Chapter Text
The Chantry bells mark 11-o’clock, and Viola de Riva begins to worry. It wasn’t far past 7 when she’d set up at the rooftop across from the Slippery Eel and watched her partner, Chiara, paste on her most charming mask and enter the barroom. By now, she should have been spotted returning to the street below; Viola should be draining a glass at a bar across town and preparing to stumble home alone.
She’s not even sure why she’s here. Chiara’s more than adept at this, and Viola’s watched her execute this same sting a thousand times over with flawless results. No one thinks twice about a beautiful woman slumming it with a wealthy merchant in a bar too dark and seedy for anyone important to recognize him. No one even thinks twice when his companion departs without him, leaves him slumped over the table and breezes out into the night unbothered. And if the thought ever did occur to them, certainly no one in Salle would risk interfering with de Riva business enough to question it out loud.
It’s a one-manner, an operation so smoothly polished and uncomplicated that Viola’s surveillance would reek of overkill if it weren’t for that ever-present voice at the back of her mind. Useless, reckless, unreliable.
She knows she isn’t here to ensure Chiara’s escape, knows the carefully concealed devices on her person will never be detonated. Viola’s only deployed for surveillance and distraction, and neither are a lick of use when no one ever bothers to follow the other Crow after her contracts are fulfilled. Chiara cuts like a knife through water, and to make things even easier, the seas seem to part eagerly for her. Viola isn’t here to help, she’s here to learn. The Fifth Talon is driving a point home: that she is nothing but backup, a tool in his belt he is happy to let rust with disuse. She’s superfluous.
She snorts, kicks at a loose shingle and moves from her perch in the shadows. Doesn’t bother padding her footfalls as she moves to the eaves, swings down until she can catch a windowsill with her toe, scoot herself off the edge to thud onto the pediment beneath. One more quick maneuver has her dropping onto the street, the only pedestrians far enough down the block or drunk enough not to glance her way. The landing only barely breaks her stride; she pauses just long enough to push her hair out of her eyes, tuck it behind her ears, before angling herself towards the Eel’s doorway.
Chiara might not need a distraction, but she’s still about two hours behind her usual timeline, and it couldn’t hurt to watch from the barroom instead of the roof. Besides, there’s ale here, and if Viola’s lucky, maybe a decent enough whiskey. She finds a spot at the bar, orders, turns to lean back against its surface, trying for all the world to look at ease. Her jaw ticks, teeth grind against each other. Relaxation has never been her forte.
The bar’s empty enough that Viola finds Chiara with a quick half-sweep of the room. At a table beneath a lantern, so she’ll be noticed easily. Not that Viola thinks that would be a problem, even if she kept to the shadows. Not with the way the light always seems to catch in her auburn hair, on the plush swell of her lower lip. If their target — Chiara’s target, Viola reminds herself — had any blood at all in his veins, he’d be stupid to overlook the woman perched on her stool at the high-top, looking gloriously bored and sinfully lonely.
Viola moves before she can stop herself. Or at least, pretends that’s the case. Her own mind rails against her even as she gestures to the barkeep for another drink, begs her to stand and leave and climb back up to her lookout. Viago will have her head for this, if Chiara doesn’t tear her to shreds herself first, with nothing more than a well-aimed glare. Viola takes both glasses in hand instead, crosses the room to stand at Chiara’s side.
“Wrong bar?” she asks, lowly, watching as the other woman’s eye flicks coldly between the glass of whiskey she holds out in offering and the doorway.
“We have three more hours,” Chiara counters airily. “It’s not the wrong bar until it’s closed and he’s still not here.”
A small smile plays across her lips as she takes the drink from Viola’s hand and raises it to her mouth. Viago has criticized Viola’s observational skills more times than she can count over the years, yet even she could not miss that the liquor never really makes it past the rim of Chiara’s glass. Part of the act, then, that smile. Viola plasters on one of her own.
Leaning in, letting her nose brush the line of Chiara’s cheekbone, Viola whispers into the shell of her ear, “I’m surveillance, right? Wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t check in on you when I expected you to be done hours ago.”
She doesn’t quite manage to stop the bitterness from leeching into her voice, to stop the angry little wavering at the center of her words.
The jest is met with fingers at her jaw, a vice-like grip yanking her back until she’s face to face with her partner. Superior, that ruthless little voice at the back of her head supplies. It’s almost funny, the way Chiara manages to keep that feather-light grin in place even as her eyes go dark and stony.
“Get back to your post,” she orders. Anger bristles along the length of Viola’s spine, does again when Chiara’s grip only tightens along her jaw.
This time, Viola really does move before she can think better of it, wrenching her face from the other woman’s hand, surging forward until their mouths are crushed together in a sharp shock. It’s nothing more than the ghost of a kiss, barely even that really. Chiara’s palm drops to the center of her chest and pushes her back a step.
“Get back,” she says evenly, “to your post.”
Viola risks one more comment, a shot in the dark at convincing the other Crow that her heart isn’t hammering in her chest, her mind isn’t reeling with a thousand self-deprecating insults and reprimands. “Had to give the bartender a reason to believe I’d leave you here alone, didn’t I?”
Chiara says nothing, but her gaze dips to Viola’s mouth, and Viola can’t help the desperate, breathy chuckle that escapes at the attention before she turns on her heel. She doesn’t have to fake the furrowed brow and the dark mood as she leaves, slamming a fistful of coin onto the bar as she passes. But she does have to pause in the street, shake off the old refrain before she circles to the back of the shop across the street.
Unreliable. Useless. Reckless. Words that have dogged her all her life and sound now under every step she takes. A phantom heat rises along her lips until she wipes too hard at her mouth with the back of her hand, and spits the bitter taste of failure onto the cobblestones between her feet with a low curse.