the letters, not bothering to give me his attention. He shifted the spectacles higher up the ridge of his aquiline nose. “For you have no business knowing.”
“But, sir—”
He removed the spectacles and stared at me with his pale, spooky eyes. “Should you continue to meddle in my investigation, it will trouble me, and should I be troubled, you will get hurt. Your family would not wish that.”
Surprise tightened my chest. I remembered Hyeyong whispering something to him. Perhaps she had told him that I’d tried to steal the letters …
“In fact, from what I have managed to quickly gather, your sister has no children, but one night she had a dream that she would have a son in the new year. If I want, I could learn far more about your sister—her weaknesses and fears, her darkest secrets. I am sure she would not wish this.”
Everything in me went still and silent. For a moment, I couldn’t even blink. “How do you know this?”
“I have people in different parts of the kingdom. Their business is to do my bidding.” With unnerving calm, he rolled up his sleeve and reached for a calligraphy brush, which he then examined with the keenness of a soldier admiring a sharpened blade. “Everything has a consequence. With a stroke of this brush, I can determine your fate. But it is up to you to decide what I shall write.”
Even when faced by suspicious evidence that pointed an ugly finger at Inspector Han, I had fought my way to maintain my loyalty. I had always tried to understand him. Yet how quickly, how easily, his own suspicion frosted over his trust in me.
I wanted to charge up the steps and slap the brush out of his grasp. Maybe grab him by the collars and shake him until every crooked secret fell out of him—
Then I saw it. A smooth, pinkish scar covering the side of his lower right arm.
“You are dismissed,” Inspector Han said, but the sight of the wound pinned me down as a memory drew so near, almost graspable. As I turned and walked toward the gate, I couldn’t stop frowning, the sensation still there. Beneath the murky waters of my present, a memory waited for me, its silver scales rippling, so close to my reach.
For a moment, I almost managed to forget the terror Inspector Han’s threat had sent into my soul. The cost of curiosity would be not only my own life, but the lives of my family, and the little one that would one day grow in my sister’s belly.
* * *
Later that day, rain rushed into the capital in a black cloud, pounding and drumming on the earth and rooftops, but it left almost as soon as it had arrived. It had been a sonagi, a quick shower. Silence returned to the servants’ quarter, the stillness occasionally broken by a raindrop falling from the eaves. Silence, spack. More silence, spack.
“Hyeyeon has been watching you like a hawk,” Aejung said when we were alone. “What happened yesterday at Lady O’s mansion?”
The memory of Inspector Han stayed with me, a chill that bit deep into the bone. Yet my calm pretense surprised me. I continued to work on the police robe in my hands, pulling the thread in and out to mend a tear. My fingers were trembling, though. “I’m not certain myself.”
“Inspector Han has changed too. The way he looks at you … it sends a chill of fear through me.”
“He does not like anyone,” I snapped. “That is why they call him Gosan, lone mountain—”
The needle pricked my finger, and the sudden pain startled a gasp from me. A crimson dewdrop formed. Sucking the blood away, I returned my attention to the torn fabric and said, “Inspector Han confides in no one else but Senior Officer Shim.” I held myself back from adding, Shim, the alibi, the maybe-liar. “I wonder … how did Inspector Han and Shim become as close as brothers, despite their difference in status?”
Aejung, sitting before a low-legged table, ground a stick of ink into an inkstone. She paused, glancing at the screened door. “Do not tell anyone I told you this.”
I laid the needle and thread down. “I promise.” My voice sounded strangled, tension knotting my throat.
She returned to grinding the ink and said, “An uncle on his father’s side tried to kill Inspector Han. The uncle had returned from exile, formerly condemned for a crime associated with the inspector’s father. I hear the uncle lost