[center][img]https://fontmeme.com/permalink/260527/ac7c9f7b.png[/img] [color=#C8E39A]_________________________________________________________[/color] [sup][color=#C8E39A]_________________________________________________________[/color][/sup][/center] [indent][color=silver]Bret had never particularly cared for casinos. The noise. The lights. The desperation masquerading as confidence. Still, this wasn’t any regular casino. Hidden beneath Skoll and Hati, a Norse inspired cocktail bar in Wicklow, it screamed opulence and excess. Places like this existed to convince people they were in control, right up until they weren’t. This one was worse. Because nobody here was gambling with money. Money was easy. Money could be earned back. Information was something else entirely. Information was leverage. Information was survival. Information got people killed. The game itself was buy-in only, hidden behind three layers of introductions and an absurd amount of security. Officially it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it attracted exactly the sort of people Calder City preferred to pretend weren’t running things. Criminals. Political operatives. Corporate intermediaries. Hell, even the occasional enhanced individual clever enough to realize power was temporary but secrets lasted forever. The buy-in wasn’t chips. It was knowledge. Every player arrived carrying something valuable like an account number or a blackmail file. Maybe even the location of some witness that needed to be silenced. Whatever was brought, it had to be enough of a truth to hurt somebody. The winner walked away with everything accumulated at the table. The losers walked away lighter. Assuming they walked away at all. Bret’s own contribution sat quietly in his pocket. A fragment of intelligence acquired during his years with Directorate Nine. Not enough to compromise national security. Not enough to start a diplomatic incident. Just enough to buy a seat at the table. Just enough to hurt if he lost it. The jacket concealed a shoulder that still hurt every time he moved it. His ribs weren’t much better. The fight earlier had left him with fresh bruises and several new reasons to reconsider his life choices. Unfortunately, reflection could wait. Tae Park couldn’t. Bret intended to leave with at least one new piece of the puzzle. Preferably before somebody decided to shoot him. Again. His odds of achieving that seemed approximately fifty-fifty. Multiple different games unfolded around him and his companion for the evening, the heartbreakingly beautiful Sienna Mercer. As he leaned at the bar, ordering their drinks, he couldn’t help but admire the effort she had put into getting ready for their “date.” She looked phenomenal, as requested. Her dark dress making every line and curve of her form appear sculpted by Gods. [color=#C8E39A]“Feeling lucky, Miss Sienna?”[/color] Sienna had walked into a lot of rooms. Rooms designed to impress, to intimidate, to seduce - she knew what that architecture felt like, had learned early how to move through it without letting it do any of those things to her. This one was doing all three simultaneously and doing it well, which she noted with the detached appreciation of someone recognising a craft they respected even when it was being deployed against them. She kept that to herself. What she let show was something else entirely - a version of herself that was softer at the edges, easier, the particular warmth of a woman who had somewhere better to be and had chosen here instead. Her dress was dark, the kind of cut that followed rather than announced, a neckline that stopped precisely where intention became statement, no further and no less. Something about the fabric caught the light of the room differently than it had caught the amber pendants of The Velvet Room, holding it rather than deflecting it. Her hair was down, and she had added exactly the right amount of jewellery - not much, just enough to catch the eye and hold it a moment longer than expected. She had, it seemed, taken his brief seriously. The brunette accepted the drink Bret handed her and leaned into him slightly, just enough to sell it, her shoulder brushing his as she brought the glass to her lips. To anyone watching they were simply that - a couple at a bar, her attention on him, his world temporarily hers for the evening. Her eyes, however, told a different story. They moved across the room with the quiet, practiced ease she had spent years developing behind a bar - taking in the players at the nearest table, the positioning of the security, the exit she had already noted without appearing to look for it. The particular stillness of the man in the corner that meant he was holding something and knew it. [color=#B77B89]"Lucky?"[/color] she said, her voice low, pitched for him alone, her gaze drifting back to him with the expression of a woman who had nothing on her mind but the evening ahead. [color=#B77B89]"I don't tend to leave things to luck."[/color] Then, quieter - [color=#B77B89]"Tell me who we're looking for."[/color] [color=#C8E39A]“I’m not sure, yet.”