35. We find out where he goes from here

Chapter 35: We find out where he goes from here

The inn that Kaplan was staying at was the first stop, obviously, and it turned up nothing but the innkeeper behind the bar shaking his head before Mikaela had even finished the question.

"Kaplan? Hasn't been in since yesterday morning." He wiped at the same spot on the counter he'd been wiping for a full minute. "You want my honest opinion, that's not like him. Man practically lives here most days."

"We don't want your honest opinion," Mikaela said, already turning for the door, "we want to know where he is."

"Well I don't know where he is, do I, that's the whole point of him not being here."

Freya caught the door before it swung shut behind Mikaela and followed her out into the street, matching her pace easy despite the armor. "The guardhouse next."

"Why would he be at the guardhouse?"

"Because he's their witness. Sometimes witnesses get asked back for more statements, especially when a knight starts making noise about wanting a second one." Freya's jaw was tight. "If he's smart he's staying close to the people protecting his story."

He wasn't there either. The guard at the front desk barely looked up from his ledger, said Kaplan had given his statement and hadn't been back since, no, they hadn't sent for him again, no, he didn't know where a man like that spent his time when he wasn't lying to captains.

"He's hiding," Mikaela said once they were back out in the street, voice tight with something that wasn't quite panic yet but was working its way there. "He knows we're looking. Somebody must've told him."

"Or he's exactly where he needs to be for whatever comes next." Freya stopped walking, eyes narrowing down the lane like the answer might be sitting somewhere in the middle distance if she looked hard enough. "You said he grew up running with your old crew. Before that, before you knew him as your handler for this job, where would he go if he wanted to disappear for a day. Not hide. Disappear."

Mikaela opened her mouth, then stopped, something clicking into place behind her eyes.

"The home," she said. "He'd go to the home."

They cut across the city at a pace just short of running, through the market square still busy with midday trade, down the narrow lanes that led toward the low stone wall and the overgrown yard beyond it, and Freya slowed them both to a walk half a block out, one hand catching Mikaela's arm before she could barrel straight up to the gate.

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"Careful," Freya said. "If he's here for a reason, we don't want him knowing we're here too. Not yet."

They came at it from the side instead, along the fence line where the weeds grew tall enough to crouch behind, and Mikaela's stomach dropped clean through the floor when she saw him.

Kaplan stood in the yard, near the ruined shed still roped off from last night's wreckage, and across from him stood Elara, wrapped in her shawl despite the warmth of the day, leaning on a cane Mikaela hadn't seen her use before.

They were talking. Low, close, heads bent toward each other in a way that didn't look like a mercenary reporting to a kindly old woman about her missing caretaker. It looked practiced. It looked like something they'd done before.

Kaplan reached into his coat.

He pulled out a pouch, small, and pressed it into Elara's waiting hand, her fingers closing around it fast, tucking it away into the folds of her shawl before it had even finished catching the light.

Coins. Mikaela didn't need to hear them clink to know the shape of a purse full of coin when she saw one, had felt the weight of enough of them in her own palm over the years to recognize it from thirty feet off.

"He's paying her," Mikaela breathed. "He's paying her."

"Or she's paying him," Freya murmured back, eyes narrowed on the exchange. "We're too far to see whose hand moved first."

"Does it matter? Either way that's money changing hands between the guildhouse mercenary who put us on this job and the sweet old woman who asked Eto to investigate her own caretaker, and neither of them thought that was worth mentioning."

Kaplan said something else, brief, and Elara nodded, patted his arm the same gentle way she'd patted Eto's the day before, and turned to make her slow way back toward the house, cane tapping soft against the packed dirt.

Kaplan lingered a moment in the yard alone, glancing once toward the broken fence, toward the shed, and something in his face when he thought no one was watching looked less like a man who'd witnessed a murder and more like a man checking his own handiwork.

Mikaela's hand had gone to the knife at her belt without her noticing, and Freya's grip on her arm tightened, pulling her back down lower behind the weeds.

"Don't," Freya said, quiet, urgent. "Not now."

"He's right there. He's right there, Freya, that lying son of a bitch is standing forty feet away and I could end this whole thing in ten seconds."

"And then what. Then you're the one in chains, and Eto's still sitting in that cell, and whoever's actually behind this walks away clean because their loose end is dead and can't be questioned." Freya's eyes hadn't left Kaplan the whole time she spoke, tracking him as he crossed toward the fence, unhurried, like a man with nowhere pressing to be. "We wait. We watch. We find out where he goes from here, who he meets next, whether that pouch was payment for silence or payment for something worse. You confront him now, we lose everything we might learn by waiting an hour."

Mikaela's jaw worked, fury and reason wrestling behind her eyes, and it was reason that won out, barely, her hand easing off the hilt of her knife one finger at a time.

"Fine," she said, low. "We wait. But if he so much as looks like he's about to run, I'm not asking permission a second time."

Freya didn't answer that, just kept her eyes on Kaplan's back as he slipped out through the broken fence slat and back into the lane beyond, moving unhurried, unwatched, unaware that two women crouched in the weeds not far off had just watched him hand a bribe to the one person in this entire mess who was supposed to be above suspicion.