Chapter Two: He Knows

Twine discovers an advantage.

Feeling drained and sitting in a silver jail implanted in the wall of a study, all morning Twine got the front-seat of their argument.

“Let me take the reward, this was my idea!” yelled the weedy man.
    
The other man flipped the chair at the desk over. “I’m the one who caught the damn pest!”
    
“And I’m the one who hired you!” threw back the weedy man.

Twine’s head turned back and forth as each of them shouted, as if he was watching a tennis match. Except there wasn’t the thrill that he remembered. In fact, he was rather bored.

His body weighed down like a sack, but when sunlight suddenly rayed through the half-closed French window,  his mind was engulfed with fright - how long ‘til the light moves to his cage, which would streak along the carpet horizontally? He immediately got suspicious that putting him in the west-wall  was their way of torture. But who knew his weakness to the sun? Who out of them knew the threat of its light?

“I will give you thirty-percent if you just let me show him to my father!” said the weedy man.
    
“But what if, Mister Albin,” said the other in a voice of sarcastic respect, “you make a run with it all the way to the bank?”
    
The weedy man paused, then out of nowhere a dastardly sly smile stretched across his face.     

“Don’t you have some sleeping to do?”

“Don’t!” The other man snatched Albin by his collar, but didn’t continue with the attack. Twine was all of a sudden curious at the abrupt depletion of energy and violence in the man’s eyes.

“Good night, Mister Nim, sweet dreams,” murmured Albin into his ear.

Nim was garbling to himself and Twine could only recognise a few words. “I’ll … one … day … I‘ll …”

Sounding like a bag of potatoes being flung to the floor, Nim collapsed onto his knees and toppled over to land in a degrading position: his bum stuck in the air and his cheeks squashed against the carpet, his mouth stupidly askew. Albin walked down the side of him up to the cage.

He watched Twine: the man was very handsome, especially with a devious look on his face.

“If the troll thinks he’ll get all of it, he’s wrong,” Albin told him.

Get all of the reward? What -? Ah, yes, the reward demanding his head and decapitated body.

If luck will side with him again, these two men will die tonight.