[/color] Bret responded honestly. He had been trained in deception. He knew how to lie, how to make his heartbeat and pulse. That sort of thing came easy to a point. Yet for some reason, he felt no need to lie to Sienna. He wondered, quietly if there was something more to that than even he knew. Coming to the game was a shot in the dark, a Hail Mary. He didn’t like to call himself a vigilante for many reasons. One in particular was that he didn’t have the street contacts that others in the same sort of profession did. He didn’t have informants or snitches or whatever the Americans liked to call them. He and his gut, the Pilgrim and for the lack of their better judgment, Cressida and now Sienna. He brought the rim of his glass, which was coated with a sweet citrus dust to his lips and took a gentle sip from his old fashioned cocktail. Now was the time that either his people watching skills needed to come in handy or the Pilgrim needed to pull its finger out of its arse and lead him down the right path. As his blue eyes scanned the faces at the table, he spoke, not in hush tones but quietly enough that only Sienna could hear him. [color=#C8E39A]“Each table has four players and a dealer. We need the ones that will either lead us to Tae or El Jefe.”[/color] The fact that he said “Us” was not lost on him. [color=#C8E39A]“It’s a law of averages. We just need to find the right three players, and I’ll make myself their fourth.”[/color] For a moment, he broke away from his room watching, taking stock of the cameras that had locked onto himself and Sienna. Bret turned into her, gently pushing a strand of hair down her face and back behind her ear. [color=#C8E39A]“Smile.”[/color] He spoke as he played the doting lover for the gogglebox. [color=#C8E39A]“You’re on candid camera, darling.”[/color] The brunette didn't miss a beat. The smile that followed his touch was warm and unhurried, the kind that reached her eyes just enough to be convincing - she had spent enough years reading people across a bar to know exactly what genuine looked like, and how to wear it. Her free hand found his arm, a light touch at the elbow, the easy familiarity of a woman comfortable in the company she was keeping. To the cameras, to anyone watching, it was effortless. It [i]was[/i] effortless. That was something she decided not to examine too closely. [color=#B77B89]"Yes, [i]darling[/i],"[/color] she mimicked, the word landing with a faint, private amusement that only he was close enough to catch, her eyes staying on his for just a moment longer than the performance strictly required. Then she let her gaze drift over his shoulder - back across the room, back to the tables. Four players, a dealer. She let her eyes move across each face in turn with the unhurried patience of someone who had spent years watching people decide things they thought nobody was watching them decide. [color=#B77B89]"Third table,"[/color] she stated quietly, her lips barely moving, the smile still in place. [color=#B77B89]"The one with his back to the wall. He's been watching the door since we walked in."[/color] She brought her glass to her lips and took a slow sip. [color=#B77B89]"I'd start there."[/color] [color=#C8E39A]“Careful.”[/color] Bret teased as he looked at the reflection of the table in her big brown eyes. [color=#C8E39A]“You keep feeding me good intel, I’ll get down on one knee right here.”[/color] He smiled widely as he fully turned to view the table she had pointed out. Third table in. Four players and a dealer. As with all the staff, the croupier that was handing out cards was dressed in all black. A form fitting dress that, much like Sienna, was deliberately woven to attract people to her table. The players were a different breed between all of them. The first, with his back to them, the one Miss Mercer had mentioned. He was a pro, you didn’t need to see his eyes for that. Crisp black suit, perfectly quaffed hair. The slight coffee color of his skin meant he was likely Hispanic. Not a terrible place to start when looking for a man called El Jefe. The second man at the table was drunk as a skunk, a cowboy based on the white ten gallon hat he was wearing. Bret had clocked him when they had first entered, mostly because the drool visibly dripping from his mouth when Sienna walked by was unmissable. The third man seemed oddly familiar, in the way that, you may not know a person but their face rang some sort of bell. The fourth at the table was a woman, with ashen hair and scars across her face, hidden by dark sunglasses. [color=#C8E39A]“Alright, we need to get rid of one of them so I can sit in.”[/color] Bret let his hand drift to the small of her back, though his eyes never left hers as they silently asked for consent. The hair on his neck began to stand, not from the electricity he was feeling from her gaze but from the waiter passing by with a tray of drinks, heading towards table 3. The Pilgrim was opening a path but this was not one that he could walk down alone. [color=#C8E39A]“If you’ll indulge me, Sienna. The waiter that just went by, I need him to drop his drink on the cowboy. Would you be so kind as to make that happen the same way you handled those boys at the Velvet? Just trust me on this one.”