The lateness of the hour pulls at Odessa's nerves like a vulture picking over the sinews of a body.

The roads are a mix of shoddily paved and not so much as pretending to be paved at all. Flat stones studded in the street like die cast randomly from a gambler’s hand turn her gait from a consistent clop to an intermittent clatter, aiding only with creating noise in the dead of night. Humid air makes the tidy plait of her braid limp and frazzled, feels as though it adds weight to her head— surely that must be why she bows it so, as she avoids watching eyes blinking from bent shutters and the shadowed eaves of houses.

She has brought little money with her. She’s sheltered, but not stupid, and the deal Odessa is looking to seal tonight will be paid in far greater a sum than any one person could hope to carry alone.

The snarling whirl of cats breaking out into a fight down an alley behind her sends her heart racing anew, and she picks up the pace. Only the tight wind of her tail around her ankle reassures her that it isn’t at risk of being grabbed. She has a knife in her belt, newly purchased and sharp enough to cut with a glance, but the knowledge in her head of how to wield it is old and covered in layers of dust. Other memories left long undisturbed under the white sheets and willful blur of time, though, have recently resurfaced. Reality wears a white sheet of its own now, as it waits to be interred back at a home she hasn’t felt any particular fondness for in as long as she can recall.

“’Tippler’s Tab’…” Odessa reads off a signboard hanging crooked on a building that spills light and sound and the scent of fermented wheat out into the otherwise quiet neighborhood like a sunspot in the dark. The nails that hold the base of the post into the mortar of the wall number in the dozens— as though the owner simply beat a new handful in overtop of the old every time it got too bad, like an archer not bothering to clear their target board between volleys. “Charming…” she adds under her breath, seeing the stain of rust that seeps down from the collection of little iron pegs like the trail of a slug.

Before even opening the door, Odessa knows it will be another Ferrum-run establishment. This side of town, they nearly all are; despite the rickety sign in need of some real maintenance rather than its seventeenth slipshod patch job in as many years, there isn’t anything overtly criminal about this building which is a surprise as pleasant as it is unnerving.

She’s spent the past month ducking in and out of places that made her ears stand on end and a cold sweat bead at the nape of her neck and small of her back— by comparison, the atmosphere here is practically welcoming for all that it’s still quite clearly a bar on the more rough-and-tumble end of the spectrum.

Or… perhaps her sense of danger is being dulled by repeated exposure. Or perhaps she’s finally losing it. Both are more plausible than she’d like.

Odessa takes a fortifying breath and slips inside, making sure the door closes slowly and unobtrusively with a hoof wedged in the crack to stop the impending bang of heavy wood in its frame. One or two people look up, and only a few others afford acknowledgment of her entrance with no more than an ear swiveled lazily in that direction. Odessa isn’t here for the drink, but she heads for the bar anyway; a mistake she’d made the first time she’d tried this had been to stand in the doorway and peer like a starved fishing bird eyeing a pond of quicksilver minnows. As though her target would miraculously jump directly into view if only she hung around and looked terribly, painfully obvious about it.

She knows better, now— she’s smartened up from the quick learning curve of a month’s worth of unwanted advances, of solicitations for handouts or company, of veiled threats that became real threats lightening her purse several times over. She knows better now than to gape like an imbecile and make herself more of a target than she already is purely by virtue of her clothes and mannerisms.

There’s a raw sort of nakedness to not having her usual bracelets and rings secured snugly around four arms, to lacking the drape of thin gold over the crown of her head. Her hands can’t come up to fiddle with anything like a worrystone, can’t smooth a thumb down the notches grooved along the side of a Behem pendant to count out prayers. She’s been without her goddess and without her staff since embarking upon this endeavor. It feels morally wrong to drag one into this plot and theologically wrong to involve the other, but she feels the absence of both like a constant chafe.

Alone is a good way to phrase it; utterly out of her depth is also suitable.

In service of not being accosted mere minutes into her arrival, Odessa catches the bartender’s attention and orders any old drink. The commoner's swill is all the same to her. She buys it without thought, but won’t touch a drop all for the sake of having something meaningless to casually tighten her hands around that serves as a prop to blend into the crowd. She scans the room, keeping the glance as bored and uninviting as possible to ward off unwanted company. She’ll be bothered in short order, she’s certain, but she hopes desperately that she finds what she needs to— finds who she needs to— before it begins in earnest.

