing it.
I don't argue myself out of it.
I've read thousands of people. I have never seen anything like this.
"You." Her voice has the particular flatness of someone identifying a problem they didn't budget for. Her hand doesn't go to her sword but it knows exactly where it is. "Gilded Crane. Private dining room."
"I was having dinner."
"With Aldric Voss."
"I'm a sociable person."
Her eyes don't move. No brand to betray her. No fear spiking, no anger flaring, no hidden motive written somewhere I can find it. I'm standing in front of a locked door in the dark with no pick and no key and no idea what's on the other side.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little delighted.
"Voss is connected to a murder investigation," she says. "Which makes you connected to a murder investigation." A slight tilt of her head. "So. Who are you?"
I give her the smile. The one that has extracted me from three death sentences and two very awkward marriages.
"Someone who thinks tonight just got significantly more interesting," I say.
She doesn't smile back.
I look at that faint, strange almost-scar where a brand should be and think: devoted. The word surfaces from somewhere and sits there, wrong and right at once.
Devoted to what?
I don't know.
That's the part that's going to keep me up tonight.