[/color] The hand at the small of her back was light, questioning. She answered it by shifting fractionally closer - for the cameras, she told herself, which was mostly true. Sienna let his request sit for exactly the length of time it took her to bring her glass to her lips and take a slow, unhurried sip. [color=#B77B89]"I don't know what you're talking about,"[/color] she murmured, her eyes staying on his over the rim. [color=#B77B89]"But if I could do such things-"[/color] A beat. She set the glass down. [color=#B77B89]“You’d better be ready.”[/color] Her gaze drifted across the room - not quickly, not with any particular intent that anyone watching might clock - settling briefly on the waiter making his way toward table three, the tray balanced at shoulder height, the cowboy's white hat a beacon at the far side of the table. She didn't move. Didn't gesture. Didn't do anything that looked like anything at all. The tray tilted. Just slightly, just enough - a fraction of a degree, the kind of shift that looked entirely like the waiter's hand was not completely level. The drinks slid with the easy inevitability of physics doing what physics did, and the cowboy took the full weight of it across the front of his shirt with a sound that cut briefly through the low murmur of the room. The brunette had already looked away by the time it happened, let the commotion settle for exactly the right number of seconds, then tilted her head toward the now empty seat at table three. [color=#B77B89]“Care for a game of poker?”[/color] [color=#C8E39A]“Give me three rounds, then come over.”[/color] Bret moved away from her with a wink. This night had started to take some unexpected turns and for all of his ability to predict the way forward; he had no idea how the rest of the evening was going to unfold. As the cowboy left table three to go clean himself up, the former intelligence officer danced his way around the other tables, playing the part of the slightly tipsy rich boy that these sort of folk would have loved to capitalize on. [color=#C8E39A]“Gentlemen…oh and lady. Sorry to disturb you but it looks like you need a fourth.”[/color] He leaned down on the table, licking his lips like a feral dog. [color=#C8E39A]“Mind if I buy-in?”[/color] The croupier motioned with her eyes to the center of the green felt. Where in normal casinos that area of the table was populated by multicoloured poker chips, in this instance there instead sat some smoking guns. [color=white]“If you read the welcome pack, sir, you would know this isn’t the usual buy-in. Mister Aguilar has generously put in a list of smuggling routes. Miss Sauvage has offered up her assassin services and Mister X has antied up with blueprints for a new technology. What can you offer, Mister…?”[/color] [color=#C8E39A]“Pilgrim.”[/color] Bret casually sat in what was once the cowboys chair and placed his drink on the beer mat. He could now directly see most of the casino and especially he had eyes on Sienna. He blew her a “drunken” kiss before turning back to the dealer. [color=#C8E39A]“Those are some good bets. Though, I think I can raise the stakes a bit.”[/color] He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pen drive, placing it with the other bets. For this next part, Bret raised his voice a touch. [color=#C8E39A]“Oh this little gadget is the name of every Directorate Nine agent active in these United States. Their cover identities, their locations and their schedules.”[/color] The room fell near silent as it processed the information he had just given. [color=#C8E39A]“So, are we going to play or what?”[/color] Sienna caught the wink as he moved away and felt, to her mild irritation, the faint warmth that crossed her cheeks before she could do anything about it. She turned back to the bar before anyone could make anything of it, reaching for her drink with the ease of a woman who had absolutely not just been caught off guard by a wink from a man she had known for the better part of an evening. She signaled for another drink, and settled into the particular patience of someone who knew how to wait without looking like they were waiting. Around her the room continued its quiet, expensive business - cards and conversation and the particular atmosphere of people who had decided tonight that the ordinary rules didn't apply to them. She was watching from the corner of her eye when he sat down and blew her the drunken kiss across the room. She caught it - performed catching it, rather, pressing her fingers briefly to her lips with the delighted, slightly indulgent expression of a woman watching her companion be charming. Then he reached into his pocket and put the drive on the table. Her smile stayed just a fraction too still, just a beat too long - the difference between an expression and a mask, visible only to someone who had been watching her carefully all evening and knew what the real thing looked like. He had sat down at her bar tonight as a man looking for a missing teenager. That was what he had told her. Seems it was the [i]only[/i] thing he had told her. Sienna reached for her drink and finished it, then signalled for another without