“I couldn’t tell you where he is. It’s not my job to keep track of him. My job, as I understood it, was to tell you if he tried to book passage on my ship. He did, and I told you. You were supposed to wait until he was about to board to snatch him, if I remember correctly. You decided not to wait. So it looks like this one is on you.”

“The people I had with Claremont tell me they were attacked by a woman.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“It was Vrenna Claremont.”

“You mean the sister who had years of training to murder people for the state, and then became a cop? Yes, that would be my logical guess too.”

“I want to know how she came to find out we were targeting her brother.”

“So ask her.”

“Kiva.”

“I didn’t tell her, if that’s what you were asking. Why would I tell her? I had three million marks riding on you snatching him.”

“Someone in your crew told them.”

“Or, and here’s just a theory, when you tried to extort the Count of Claremont in front of his adult children and you didn’t immediately get what you wanted, maybe they figured an asshole like you would try to force his hand with something like kidnapping, so they made preparations, particularly the one of them who was a fucking soldier and is now a goddamned cop, Ghreni.”

There was silence on the other end of the call for a moment. Then, “I’d like to know how you heard about that.”

“Because Marce Claremont fucking told us,” Kiva said. “He told my chief purser about it when he was booking passage, and then my purser told me, because his job is to tell me things that will affect my ship’s bottom line. Are you really such a smug asshole that you didn’t think the Claremont kids wouldn’t talk about that? If there wasn’t a fucking war going on and the rule of law wasn’t basically suspended while the duke thrashes about for a few more days before the end, your ass would already be in jail for extortion, with the duke letting you be the fall guy. For fuck’s sake, Ghreni. You tried to extort an imperial official in front of a fucking cop. You have to be spectacularly dense to try to pull a stunt like that.”

There was another silence, and Kiva merrily counted off the seconds before Ghreni spoke again. She got to six.

“Have you heard from Marce or Vrenna Claremont?”