The room upstairs was small and smelled of old wood and cheap perfume. It was a common room in a common inn, but the woman who had brought Captain Valen here made it feel like a private chamber in a king's castle. She had a gentle, calm way of moving that was very different from the loud, rough manners of the village girls downstairs.
She gestured to a chair by a small wooden table. "Sit, Captain. Rest your legs. The air down there is too thick with noise and booze."
Valen sank into the chair. He felt the heavy exhaustion of the last few weeks pressing down on him. The tension from the Edger estate, the strangeness of the Elf slave who had somehow negotiated the Denares brothers for them to send the army away home. Which was very unlike them to do. It had all made him very tired.
The woman poured him a deep brown ale from a bottle she had carried up. "Drink this. It will clear your head."
Valen took a long, deep gulp. The ale was strong and sweet, not the usual bitter stuff they drank. He felt the heat spread through his chest, making the edges of his worries soft and blurred. He watched her as she moved around the small room. She was truly beautiful, the most striking woman he had seen in this region. He felt a familiar, rough excitement stir in him.
"You have a kindness that most women in a place like this do not possess," Valen mumbled, feeling his tongue already getting heavy. He reached out to touch her hand.
She smoothly moved the glass out of his reach. "I am just a simple woman, Captain, trying to make a living. But I see the weight of a warrior on you. You carry many secrets."
She poured him another half-cup of ale before he could complain. "Tell me, is everything going well for the Marquess? We heard rumors that Lord Darius and Lord Alaric were at the Count's estate. Did they leave for the capital already?"
Valen frowned, pulling his hand back. "What does that matter to you?"
"Ahh, It matters because men like you are the protectors of the kingdom," she answered, her eyes wide and innocent. "If the great lords are safe, we feel safe. Did you speak with Lord Alaric? I heard He is called the Marquess of Law, a truly smart man, they say. Did he tell you about the next movements of the army?"
She was asking too many questions. Valen felt a prickle of annoyance under the comforting warmth of the drink. 'She is trying to talk like a noblewoman, not a bar waitress,' he thought dimly.
"The lords are not here. They... they finished their business and left," Valen slurred. He rubbed his temples. "Now, enough talk of nobles and armies. I didn't come here to talk strategy."
He stood up, grabbing her arm. "You have asked enough questions. Now you will answer to me."
The woman did not fight him. She looked at him with a strange, cold look. It was the look of a person looking at an insect, not a lover.
She pulled away with a sudden, sharp strength that shocked him. It was too fast, too powerful for a small, gentle waitress.
"You are drunk, Captain," she said, her voice losing its sweetness. It became hard and sharp. "You have wasted my time."
"Wasted your time?" Valen bellowed, his annoyance boiling into anger. The constant questions, the sudden coldness, and the clear rejection made him feel like a fool. "You have been playing games with me! You only poured me drink, and you annoyed me with questions unrelated to you! Now you call me a waste? Get out! Get out of my room! You are annoying!"
He grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at her.
The woman's face remained cold. She nodded once, a quick, mechanical movement. Without another word, she opened the door and vanished, leaving the scent of perfume and a lingering sense of deep wrongness in the air.
Valen watched the door slam shut. His head was spinning. He shook his fist at the empty space where she stood.
"Hah, A beautiful waste of time," he muttered. He stumbled over to the small, hard bed, the strong ale finally doing its work. The moment his heavy body hit the thin mattress, his mind shut down. He passed out completely.
In the middle of the night, Valen woke up suddenly.
It was not the noisy shouts of his men or the bright light of morning that woke him. It was a cold, sharp feeling above his neck, a pressure that was too thin to be a hand.
He opened his eyes. The room was dark, lit only by a thin sliver of moon coming through the window. The clock in the village square had just chimed midnight.
Standing over him, silhouetted against the weak moonlight, was the woman.
She was holding a hunting knife. The blade, long and wickedly sharp, was pressed right against the soft skin of his throat.
She was not smiling. Her eyes were wide, focused, and utterly empty of human feeling. She was an assassin.
In a moment of pure, raw instinct that saved his life, instinct born from ten years of battles and close calls, Valen moved. He did not think. He simply roared.
It was a guttural sound, the sound of a beast caught in a trap.
He threw his entire body to the side, kicking out with his heavy boots. The sudden, violent movement was enough to throw the woman off balance. The knife slid across his skin, a burning line of pain that was quickly soaked in blood, but it missed the main artery.
SHIIIING!
The blade struck the wooden headboard of the bed.
Valen scrambled off the bed, knocking over the table. The spilled ale and the darkness made the small room a chaos of shadows and noise. The woman was fast, inhumanly fast. She moved like a striking snake, spinning and thrusting the knife again.
