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It takes her a while to spot the necklace, and in fact, the annoying little bird sees it first.
But I am patient. She is the only one I am patient with.
My Brielle.
A warm sense of pride washes over me as she examines the necklace slowly and looks around curiously.
She is smart. I wouldn’t be this obsessed with a stupid woman.
I know that I cannot spend all day in the woods. The sun is rising, and I need to meet a client for a job at noon.
I move slightly to lean forward to see Brielle better, and I must make some noise because her pet bird looks up at the trees. I freeze in place where I am leaning against a thick branch and hope that my clothes are dark enough to blend in with the deep, dark greenery of the treetops.
I hope the bird doesn’t smell all this fucking blood and alert her to it. To me.
I grimace when the bird looks away, and I do not dare shift again while I watch Brielle.
She hesitates quickly, quietly, but then she eventually puts the necklace on around her neck.
It is cold, and she is wearing a thick, threadbare coat, but she pulls down the collar of the coat to look down at the necklace around her neck. And that gives me an excellent view of the delicate silver piece of jewelry laying flat against her collarbones.
Brielle is quite slender, unhealthily so, and I know this comes from a life of hard physical work and not eating enough food. Now, her pale collar bones jut out, and her bony wrists look almost brittle as she pulls down the collar of the coat.
I could snap her in two if I wanted to,I think musingly to myself.
The thought is disturbing, but all my thoughts are disturbing.
I cannot help but grin happily as Brielle smiles as she fingers the necklace with her thin, small hands.
You’ve reached the first hurdle. She is wearing the necklace. This is the start of it all.
And it is the end of it all.
That necklace is the start and end of something, and everything is falling into place now that Brielle has decided to wear it.
And you didn’t even have to coerce her into wearing it. She put it on of her own volition.
A sense of triumph washes over me as Brielle and her pet bird start to forage through the forest.
I continue to watch her in a slightly distracted manner, and soon my vision of her has become a blend of my current reality and remembered images. As I watch her forage, all I really see is the first time I saw her.
So much has changed since then. In fact, I think everything has changed since then.
I was on a job when I first saw her. The dark elf owner of one of the nearby factories had pissed off too many of the khuzuth investors, who had been waiting for financial payouts for nearly three years. It was clear to me that he had embezzled their money, and it was obvious that the dark elf in question knew that his number was up.
He had stopped going home and had shipped his family off to Orthani for safety.
But I found him. Sleeping, hiding, in one of his factories right near Lowtown.
He knew that they would send someone for him. He had employed several miou soldiers to protect him.
But I got through them. I hated to do it because it expended more energy than I had been willing to.
He had his back up against the proverbial wall when I finally found him. I almost had him when he escaped through a hole in the wall of his factory. I was tracking him through the forests that backed up onto the factories, and that was when I saw her.
She has been mine ever since then.
Even if she doesn’t know it.