taking her eyes off the table. The first round told her that Bret played the tipsy rich boy convincingly enough that at least two of the other players had already decided he was the easiest mark at the table. The second told her that he was letting them think so, which was considerably more interesting. By the third she had worked her way through half of her fresh drink and formed a working opinion of each player - the one with his back to the wall who gave away nothing, the woman with the scarred face who gave away slightly more than she intended to, and the third whose familiarity she still couldn't place but filed away regardless. Picking up her bag as the dealer dealt the fourth hand, she sauntered towards table three. She approached from behind, one hand settling lightly on Bret’s shoulder as she leaned down, her lips finding the side of his neck with the easy familiarity of a woman who had done this a hundred times before. She hadn't, for the record. But nobody at this table needed to know that. Then she straightened, looked across the table at the assembled players, and reached over his shoulder for his drink. [color=#B77B89]“Don’t mind me,”[/color] She took a long sip and set it back down. [color=#B77B89]“I just came to watch.”[/color] The plan worked perfectly. As much as he wanted to enjoy the moment of a beautiful woman kissing him, Bret watched his fellow players and his senses began to tingle. The man that the croupier had identified as Mister Aguilar grimaced at the sight of the “lovebirds.” Whilst the woman called Sauvage began to moisten her lips. Mister X, however, did not flinch, did not move. Aguilar reached into his pocket and slammed down a familiar vial with a black crown, only this one was full of the bright orange liquid that had come to be known as King’s Blood. [color=White]“Add this to the pot.”[/color] Then something changed. It was like a scent. Something entered into the atmosphere of the table and it wasn’t Sienna’s perfume, although that in itself was to die for. At first, Bret thought it smelled like the damn air, just before a rain shower. Then mould, maybe? The Pilgrim began to scream in his ear that a fork in the road was about to appear. He saw it a few seconds before it happened. Springing up to his feet, Bret grabbed Sienna with both arms and pulled her away from the poker table. The woman called Sauvage lunged forward, grabbing the vial of King’s Blood before anyone could react. There was no pause as the table flipped and she quickly ingested the drug, container and all. The room began to move but it was slow, these men and women were not people of action. They were those behind the ones that did the dirty work. A split began to appear from Sauvage’s lip that ran down to her chin. Then the split opened wide like a Dilophosaurus and blood spewed out, hitting Aguilar square in his face. Bret could see how it began to burn, melt and sear his skin away from the bone. The smell was sickening. Sienna had seen a lot of things behind a bar. Fights, breakdowns, confessions, the full spectrum of what happened to people when the night ran long and the drinks ran deep. She had seen things in this city that most people wouldn't believe over breakfast. She thought, on some level, that she had developed a working immunity to being surprised. Yet, she had not accounted for watching a woman's face split open like a wound and dissolve a man's flesh from three feet away. But what stayed with her, even as the room came apart around them, was that Bret had already been moving before any of it happened. His chair scraped back, his hands found her arms with a certainty that brooked no argument, pulling her away from the table before she had registered there was anything to move away from. She let him move her for exactly as long as it took her composure to locate itself. Then she found her footing, her hand closing around his arm, and looked up at him with the particular expression of someone filing a very long list of questions away for later. [color=#B77B89]“What now?”[/color] The brunette whispered amongst the chaos, heart racing. Instinct was an incredibly powerful thing, Bret had always believed that. And even though his instincts were somewhat Grey-powered, he still trusted them beyond anything else. In that moment, he found himself torn between too many different instincts at once. The first was telling him to help get people out, even if they were mostly morally bankrupt. The second was telling him to grab the info that had been dropped and run. The third, well the third was the one that he was likely to listen to. [color=#C8E39A]“Now I’ve got to go to work.”[/color] He closed his eyes for a moment and let the pathways around him open up. He inhaled as his mind travelled the phantom roads of choice and the Pilgrim guided his way. Grabbing the chair that he once sat on with a single hand, Bret spun his full body with a great amount of force. He launched the chair at Sauvage to distract her before rushing at her with all the might that his frame could carry and tackling her by the waist to the far side of the room. Mister X, who had not moved from his seat, casually leaned down and picked up all the paperwork and the pen drive that had been the point for the table. Gathering them up all neatly, as if filing was something he cherished, he moved over to Sienna and offered them up. [color=white]“He was going to win anyway.”