Valen was a large, strong man, a seasoned warrior of the Denares army, but she was quicker. He caught her wrist, feeling the unnatural hardness of her muscle, the strength that was not supposed to belong to a waitress. They struggled, the knife flashing inches from his face.
He let out another desperate, fighting roar. He threw his weight against her, smashing her into the wall. The impact should have stunned a normal woman. But she only grunted, twisting her arm free.
Realizing she could not finish the job quickly, the woman stopped fighting. She did not run for the door. She looked at the wooden wall behind Valen.
She took a deep breath, and then she struck the wall not with her body, but with her fist.
CRACK-CRASH!
It was a sound like a tree trunk snapping. The wooden planks of the inn wall, thick and strong, splintered and burst outwards. A sudden rush of cold night air filled the room. The woman had punched a hole large enough for her body to fit through.
Valen stood frozen for half a second, staring at the raw, jagged edges of the broken wood.
She did not hesitate. She dove through the opening, into the black air of the night, disappearing without a sound.
Valen stood panting, his hand pressed to his neck, slick with blood. The adrenaline was now a terrible, shaking tremor throughout his body. He stumbled to the hole in the wall and looked out. Nothing. No shadow, no sound of running, no body on the ground below. She was gone.
His last, desperate roar had worked. The sound had woken the entire inn.
The door to his room burst open. Three of his subordinates, all veterans of the Diablo unit, rushed in, their swords drawn and their faces full of fear and alertness.
"Captain! What happened?!"
"A assassin!" Valen roared, his voice hoarse from the effort and the rage. He pointed a trembling finger at the ragged hole in the wall. "The girl! She was an assassin!"
The soldiers stared at the damage. The clean, sharp edges of the broken wood made it look as if a cannonball had struck the wall. The strength needed to do that was terrifying.
"The girl, Captain?" one of the soldiers, a big man named Grom, asked, his eyes still clouded with sleep and drink. "The beautiful one that took you upstairs?"
"Yes! And the others! The ones who came to service you! They were not waitresses!" Valen moved to the door, grabbing the shoulder of the youngest man, Private Hal. "Did they ask you questions? Did the girls ask you anything about our mission or the Count's estate?"
Hal, still half-drunk, swallowed hard. His face turned pale.
"Sir... they did," Hal whispered, looking at the floor in shame. "My girl... she kept asking about the Denares Lords. She wanted to know why they were at the Count's house and if they were planning to leave soon. I thought she was just trying to impress me, so I... I told her we were suspicious of them. I told her we thought the Count's house was hiding something. I said we felt like we were waiting for no reason."
Another soldier, Borin, nodded quickly. "Mine, too, Captain. She was especially interested in the rumors about elves being seen inside the house."
Valen's mind, suddenly cold and terrifyingly sober, clicked all the pieces into place.
The beautiful women, the cheap price, the endless questions, the unnatural strength, the clean escape, and the midnight dagger.
"They were spies," Valen stated, the words cutting through the air like ice. "Not spies for the Denares. Not local spies. They were professionals. The kind that work for high-ranking nobles. They wanted to know if the Denares brothers were here. They wanted to know what was going on at the Edger mansion."
He looked around the room. The inn was silent now. The other soldiers had rushed into the rooms of the waitresses.
"Check the other rooms!" Valen commanded.
A minute later, a soldier rushed back. "Captain, they're gone! All of them. They left their bags, but the girls are all gone. The rooms are empty."
The realization hit them all with the force of a punch. They had been sleeping with their enemy. They had been drinking and talking secrets to highly trained killers.
"This confirms it," Valen said, his voice now dangerously calm. He touched the cut on his neck, feeling the wet, warm blood. The pain was irrelevant to the danger he had faced just moments ago.
"Either Someone is protecting that Count's house, trying to hide what happened there, or someone else is trying to take it over. The only reason a high-level assassin would risk killing a Denares Captain is to keep a massive secret safe. The Count's house is not just a house anymore. It's a central point of a war."
Valen grabbed his sword and strapped it to his side. He didn't bother to clean the blood or change his clothes.
"Grom! Wake every single man! Drunk or not, I don't care. They need to put on their gear and be ready to march in five minutes!"
"But Captain, it's the middle of the night! And the men are all…"
"Five minutes!" Valen roared, silencing his subordinate. His eyes were burning with a new, cold determination. He had been played for a fool, but he was still a veteran. "We are not going back to sleep until we know what is in that mansion. If the secrets in there are worth killing a Captain over, they are secrets worth dying to uncover. We march now. To the Edger estate!"
Author note: This novel need more ratings and support guys.