Assassin's Revenge

Chapter 3

(M)

After finishing his job in Rollo’s manor, M heads to the servants’ quarters, thinking about what he’s heard at this morning’s meeting. The meeting consisted of Duke Cosmo of House Rollo and his wife Duchess Olivia, and another four subordinates of his. From what M heard, the royal family seems to be conducting a masquerade ball for his highness’s, the crown prince’s , eighteenth birthday.

“Royals.” M scoffs to himself as he opens the door to his extremely small room, but honestly it doesn’t really bother him. Anything is better than the horrid stench of blood in that cursed hideout. As he begins to undress, he hears knocking on his window, so he walks to the window to see a familiar eagle. No, not just any eagle. It’s Siren’s eagle.

“Oh, hello there, Arch.” M strokes the eagle’s soft feathers as he unties the piece of paper tied around Arch’s tiny leg. The letter is written in special morse codes in case the letters get caught by someone in the manor, as morse code is only taught to the military and is not well known.

“Hyphen period hyphen period space three hyphens space two hyphens space period double space hyphen period space three hyphens space period two hyphens.” M reads the code in this way, then substitutes the codes he was taught in his time in the military. He grabs a paper from the drawer and a pen and sets to translating, “C o m e  n o w -come now. Shit.”

M discards his coat and puts a cloak on instead, puts a mask on his face and then the hood of the cloak on his head and opens the window wide, in which Arch was stationed just a few minutes ago, and jumps out of the window. Since the servant’s quarters are on the ground floor of the mansion, the jump is fairly safe. M quickly adjusts the hood on his head and takes off running towards the hideout…

Fifteen minutes later, the hooded man stands at the entrance of the mountain, grabs his gun from his cloak’s pockets and aims for the fake icicle on the ceiling of the mountain and shoots. The icicle, made of bullet proof malleable steel, bends to release an invisible trigger to open the hidden tunnel leading towards the hideout. M walks through the tunnel, one full of dangerous traps and hidden weapons. This tunnel has a peculiar protocol that M couldn’t understand, in which the tunnel detects if there is more than one person present, it will collapse over their heads, so all members of the organization are informed to only enter the tunnel single. 

M reaches the end of the tunnel and encounters a familiar locked door, he then makes sure to knock three consecutive times before he hears two knocks on the other side of the door, something shifting and then usual croaky voice.

“Password.” The voice inquires. 
M hastily says the password before the door unlocks, squeaking loudly as it is opened. “Oil it up.” he commands one of the servants that work in this area, “Where is Siren?”

The servant looks around warily as he says, “I-I don’t know.”

M sighs, before heading towards Siren’s room, hoping to find her there. Her room is bigger than his room in Rollo’s manor, on the right side of the spacious room is her bed, atop it is crowded with opened books and wrinkled clothes, her wardrobe must be empty at this point, how in the world does she sleep with all that junk? On the other side of the room is her desk, with even more books and papers thrown around atop it, while the wall behind the desk holds up a large map of the kingdom. A paper carefully placed on top of all the mess catches M’s attention- a list of nobilities- Siren’s clients. As he looks closer, one of the clients’ names is crossed out, Count Oberon of House Astley.
 
M was about to continue inspecting the other names when he heard footsteps behind him, he turned around to find Siren standing at the door. She looks absolutely horrible with her eyes as red as her hair, almost on the verge of tears, her right cheek red and bruised, as if she’d been slapped. What happened?