Maybe her approach made sense from her perspective, and there was a course here where she’d batter them, get them to admit weakness, and then strike home with a decisive verbal blow, which they’d be too flustered to respond to.

But… no guarantee.

“Is there another option?” Sveta asked. “What if we… just took him?”

Midas made a hand motion. Some of his people shifted their posture. Snuff moved a step to one side, to put himself between those ‘some’ and the old man.

“I don’t mean that in a hostile, bad way,” Sveta told Midas. “But if you care what the lesser villains think… what if we skipped that part? You let us kidnap him, you tell your people whatever you want, make us out to be the bad guys, then we move forward with Victoria’s plan. We meet you, negotiate, leave the lesser villains in the dark…”

“No,” Semiramis said, at the same time Midas shook his head.

“That’s a lot of bad blood,” I said. “It closes doors for the future.”

“I’d rather close doors than kill someone without putting him on trial.”

I nodded.

The suggestion had been off-the-wall, but it seemed to have shifted the tenor of the conversation to be less combative. There was a pensive, tense pause.

I pulled off my mask and pulled my hood back away from my head. “Give us the Old Man, let us talk to him, let us test him and try to break the connections or force him to give them up. If the concern is that we’ll keep him and use him, you can send us a trusted representative to see what our setup is. How villains are being disappeared, imprisoned, whatever we end up doing. But we loop you in, you come away with a lot of information and a bit of clout, because from that point on, anyone here that wants to deal with us is pushed to act through you.”

“I’d agree to that,” Semiramis said. Because she wanted power and influence, she wanted control—it had motivated her hiring of Big Picture.

Even Prancer was nodding. He had his own motivations, wanting a footprint. Influence in any form would translate to people joining his corner world or supporting it.

Little Midas was the sticking point.

“I don’t like it,” Little Midas said.

“You don’t like anything,” Tattletale told him. “Except the easy, immediate solution.”

“I’m a greedy man, Undersider. When I want something I want it now.”

He touched the air and turned that air into something solid, a wispy statue that looked like it was made of a thousand hair-thin gold wires. The shape was of a woman’s face, upper chest, and breast. He gripped it by the neck and chin, hard, as it continued to form, then made it dissipate with a wave of the hand a moment later.