When Riza found him, he was sitting on a rough chunk of concrete in almost complete darkness, knees drawn up, huddling over the bloody, shaking hands curled in his lap. Only the radiance from a single ceiling fixture, dangling lopsidedly halfway down the ruined tunnel, outlined his profile and provided enough light for her to pick her way toward ( Read more... )

“Don’t be afraid,” a soft voice whispered.

( Spoilers for Chapter 102 )

Roy bent over the miniature locomotive, brows drawn down in deep concentration as he tightened the tiny screw on the bottom of the frame. He rarely had to wear his glasses - few people knew he even owned them - but this close work was impossible without them. It didn’t help that the ceiling fixture in this small basement room wasn’t the brightest ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 3)

He made his way along the dark hallway, guided by a wedge of lamplight that emerged from a half-opened door nearby to fall across the carpet and climb the wall on the opposite side. He could hear the murmur of voices, but couldn’t yet make out any words. The strip of light wavered and trembled a couple of times, forcing him to pause ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 2)

Ed glanced sideways as he danced, watching the colonel a few feet away twirling Devra near the phonograph. One of the two dark-skinned women who lived and worked here, she had taken the long red scarf the man had given her and tied back her voluminous curly black hair. The ends of the scarf whirled about her brown dress as she ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 1)

“So tell me,” Ed muttered under cover of the other conversations, “were you ever planning to explain what was really going on here, or would you have let me be humiliated the whole evening?” He finished cutting the slice of roast goose on his gilded plate, the heavy silver knife clinking on the china plate. He put a piece into his ( Read more... )

Ed pulled his red coat more tightly around his shivering body and let out a long, slow breath, watching it stream in front of him in a thin fog before it dispersed into the crisp, cold night air. There was no chance the colonel would see the foggy breath as his subordinate huddled here in the shadows: the man was too busy letting the three women on ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 14)

The alarm bells seemed to be coming from everywhere. He struggled up from the thick, fuzzy blackness, slowly, his arm reaching out in a vague search for the alarm clock. It was only when he felt the hard surface beneath him, and began to push himself away from it, that he realized it wasn’t the clock making the noise.

He gasped for ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 13)

Maes stood looking down across the table at Roy for a long, long time. Roy, in the meantime, sat quietly waiting, saying nothing, gazing into the amber liquid in the glass cradled between his hands. His still-gloved hands.

Maes could hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the hallway, and the occasional creak as the house ( Read more... )

(See Chapter 12)

When Elysia had been put to bed that evening, and Maes settled with Gracia on the couch in front of the fireplace, he decided he’d had a pretty productive day, even if he’d ended up staying home instead of going in to work. He’d called the office to let his investigators know there would be some extra police patrols starting ( Read more... )