Three cities and three failed attempts ago, she’d enticed a reluctant whisper from a nervous Volucrin about a person who took any job.

Two cities and two failed attempts ago, she’d followed that thread to an irritable Felish woman with a tattered, mangy tail that pointed her to a Canish man who allegedly acted as the broker for such an individual.

One city and one failed attempt ago, she’d graciously gotten a name from the wrong Canish used to the mix up. She’d then gotten a description. A calling card.

A real crumb, at last, at last.

Now, Odessa leans her hip against this dingy bar and hopes to anything out there that might be listening that she’s made it to the right place, at the right time— because she is running out of time.

“C.I. is who you’re after, not me. Handles all her business. You’ll know 'im by a brooch in the likeness of red eyes; nobody else is allowed to wear that mark, if they know what’s good for 'em.”

It’s not much to go off of. It’s barely anything in a city this big, when the man himself doesn’t even keep to a reliable schedule. Odessa may have missed him by an hour; she may have missed him by a week. Still, she has to try. Nobody else would take her request— she’d get no more than a few sentences in before having all manner of doors shut both figuratively and literally in her face. With each earned scoff or bewildered rejection, she’d felt both her grip on the situation and her anonymity erode like a harsh file taken to sandstone.

One can only shop around for an assassin for so long before it comes back to bite them, instead.

A sudden explosion of laughter from further down the bar has Odessa snapping her head over so quickly her horn nearly scrapes the Kerim man beside her.

“Hey!” he snaps, two hands coming up to guard his drink as though Odessa was aiming for that rather than his face, his other two hands both jabbing stubby fingers at her forehead, "watch where you’re pointin’ that thing, you muddy mess.”

She hadn’t been aiming for his drink or his face, but now Odessa thinks she’d rather like to.

"Piss off," she mutters, and ignores her kinsman. The words are crass and stilted as they leave her tongue, but nothing else save their own foul language has seemed to penetrate with these people.

The last thing she needs is to get into a barfight like some common cur, it's surely a fight she'd lose. But the temptation is greater than ever. Giving in to enacting one line of dark thought is naturally making way for smaller sins to seem all the easier. She doesn't have the space for wasted words with wasted drunks, though, and again scans the poorly lit room.

Her eyes pass over tables of cavorting Felish scribbling no-doubt awful poems on napkins.

A woman using the hair of her own tail as a bow for a fiddle (and admittedly sounding not half bad given that the position unfortunately necessitates a very contorted and… improper pose.)

A handful of unremarkable Kerim quibbling over dull coins they pass back and forth between shots of burning amber in chipped glasses.

She begins to lose heart as more and more people are written off, the few she sees with canid features so far off the mark as to not even be considerations.

Had she missed him after all?

Desperate, she looks once more. It's all she can do.

In the back, missed upon her first pass, tucked at a table beside a supporting column and in conversation with some manner of rodent-y Multin that sloshes his drink with every other gesture, Odessa spies the distant muted gleam of many grouped carmine jewels set in a shawl's pin wrapped about the shoulders of a Canish and feels her stomach swoop.

It's the right place. It's allegedly the right time. It's as close to the right description as she could wheedle out short of being handed a portrait: this is who Odessa has been seeking.

Her pulse thunders, and she abandons her drink atop the sticky bar entirely as she finds her hooves and approaches this last chance.

The man flicks blue eyes to her before she’s even made it halfway there. Seeing that she isn’t pausing, with a bemused wave he dismisses the person he was speaking to. Odessa barely notices the parting smirk and eyeroll and shoulder-nudge they give him, and the Canish gives no indication of responding to the tease as all his attention settles on her. The space at the table across from him thus cleared, Odessa perches on the edge of the rickety stool. The warmth from the rear having just vacated it is momentarily distracting in its discomfort, but forgotten quickly.

The Canish man sizes her up hovering somewhere between surprised and curious. Odessa waits for him to say something, but he just taps his fingers against his glass patiently so she goes first.

“C.I.?”

“Depends on who’s asking," he returns, "and why.”

It isn't a no.

“I’m the one asking. I’m told you’re the person to see, for a- a job.”

He nods, pillowing his cheek in a hand. The claw of his thumb brushes near the corner of his eye in a loose furl of fingers. “Awfully vague.”

