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O llie had a plan because Lucy left him with no supervision and not a ton of work to do because Basselt was handling a lot of it.

This was actually a good one that wasn’t going to piss off my mother because we ended up in the cells again.

This one might actually reunite the little makeshift family we formed when we were kids.

We knew Neco wanted it. We just needed to be a buffer so Lucy didn’t fly off and assault him and we needed to coax it out the big guy that he was such a dick to her because he thought he was lusting after his half-brother. Then, we needed to find a way for Lucy to tell Neco her secret.

Of course, the more minds involved catching the Ghoul, the sooner this was over.

And we all brought different things to the table.

They were already eating when Ronan and I got to the tavern and I wasn’t faulting anyone for that.

Lucy and Neco both tended to get engrossed in something and forgot to eat.

Ollie wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to keep them there without offering them food and he wasn’t going to get between them and food while waiting for us to get there. Lucy might bite him and Neco killed people. I loved my friends, but I wasn’t doing that for them, either.

They’d barely gotten started when we got there and Lucy was already looking like she might want to stab Neco with the butter knife. Ollie was smart enough to sit between them, but Lucy looked like she might want to stab him, too.

Ronan and I rushed to grab a bowl and serve ourselves before someone started bleeding. Lucy pointed her spoon at Neco and I didn’t think she could stab him with that.

“Talk,” she demanded.

“Eat,” Neco grunted.

Oh, we were doing this again. Neco usually got wrapped up in caring for other people in his own way and Lucy got wrapped up in feeding them or getting them drunk.

When we were kids, they both called each other on forgetting to eat and refused to let them do anything until they put something in their mouth.

Lucy knew and remembered because she got this pained look on her face before she hid it. I was about to say something to get everyone’s mind on something more civilized, when Lucy shoved a massive piece of bread in her mouth and started chewing like she’d been raised in a barn.

“Oh, fine. I’ll tell you so you don’t choke to death being a brat. The Ghoul is a Baron or one of their kids. They either don’t know or they are bringing us in to pin it on someone else.”

“I thought you were just going to the house in Lower Cutwart,” Ronan asked.

“We did,” Lucy said. “I don’t know how he figured that out, either.”

“Because seven people died in that house. Two were women and one was a kid. If someone kicks your door in and you haven’t broken the law and expect someone to kick your door in, then you’re going to get the women and kids out while the men take care of the interloper.

The rest of the people in the house were sons who were either of marrying age or close, according to Trevils.

“The father and the sons would have protected their domicile and their family. It’s human nature, and they’d be within their right to in most cases. They’d also outnumber the Ghoul, so unless the Ghoul is more than one person, the Ghoul would be dead instead of that entire family.

“There was also no sign a fight went down like you’d expect.

It looked like someone kicked the door down, they came out ready to fight and then just didn’t.

They didn’t run, either. It was like they sat there and let him kill them.

I’m guessing he promised to spare the rest of the family and just lied.

“He has to be a Baron or connected to them because if anyone else kicked their door in, they’d believed this person broke in to kill them.

If they didn’t kill the Ghoul, he’d be believed no matter what he said and if they did, the Barons would just make up a story he was innocent.

They’d make an example out of that entire family.

The men had to have thought they were sacrificing themselves for their family. ”

Fuck. I didn’t doubt Neco at all. He’d always been observant and Aunt Keeva finally admitted she didn’t just bake cakes. She also said Neco hadn’t asked her to teach him how to get away with crime in Nestran, he was pretty well suited at a job solving them should he choose.

Most of my friends didn’t know my aunt trained Neco, and I was keeping that to myself because I didn’t really want to piss the women in my family off before I knew Keeva was an assassin. You didn’t want to piss off most women from the Jagged Key Isles. I knew better.

“Shit, this is bad,” Lucy said.

Lucy wasn’t fighting Neco because it wasn’t the time.

Folcard was expecting Lucy to bring him a name so he could decide what to do with it.

If the Ghoul was one of them, they’d pick someone they had a problem with, pin it on him, leave his family destitute, and just tell the Ghoul to make his mess where no one would care.

That meant Guttertown. That also meant Neco couldn’t kill him like he wanted.

“So, we just need to come up with a really good plan then,” Ollie said.

We all just stared at Ollie. His plans usually landed us in the cells.