The Red Room

I'd gone to meet him, the General. We'd worked together in the past. He was, when I was getting the drug trade in Ar off the ground, charged with my overseas trade. So there were no particular warning flags in meeting him this day. I had done so a thousand times before. I didn't even see it coming, the one that snuck up behind to strike me on the back of the head. Pain, a sharp blinding light, and then darkness.

When I awoke, the pain was excrutiating. In one brief moment of hallucination, I thought it was Tza that bathed my brow with a damp cloth. Confusion etched, until the fog cleared and I angrily shoved Kyron's hand away from me. He knows my secret, but he has no formidable proof. To the contrary, it would be far easier for me to paint him the arson and murderer than for him to do so to me.

Our meeting was not an amicable one. He backed me into a corner, with contracts, and threats, and I came out snarling. In the end I fell, with a concussion and bruised ribs. Perhaps it was good to come face to face with my own mortality and fallibility. It was a lush prison, and he stayed there and stared at me the entire night.

The next morning I was released, wounded but alive. The game from that point forward, had now changed.