“I…" she swallows thickly, "I really can’t afford to be overheard.”

“Sure. You, and everyone else coming to me.”

It’s not a rude exchange, she thinks. Merely a mutually guarded one. With both players refusing to show their hands, this will never progress past an awkward stalemate between strangers— Odessa has learned by now that there is no take without a little give in this shadowy business.

She lowers her voice as much as she can, at least; brown ears dusted in white spots like the flick of paint off a brush swivel forward to make out her name that she reluctantly parts with.

“Odessa Trajan.”

The man rears back as though slapped and Odessa waits for the laughter.

The last four prospects she'd tried had done the same until she’d managed to convince them that such a muddy Kerim really was the heir apparent in the flesh… before immediately refusing to work with her.

This one, though— he doesn't laugh. He leans in and studies her. She meets his gaze and does the same while all four of her armpits sweat at the scrutiny.

Thin nose; ambiguously oval pupils that peg him neither daydreamer nor nightdreamer definitively; a messy but still artful tousle of brown hair nearly obscuring the ears of some type of jackal or common hound that have returned to a resting position in a slight cant down and back. (Neutral for him, she hopes, or else the odds of solving her little inheritance problem are plummeting by the second if she's managed to offend this early on.)

In a loose blue shawl overtop a long-sleeve shirt with nice embroidering on the cuffs and hem, he's tidy yet dressed down. It's perhaps still slightly too well-put-together for a place where Odessa is peripherally aware of someone singing an off-key rendition of Glory to the Holes, and it is a heinously far cry from the version sung in church.

The crisp nip of a lingering spell in the air explains why the man isn't perspiring like a brick of cheese left out on a plate despite the summer season and bodyheat of the pub's patrons; Odessa quietly laments not thinking of doing the same hours ago.

At length, Cairos removes his hand from his glass and crosses his arms over his chest, an eyebrow raised.

“... Quite the last name," he offers carefully, and Odessa wonders if he's a few hairs short of a hide or if she's got something stamped to her forehead that she didn't in the last several meetings with prospective hires.

“You believe it, then?” she exclaims.

Perhaps not the best phrasing; Odessa’s tired incredulity leaks through the cracks and she’s sure it only makes her sound all the more suspicious, as though she herself is surprised the man is buying a tall tale.

“Even if I didn’t,” he reasons, gesturing to her clothes, “you came in here wearing that. You think anyone from here can afford silk? Either you’re a brave con artist, or you’re a stupid one. Or…” he tips his head. Squints at her, like Odessa is a puzzle he’s trying to fit together. “Or you’re serious.”

The air feels frozen in her throat like a ball of ice. “I assure you, I’m more serious than I’ve ever been in my life.”

A good stretch of silence goes by that she bites her tongue to keep from breaking. The Canish is damn near impossible to read, but he’s clearly thinking something. Odessa feels like a beetle caught below the glass of a champagne flute, parts of her warped and gigantic in the skewed perspective. Horn, eyes, ears, skin— all of it wrong and all of it being judged now in some internal calculus she isn't privy to behind this man's eyes.

At length, he shrugs a shoulder and motions for them to go.

“Then you really can’t afford to be overheard, after all,” he muses, and she nods silently. Not daring to hope, not just yet. He puts a hand out and Odessa takes it. They shake, perfunctory and brief.

“Cairos Iliou,” he at last divulges his name. Or some name, at least, even if it isn't actually his. “You’ll forgive me for not bending knee? Given your request for privacy, unless you’d like a spectacle…”

Odessa makes a frantic no, no motion, as if afraid he’ll do exactly that.

“I think I can let it slide this time.” levity is hard to reach for after weeks of being stonewalled, but this Canish isn’t nearly as threatening or dour as the last several brokers she’s met with and she needs him to like her. “I will be expecting it at your earliest convenience, though.”

The man— Cairos— cracks a faint smile at that, and motions them to depart.

Odessa hardly trusts him, but she sticks close to his side as he pays his tab at the counter and holds the door open for her to duck easily under his arm and out onto the street. She doesn’t even have to mind her horn; he’s tall, for a Canish.