[/color] Simultaneously, Bret narrowly avoided another spit of acid from Sauvage before spinning and elbowing her in the nose, the only target on her face that wasn’t terrifying. He didn’t manage to hit the second time, being thrown back across the floor by a kick and coming to a stop a few feet from Sienna and Mister X, who casually shot a finger gun at the pair before sauntering off into the chaos. [color=#C8E39A]“Next time we go on a date, can we just go to a quiet pub?”[/color] He dragged himself to his feet and reached into his jacket. He didn’t want to do this. He had to give her the choice. Bret pulled a gun and aimed it at Sauvage. [color=#C8E39A]“Go now. It’s the only warning you’ll get.”[/color] Sienna had filed Bret Lowther under many things over the course of the evening. Intelligent. Perceptive. Attractive. Considerably more interesting than he had initially appeared. What she had not filed him under was this - the chair already in his hand before she had fully processed the need for one, his body moving with the particular economy of someone who had done this before and expected to do it again. The tipsy rich boy was gone. What was in his place had clearly been there the whole time, waiting with considerably more patience than she had given him credit for. She watched him go and felt the read she had been building on him all evening quietly revise itself. She was, it seemed, going to have to start a new file. Mister X appeared next to her then, a man who had decided the evening's chaos was someone else's problem, holding out the gathered intelligence and the drive with the mild, administrative air of someone returning a lost item. She took it without hesitation - smoothly, naturally, tucking both into her bag with the same composure she might use to accept someone’s payment at the bar. She turned her attention back to the room - to Bret dragging himself to his feet, to Sauvage still standing at the far end of it, to the gun appearing in his hand. [I]Had he had that the whole time?[/I] [color=#B77B89]"Next time,"[/color] she replied simply, [color=#B77B89]"I'm picking."[/color] Then she looked at Sauvage - really looked, the way she looked at things she was about to do something about - and waited. Sauvage moved. Sienna reached for the thing that lived just beneath the surface of her attention. The same quiet renegotiation of terms she had used in her bar, in her room, on her conditions. This was none of those things. But the boy was seventeen, and Bret was bleeding, and the gun in his hand deserved better odds than he currently had. The weight came down. Sienna had never seen firsthand what King's Blood did to a body's tolerance of her powers, but Sauvage's movements quickly slowed, her frame pressing toward the floor under the incremental addition of gravity doing quiet, insistent work. Except it wasn't quiet. Not this time. Sienna felt it immediately - the resistance, the way Sauvage pushed back against the pressure with a force that had no business belonging to a human body. She held it, jaw tight, the effort of it moving through her in a way she wasn't accustomed to and didn't particularly care for. Her free hand found the edge of a nearby table without meaning to, steadying herself against something she couldn't let show on her face. [color=#B77B89]"[i]Bret.[/i]"[/color] Just his name, quiet and clipped. She kept her eyes on Sauvage and said nothing more - the line of her shoulders said rather a lot. There it was. In all its glory. Bret was right. She was a Grey and now she was controlling Sauvage. Or more specifically, she was holding her. They would have a lot to talk about after all this was over. But first things first. He didn’t say a word as he pulled the trigger of his gun three times. The first two entered Sauvage’s open mandible, one going straight through her skull and piercing the wall behind her, the other lodging herself in the base of her brain stem. The third bullet went lower, a fair few feet, off slightly to the left hand chest and just slightly above her breast. The heart. Sauvage crumbled to the floor in a pile, acidic blood seeping from her mouth and beginning to burn a hole in the concrete floor. He lowered the pistol to his waistline and wiped a fresh wound on his face with his palm. Bret refused to get blood on his new suit, Cressida would murder him dead. He turned his head slightly to look at Sienna. He didn’t shy away from her eyes, he couldn’t. They would have to talk about this. The Pilgrim had gone quiet but he knew it wouldn’t be for long. They didn’t have the time to dwell and fester in the chaos. [color=#C8E39A]“So, late dinner?”[/color][/color][/indent][center][color=#B77B89]_________________________________________________________[/color] [sup][color=#B77B89]_________________________________________________________[/color] [color=silver]Collaboration with [@Melissa][/color][/sup][/center]