Act 2:
The Dance of Numbers
The books lay stacked up in a mountain under the dim ceiling lights. Alice took a book from the pile and read the title. Her eyebrows drew together.
“The Finer Points of Converting Heavy Firearms,” she recited. “What’s this doing here? These shelves aren’t supposed to have anything to do with weapons.”
“Oh, dear. Did one get mixed in~?”
Alice grabbed another book. “Yeah. And this one’s When to Use the Knife, When to Use the Dagger. This shelf isn’t organized at all!”
As Alice pulled out another misplaced book, her shoulders dropped in depression. The book stacks cast dark shadows against the moonlight spilling in from the window.
A maid, her arms overflowing with books, shrugged as she threw a glance at Alice.
“Hardly anyone ever comes into this place looking for books, anyway~. So the people who do just put them wherever they find space~.”
“That’s no excuse! What’s the good of having a reference library if you’re just going to treat it like a barn?” Alice grunted. “What a waste of a great library.”
She checked another book: One Hundred Choices for Drugs. She didn’t even flip through that one—she just stacked it on the tower of books about drugs.
As a condition of her staying in Hatter Mansion, Blood had assigned Alice a job: to put the reference library back in order. Or, to be more precise, he had first tried making her a mover and then a maid, but after only a short time of each, he’d decided to have her do something else. She’d worked as a maid in Heart Castle, so she knew she’d been handling that one just fine…which meant the Hatters had probably realized that maid’s work would give her access to secrets they didn’t want her seeing.
Thus giving me the books.
After a few time periods as a librarian, they hadn’t shifted her to anything else—which meant this was probably her position now. And she wasn’t terrible at it.
She was responsible for re-shelving the returned books in proper order—but before that, she had to find and clear those correct spots from the intrusion of other books. Each shelf more or less had a category attached to it, but most of them had books of different sections mixed in. Alice had recruited a maid to help her relocate the interlopers to their proper shelves.
“They call this a reference library,” Alice muttered. “But not right now, it isn’t.”
“It’s worth the time to fix it.”
“!”
The very words she was thinking materialized out loud, from a low voice behind her.
Alice swallowed the complaint stuck in her throat and turned. Blood walked lazily between the shelves, dragging a finger along the books’ spines.
“I…didn’t expect to see you here,” she murmured.
“I wanted to see how hard a guest works.” He pulled a book at the edge of his fingertips—something from the section designated for industry technical manuals. “Hm. It’s looking more organized already.”
Alice watched him silently flip through the book and felt a sense of déjà vu. But not of this dreary reference library…
Just of him. His tilted face in profile as he read a book, time and time again.
In that private room of his, almost a library itself with all its tomes; under the shade in the mansion’s garden; and in that hidden sanctuary with all its red roses in bloom. Blood had always loved reading, so they’d spent many a quiet period together, reading in each other’s company. Hatter Mansion had been a calm, content place that no one would suspect was a Mafia base. Her memories of that were as precious as those of the tea parties in Heart Castle.
And now, as she stood beside the Blood of the Country of Diamonds, she keenly felt the distance from her past life. As reflections tumbled through her head, Blood abruptly looked up from his book.
“Do you find this work boring?”
Alice blinked. “Huh? No… Not at all. Why would you think that?”
“Because you’re just standing there and looking at me.”
“Urk. Right, sorry.”
The man gave a snort at her meek apology. “If you aren’t bored, then I envy you. You won’t find a single secret hidden in here—so I thought you might regret the assignment.”
“I told you that I’m not after secrets,” she reminded him dryly. “Anyway, about this job—this place is a complete mess. How have you been managing it up until now?”
Blood slid his book onto a different stack, possibly answering the question.
Alice sighed. All the reference books in the library seemed useful—even if they were mostly about weapons or drugs or other dangerous things. But out of order, they were useless as reference. It was like leaving a treasure trove to rust.
“Don’t you have any librarians?” she pressed. “Or maybe you have plans to hire one…?”
“I doubt there’s a mobster in this world who wants to organize a library. If I posted a librarian job, we’d get two kinds of applicants: spies, or meek little failures who would be useless in our many gun fights.”
“Oh… I guess you’re right.”
As Alice nodded, a different thought formed in the back of her mind. It would be a risk to hire someone new, especially with all the warring territories and rival mobsters. But there was a problem even before it got to that—Blood and his people had no room in their hearts to even accept her, an Outsider. Alice remembered how much mobster fighting she’d seen in the Countries of Hearts and Clover—to say nothing of what she hadn’t seen, especially since she’d lived in Heart Castle—but still, the residents of Hatter Mansion had never given her the impression that they were in fights. They were strong enough to protect her, they just didn’t seem…on the offensive.
The Hatters in the Country of Diamonds lived under much stricter rule, apparently. And since Blood had never seemed like a pushover in Hearts or Clover, maybe that just meant he was…worse at management here. Like he was younger and hadn’t gotten the hang of being a leader yet.
She was starting to understand Diamonds Blood a little better.
He flashed her a small, slanted smile. “You’re an odd one, to worry about the utility of a mobster’s reference library.”
“O-odd?”
“Just my honest opinion.”
His smile turned nasty as he returned another book to the shelf. She worried he’d only come to make fun of her, but then he moved farther back into the library.
He gazed at the spine of another book, then took it out and studied the cover. He seemed to have forgotten her presence.
“……”
“Uh… What are you looking for?” she asked at last. She was supposed to be helping out here.
She thought he’d reject her offer as being none of her business; she was surprised when he obediently opened his mouth to answer.