I crack the door open slowly and peer inside the room before entering.
The main room of the warehouse sprawls before us, dark and expansive. It’s filled with shelves and racks, each of which is covered in wooden barrels and crates, some of them stacked to the ceiling.
The darkness is broken only by the distant flicker of a single candle in a window on the opposite side of the room. There’s no hint of movement, not a footstep, not a shifting shadow. Wherever the guards are, it’s not here.
I move slowly along an aisle between shelves, and Soren reluctantly follows. There’s room enough for us to walk together now, and I feel the lack of him the second he moves out from behind me. We pause as we reach an aisle that extends to the front door. I darken the shadow as deep as it will go as I lean out to check for guards.
No one. Even the front doors have been left unguarded.
This feels all wrong. The goods they store here are valuable. The shelf beside me contains several crates labeled as saffron, a spice so rare and expensive that I’ve never so much as seen it, let alone tasted it. And the city is busier than ever with festival goers coming into town. Why would they take such an unnecessary risk?
Did someone else get here first?
There are no signs of a struggle. Nothing looks the slightest bit out of place.
Soren squeezes my hand and walks a step in front of me, urging me onwards. It’s brighter on this side of the warehouse because of the candlelight, bright enough that he drops my hand and begins to lead.
I try to ignore how empty my hand feels without his, how his warmth lingers on my skin.
We’re nearly to the candlelit window now, although an aisle separates us from it. I peek through a gap in the crates to see an empty desk with an overturned chair within.
Here’s the fight we were looking for. It’s difficult to see from this angle, but something caused the occupant of the office to leave in a hurry.
“Let’s go,” I whisper. The office has a door that leads outside on the dockside of the building. If the girls were here, they could be on a boat by now.
“Wait,” says Soren, and he grabs my arm and pulls me back to him forcefully.
Then he pushes us both to the ground, urging me into the bottom shelf between a stack of wooden boxes.
He’s sensed someone. It takes a moment before I hear their approaching footsteps. At least two of them, moving quickly and with no regard for the noise they’re making.
The door slams open, banging into the wall.
“Gods, it’s heavy!” yells a man. His voice is accented. It reminds me a bit of Larus, the accent of the Enez Islands, though I know it’s not him. I could recognize Larus’s voice anywhere.
Please don’t be Felix.
Something crashes to the ground with so much force that it shakes the containers we’re hidden between.
“Careful with it,” replies a woman, her accent Selaran. “There’s a lot of coin in that crate.”
“Yes, madam,” the man replies. He says it without a hint of sarcasm, and I breathe a sigh of relief that it’s unlikely to be Felix. After our encounter today, I can’t imagine him taking orders from anyone.
This is our chance. We could knock these two out and then wait for the others to check what happened to them, picking at least a few of them off one by one.
I put my hand underneath me, beginning to push myself up.
Soren grabs me by my shoulders, pulling me to him tightly so I don’t lose my balance from the loss of momentum.
I can barely breathe, for a couple of reasons. There’s the terror of being caught, of knocking something over and getting their attention before we’re ready to take them on. And there’s the physical sensation of being crushed against Soren, robbing my lungs of the space they need to fill but also sending a rush of excitement through me.
It's hard to focus when he’s holding me this close, when I can smell him, incense and spice.
But his action works: they don’t hear us.
“One more,” says the woman.
“Don’t bloody remind me,” grumbles the man.
