“Sit tight here, my good friend,” Velen said, walking away from the couch, unrolling the rug, and opening the secret hatch. Velen’s training, combined with an Alchemical earpiece that amplified their hearing, had made them an expert at spotting liars, and there had been no odd twitches or quavers in the man’s voice as he’d told them his purpose. Everyone had a tic, even if it was too small to hear with the un-enhanced human ear. So Velen could be relatively sure that the man wasn’t a spy for the nobility, or a spy for a rival criminal organization.
They walked down into the darkness of their basement office, shutting and locking the hatch behind them. They walked through their office to the door behind their desk, unlocking it and swinging it open. Behind it lay a concrete room with six blood-spattered sets of manacles hanging from the wall. Beneath each of them, there was a reddish-brown bloodstain set in the concrete.
Only one of the sets of manacles was currently occupied; by a brown-haired, light-skinned man with rivulets of dried blood running down his bare chest from cuts Velen had made a few hours before. He was gagged with a black handkerchief, which was muffling the screeching emanating from his mouth, and tears ran down his face, dripping on the floor. An Alchemical blackspike - a device that caused a massive amount of pain to anyone who was unlucky enough to be subjected to it - was shoved in his leg. Velen had put it there three hours before, when they’d left for the Espara job. Hopefully the man had used that time to think over their questions, and come to a reasonable conclusion that was different from the bullcrap he’d been spouting before Velen had left.
They yanked the blackspike out, and the man’s screams immediately ceased. They tore out his gag, which was covered in spittle, tossing it on the ground. “Are you ready to talk? What do you know about the murder of House Ipara?”
The man let out a soft wail. “I don’t know anything!” It was a lie. When questioning the man earlier, Velen had noticed his voice slightly quavered at the end of each vowel whenever he lied.
“Persistent, are you?” Velen growled. “Tell me… which of your eyes do you like the most?”
The man wailed, thrashing. “Please, no… please!”
Velen held his left eye open with one of their hands, and reached for it with the other.
“Wait! Stop! I’ll… I’ll talk. Ah… Khusa Asou. They… they’d know something!” Velen sighed. The man was just telling them what they wanted to hear. But… he had a point - Khusa might know something about their parents. He was one of the most connected and important people in the Arcallan underground; he had to at least have heard about the incident.
Velen sighed, closing their fingers around the man’s eyeball (“Wait! Stop! I talked!”) and tearing it out, its blood-soaked root trailing behind it. They sighed, tossed the slimy thing onto the floor, shoved the blackspike back into the man’s leg, and shoved the gag back into his mouth.
They walked out of the dungeons and up the stairs, stopping at their office sink to wash the man’s blood off their hands and face. They unlocked the hatch, and strode towards the telegraph room, ignoring their guest. “Tip!” they called. “We’re leaving to meet my new ‘friend’.”