Rewrite That Witch
CH490 · Rewrite
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Chapter 490: The Real Target

At the Sheep Tavern, Maans’ address took less than a minute to obtain.

“I go in first. The rest of you come through the front door afterward.” Nightingale looked at Summer. “Keep Lightning and Maggie outside.”

She entered her Mist before anyone could respond, and the world became black and white.

In her fog-world, the lines that constituted walls, floors, and solid matter twisted and bent away from each other, revealing the seams invisible to ordinary eyes. She found the relevant crack and slipped through the wall without slowing.

The man’s room was as bare as Shovel’s. Maans had apparently been destitute since the patrol was disbanded—poverty that recent. She swept her senses through the space: no God’s Stone of Retaliation anywhere nearby. In the bedroom, her target lay under a blanket, still asleep. His coat hung at the bedside. Even through the fog-world’s monochrome, she could see the stiff, brownish smears along the sleeves.

She returned to the entry room and opened the front door.

The officers poured in. They caught Maans mid-start, shoved him back down onto the bed, and had him bound before he was fully awake.

“Let me go! Who are you?”

“You’re under arrest for murder.” Rene’s voice was flat. Two open-handed strikes silenced Maans’ next words before they formed. “You plotted against His Highness. Hanging you at the city gate would be merciful.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t do anything—”

The next strikes were not open-handed. When Maans caught his breath, his mouth was full of blood and one of his front teeth was gone.

“We watched you kill Shovel last night.” Rene stood over him. “You fed him Dreamland Water first, strangled him while he slept, then cut his throat to keep the blood from getting on you. That was fairly clever. We’re not impressed.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Who told you to kill the Rats applying for City Hall work? Who ordered the crown-and-cross mark?”

Nightingale picked up a small glass bottle from the nightstand—half-full of pale blue liquid.

“Dreamland Water doesn’t come cheap,” she said. “And it’s not easy to obtain now that the gangs are broken up.”

Maans said nothing. His eyes moved between her and Rene and held something beyond terror—the specific look of a man realizing that the walls he thought were invisible had been seen all along.

“Confess everything and we may spare you the rope,” Rene said. “Stay silent, and I’ll help you fully understand what it means to infuriate a noble.”

She knew he was lying. She let him lie. His Highness had been clear: security was the top priority, and anyone threatening it would face the full consequences. Sentiment had no place here.

More blows landed. Maans was not a man of iron—he had never been. A man with genuine resolve would not have spent his career as a patroller enriching himself through extortion, and he certainly would not have taken four lives for a handful of gold royals. He had never expected to be identified in a city of twenty thousand people in less than four days. The arithmetic was too far outside what his world had prepared him for.

He broke quickly, tears and blood mixing on his collar.

“It was someone from the inner city. He approached me first. He said he’d pay me four gold royals for each one—said that if people saw City Hall workers dying and the black-uniform police doing nothing about it, they’d lose faith in the new system and demand the patrol be restored. I needed the money. The police had turned down my application. I agreed.”

“The police department will never hire someone like you,” Rene said.

“Do you know his name?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

Rene took the hint and delivered another round. When it stopped, Nightingale repeated the question.

“I really don’t know his name,” Maans said, barely audible. “He never told me. I’ve wondered why he was so generous—he doesn’t look like a noble. When we met a few days ago, he seemed hurried, and his clothes were odd. Like he’d put one coat over another.” He panted. “But there was a uniform under the outer coat, and I saw an emblem on the collar. Shaped like a petal.”

Nightingale and Rene looked at each other.

“Isn’t that the Honeysuckle Family’s emblem?”

“That’s why I wasn’t sure,” Maans said. “Everyone knows the Hulls support the lord. They’d never move against Lord Wimbledon.”

“It can’t be Petrov,” Rene said with certainty. “There must be another explanation.” He turned the problem over aloud. “Since they meet regularly, we could set a trap—have Maans ask for his next payment and take the man when he arrives. That would close the case.”

It was the logical approach. Nightingale nodded.

But something remained out of place.

Maans was not lying. She had listened to enough lies to know the difference, and nothing in his account had the texture of invention. So what was wrong?

“Nightingale!” Lightning’s voice carried through the outer wall. “You all right in there? The meeting’s almost over—we need to go back now, coo!”

The word meeting landed in Nightingale’s chest like a stone dropped from height.

The meeting with the nobles. Establishing the new City Hall. Right now.

Which meant that at this moment, Roland was in the ground-floor hall of Longsong Stronghold, surrounded by the entire returning nobility—and not one guard stood between him and every person in that room. The nearest protection was outside the hall.

If the man with the petal emblem was genuinely a member of the Honeysuckle Family—not Petrov, but someone else wearing the family colors—he could walk into that castle and into that hall without raising a single question.

Nightingale was already moving before the thought finished forming.

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