The Royal Thief

Chapter 67: Misleading Truth

Once again I felt so uncreative and bored with this chapter so it's really late, but maybe not a disaster? I will need to go back and add more detail to the middle part when I edit the entire book. I don't know what it is lately, but getting out a weekly chapter just keeps getting harder and harder.

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I went in the early morning, before sunrise, for two reasons (neither of which was because I liked getting up early at all)- first because I knew he would be in his office at that time, and second because this was my secret. Or rather, my secret that he had a secret. And no one else would become suspicious of it by catching sight of me slipping silently into the Guard's headquarters and the dark hallway beyond.

"What are you doing here?" He asked, not looking up from the report he was reading.

"Nothing," I said, easing the door closed behind me. "Just... visiting." I didn't have a clear idea of what I was going to do. I sensed directly bringing up that he was consorting with rebels was a bad idea, but I had to learn something. After all, that was the only information Dell had given me. Refusing to elaborate, she wouldn't tell us anything more than that she sometimes got information from him.

It seemed to me that she'd been purposefully ambiguous about how this information was gotten.

He groaned and rubbed his eyes. "If you haven't got a reason for making my life harder, would you please get out?"

"What if I did have a reason?"

He looked like he was going to groan again but then he just sighed. "Give me a moment." He began to quickly clear his desk, sweeping papers into neat piles and shifting them into drawers or larger stacks. There was more clutter than usual, and when I leaned over to get a look at one paper he whisked it into a drawer and covered up the nearby papers with his arm.

Rolling my eyes, I sat back in the chair before his desk and looked around the tiny office. Locked wood cabinets lined three of the four walls, making it seem even smaller than it was. Old-fashioned lanterns cast a coppery light over the scuffed floor. With no window, it was the only source of light besides the old brazier set in the wall behind his desk, glowing with red coals. Above it was a narrow shelf, and sitting on it was a hasty stack of rectangular slips of paper.

I almost fell off my chair when I caught sight of them. They were gold notes-slips of thick, cotton-like parchment with intricate designs in pale greens and blues with gold gilt on the edges and corners. They were given by the Vaulisse, the noble bank, as markers of 120 gold pieces each. The pile easily held about ten.

"What are those?" I demanded.

He flinched, and quickly looked over his shoulder. In a second flat he'd scooped them into a desk drawer, snapped it shut, and locked it.

"How did you get those?" I could think of a thousand ways, but they were all my kind of ways.

"I do get paid, you know," he said calmly, though his face was a shade paler."

"Not that much, you don't." Auxiliary Captain was a high position, undoubtedly with a higher pay than most positions, but the amount of gold that had been lying so casually on the shelf moments before had to be equal to at least four years of pay. It was impossible that he would still have so much money unspent. Wasn't it? I had a very good grasp on the value of heavy weights of gold- Jaden had insisted it was a basic skill to know how much you were stealing. But if it wasn't pay, how had he gotten it? Joshua's code of honor- however much I disagreed with it- was incorruptible. Nevertheless, I accused him, "You stole it!"

"Don't you dare-" his eyes were flashing dangerously. I knew that look, but I wasn't going to let this go.

"Oh? So how did you get it?"