Odessa doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he’s nearly completed the motion, but Cairos discreetly scans the empty street and shadowy eaves before deeming them alone and unfastening his pin and pocketing it. The path he sets them down is lit well with steadily flickering orange, the hour not yet advanced enough that the lamplighters' spells have begun to fizzle out with the call of dawn. Very few things about this entire scenario are reassuring to Odessa, but she has to appreciate not being immediately hustled into a pitch-black alleyway or held at knifepoint. Instead, Cairos slides his hands in his pockets and adopts an unhurried pace.

Aside from the minute scrape of claws as he steps and the unavoidable clatter of her own hooves, nothing breaks the silence beyond the far-off bay of dogs or clang of a disturbed trashcan streets over. It's as peaceful as any city ever gets, but every unexpected sound— which is all of them, to her— is jarring to Odessa's composure.

"I'm surprised you found me," Cairos says eventually, voice politely low to match the time of night but not a whisper. "Not because I'm utterly impossible to find, but because we do purposefully make it difficult even for a nobody. Who sent you?"

Odessa opens her mouth and almost, almost lets fly free descriptions of the chain of faces that got her to this moment, but the first few words get chopped off into sudden quiet.

"I don't believe it's safe to reveal my sources," she amends. "For their sake, and my own."

This gets her a glance and a nod, and it's too dark and Cairos is too unfamiliar to tell if that was a flash of approval in the look, but if nothing else he accepts it and doesn't push.

"I can guess anyway," he returns. "Wouldn't even have to do anything about it, either. Someone with a wagging tongue for a royal has by now been paid so much they've no further need of this business, or they're liable to get themselves killed all on their own with or without our help."

The 'help' he's referring to and the 'help' Odessa is used to are two vasty different things. Cairos isn't a menacing individual, but she swallows all the same at the candidness.

Wetting her throat, Odessa says hesitantly, "it took me over a month to get this far. If that makes you feel any better."

She gets a dry laugh for the comment, and Cairos shakes his head. "It's a stark reminder of how even the best laid plans can go awry, and there's no such thing as being anonymous. All I can do now is hope you didn't make too many waves before you got to me. Did you? Does every baker and deliverybird between here and Avesey know you've been turning over stones looking for an assassin for hire?"

There it is. No more metaphors, no more gentle language to couch it in. No more dancing around why she's here.

"I don't think so," she murmurs, the word assassin ringing in her ears despite how quietly it was said and despite how very often she's heard it these past months, "I paid off who I could, didn't give my name unless I had to, tried not to dress too obviously… you seem to think I've failed at the last of that, though."

Cairos tips his head, eyes landing on the neckline of her dress but no further down. On the little decorative beads woven into the fabric specifically, she realizes. She'd thought this was one of the more discreet outfits she owned but the amused— and slightly pained?— smile he musters is swiftly dispelling that notion.

"Yes… and no," he answers, suddenly a touch sheepish. "Silk is too good for this entire part of town, as I said, but I doubt most would even notice. Not as damming as showing up in a tiara, anyway. At least you didn't do that." A beat passes, and he adds "I'm a tailor. Technically. My other half tells me I'm too precious about clothes but I think I've got a fair excuse to be. At this hour most people aren't looking at what clothing you're wearing— just how much clothing you're wearing." He snorts lightly, hooking a claw under the edge of a sleeve at his wrist and tugging to indicate the embroidering she's now aware must be his own make. "I'm the exception, and I receive endless amounts of shit for it."

"Isn't your job… um, this?" Odessa hedges, unable to repeat the A-word so cavalierly.

"Sitting in different bars every few months for a few hours a night? It wasn't always. And it isn't usually."

Odessa feels distinctly as though she's missing something here, but she lets it go. Even assassins needed to have hobbies, she supposes, and she's not here to request a new wardrobe no matter how snappy of a dresser this Canish is. She'd be willing to bet Cairos is doing it on purpose— this easy, familiar chatting that demands nothing of her and reveals little of substance about him— but it works even so. Odessa's shoulders inch down from around her ears as they walk and speak of little nothings, even if the stiffness doesn't leave her spine and the crawl doesn't banish itself from beneath her skin.

The streets they're traveling turn several times but never does the path suddenly veer into suspicious woods or lightless corridors or ramshackle encampments of tarps and hollow expressions.

When Cairos ends their walk at a path to an exceedingly ordinary home, Odessa lags behind.

It's silly, but she'd been expecting something more… creepy. Evil. Sinister.

