Love and Other Crisis | Season 1

Episode | 23

Gale was in full tech mage mode when Inola and Ronin returned to Sage Tower. Four additional screens joined his standard setup, floating and shifting at his command. Glyphs danced across the screens, and Ronin understood none of it. With their witch found, Gale focused on deep diving into Katerina's records. He'd leave it to Gale to sieve out hidden clues for their investigation in the ever-twisting saga of the missing jewel.

Ronin rallied Gideon and Inola into his office.

"Alright, what do we know?"

"Do we know anything?" Gideon's eyes flicked between his colleagues. "We cleared Katerina of any involvement, and she almost lobotomized Kaliope. She manipulated the case from the start. Can we trust anything we have at this point?"

Ronin accepted Gideon's point. "Clean slate then. We scrap everything on the board and reset."

"Ah. One second." Inola dashed from the room and returned with Kaliope's case board. "I don't think she'll mind, do you?"

Inola snapped pictures of the old arrangement. Old photographs and post-it notes set aside, Inola erased Kaliope's messy scribbles. The woman's penmanship was atrocious. Board cleaned, Inola uncapped a dry-erase marker.

She headed the board: Katerina + Unknown Accomplices.

"Ready."

At Ronin's hesitation, Inola waved her hand. "Hurry up. Time's ticking. It might be mundane, but it works when Kaliope does it. She says it helps her make sense of the noise in her head to visualize it."

Ronin nodded. Noise in her head? Why wasn't he surprised?

"Tonight, we confirmed Katerina's involvement. Whether she is the mastermind or not, she's definitely complicit. What she was doing in that alley with those humans..." Ronin glared at the woman's name on the board. She was right under their noses all this while. Plotting and conniving, with none of them the wiser about her tricks.

"The humans complicate things, don't they? Why would they be involved in a scheme to reignite the feud between the Main and Minor houses?"

Roning considered Gideon's inquiry.

"I doubt they're involved in the main case. Assuming Katerina has the actual jewel, she might have been there to sell it. Grounded and processed, the gem has multiple applications in the Noccult world, even without active magic. So we'll set the humans aside for now and focus on Katerina. And possible occult-linked accomplices. What would her motives be for destroying Falgor House?"

"Revenge or social commentary?"

Inola wrote Gideon's answer on the board.

"The jewel theft was a crime of convenience. Madam Falgor commissioned the ring, and she or they saw an opportunity too golden to pass up. They had three months to plan, execute, and cover their tracks." Ronin leaned toward social commentary over revenge against the Falgors as a motive, without evidence of personal ties and grievances between them and Katerina. But after years in the business and seeing vendettas in various forms, there was a middle ground.

Katerina might have a grudge against the system in general. Or the Falgors were an outlet for a personal agenda, acting as a stand-in for the guilty party—a victim of convenience. Katerina wasn't associated with any Houses, according to her files. Files that were now under scrutiny for fraud.

Can we trust anything we have at this point?

Ronin hated assumptions, but the credibility of their current information left him with no alternatives.

Gideon picked up the argument for a socially motivated strike.

"If we go the anti-system route, the kindlings were already there for the fire. Zohar is known for his anti-Main House sentiments and his disputes with his brother. He wasn't hard to frame. Once Zohar's line loses its position as the Minor House, Falgor House would become a single-branch succession. Oh no." Gideon slapped a hand over his mouth.