This place even has a mailhatch with the usual nondescript lid replaced by a handmade plate engraved and molded to be in the likeness of a curved tortoise's shell. It's uncannily charming, given the purpose of the house it's paired with.

Odessa tears her attention from the unexpected little splash of personality to Cairos, who's taken to slipping a key off his belt and into the lock of the front door.

It opens with no more than a token whine of hinges, and he steps aside to gesture through the opening. Inside, Odessa can see the edges of a few things hung up on the walls, the glow of a well-tended fireplace further back, a decent rug stretching the length of the floor… it looks for all the world like a normal house. She wonders if a few mounted skulls and bloodstains wouldn't actually make her feel better, at this point.

"Night's a-wasting," Cairos prompts neutrally, and Odessa thinks she could turn around and leave this instant without a word and he'd allow it.

One of his hands is in his pocket and the other rests calmly on the doorknob, and Odessa again feels herself reel at the enormity of what she's even doing here.

(Cairos gives her that moment, she suspects, because he finds a few pointless seconds to busy himself with smoothing wrinkles out of his shawl while she dithers.)

Truly, this is almost it.

It isn't the point of no return yet but it's one more step towards that ledge.

Odessa has been saved from having to step off it thus far by proposals crumbling before they'd even left her mouth, but this— this unassuming house and polite man and lack of immediate rebuff— this feels heavier for all that it's objectively the nicest go-round she's had of this song and dance in months.

One set of her hands smooths her hair down in an unconscious mirror of Cairos' own tidying, and the other set wrings a few times before she quells the giveaway. Her stomach clenches and it feels like something is forcing its way up her throat but getting stuck. If she bites her lip any harder it'll likely bleed.

Cairos waits, and Odessa gathers herself, and when she steps past him with skittish hesitancy he doesn't remark upon it.

"I'll let Boss know we've got a visitor," he says. "We don't usually skip the chain of command like this, but I'm sure as Hole not making the final call on whatever ungodly reason you sought us out for."

Us, our… she had missed them earlier, but those aren't the words of a lone assassin. And what's more—

—"Boss?" Odessa repeats, bewildered. "Wait, it's not— it isn't you?"

"Do I seem like the stabbing sort?" Cairos throws over his shoulder, and before Odessa can reply that lately she's been expecting even Vesper children to fit the bill as 'stabbing sorts', he ducks around a corner and down a stairwell.

This house is the same in layout as most on Leifr; largely underground, the entry room she's standing in is little more than a brief reception area and kitchen. The actual bedrooms and living rooms are underground, the comforting press of earth and closeness to Lo making this place identical to any thousands of other homes throughout the country.

What typically brings comfort and routine instead inspires trepidation as the muffle of faint voices drift up the stairs: she'll have to meet with "Boss" underground.

Odessa doesn't make it a habit to pray to Lo. Invisible heretic that she is, Be is the goddess who receives her prayers in true earnestness. In this moment however she is a beggar and cannot afford to be a chooser. Either sister answering her prayer would be fine with her, right now.

The voices die off, and Cairos pokes his head around the corner he'd disappeared to. The little white flecks of spots on his ears catch her eye in the dark hall like snowdust against the night sky.

"Alright," he invites, "whenever you're ready."

Odessa clenches four fists and two eyes for just one weak moment of transparency, before approaching.

Down the stairs and a turn later, she hasn't been able to take them in because of her mounting distress but Odessa knows she's passed a handful of nice portraits and a pretty vase or two. The wallpaper is appealing, probably. The doors they pass are a dark oak, carved with a craftman's touch but not verging on ornate.

It's all so very nice, and normal, and Odessa struggles to not be sick as she marches towards finality.

Cairos pauses at the last door, straightening up and giving her a more critical appraisal.

"No weapons, and we'll promise the same," he orders firmly, all business as his eyes go directly to the knife she thought she'd concealed expertly beneath her sash, "including magic. Don't even think about it. Boss eats that stuff for breakfast and can sense it coming; you've got no shot."

Odessa nods jerkily. As another mark against her, she'd never been terribly apt at magic for her species much less her pedigree.

Satisfied, Cairos cracks the door. He opens it a bit, then stops as though a thought has occurred to him and gives one last faint smile.

“Also… don’t flinch. She finds it funny."

"… She?"

---