Page 86 of The Mercenary's Guide to Mishaps and Romance

The bird doesn’t seem to be overly pleased when she hears that word. I don’t know a whole lot about birds besides the fact that this one is probably evil, but she’s definitely not as happy as she was when Ellis was calling her pretty.

“Do you not like that name?” he asks. “What about pretty bird. You like that?”

She’s immediately pleased again.

“Look at her following us! It’s so cute that I’ve almost forgotten all about the fact that we’ve broken into a dead guy’s house and are likely going to get murdered.”

I look over at the bird and am highly confused about what’s so cute about it, but boy does Ellis look delighted. It’s… ridiculously adorable. What the fuck do I have to do to get him to look at me like that? “If I strut after you and wave my arms around, will you look at me like that too?”

“Huh?” he asks as he glances over at me before giving me a beaming look that shoots me right in the goddamn heart. “Are you jealous of a little bird?”

“Maybe,” I grumble.

Ellis scrutinizes me for a bit, and because I can’t look less cool than a damn bird, I wink at him. It makes his smile fucking bloom across his face before he quickly looks away and rubs his face.

Fucking hell, he’s cute.

“What exactly are we looking for?” he asks as he trails after me.

“I… really don’t know. But Cassel asked for his laptop or computer. So we’ll see if we find anything like that.”

“Okay,” he says, but clearly all he knows how to do is smile at the weird bird.

The downstairs area doesn’t prove to have much, so we head upstairs.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” the bird tosses out.

“Why does this bird only say weird things?” I ask.

“I don’t know, but she’s cute, so she can say anything she wants,” Ellis decides, very pleased that the bird has followed us up the stairs. I think he would have been sad to see it stay behind, but I’m not quite sure why.

“This looks like an office space,” Ellis says as he rushes over to a door that’s cracked open. He pushes the door the rest of the way open and hurries inside. I follow behind him, immediately seeing the desktop computer on the desk.

“I just feel like there has to be something here for my father to have sent us here, right? I mean, maybe he meant there was something on the computer, but I feel like there’s more to it than that.”

“We can check drawers?” Ellis suggests as he sets the cake down and the bird hops around going, “Bad boy. Bad boy. Motherfucker! Bad boy.”

I start pulling open cabinets and rifling through them. There’s so much paperwork in them, and I have no damn idea what I’d even be looking for. Something that connects this guy to Arthur? To Ellis’s father Zachary? To the death of Arthur’s daughter Jasmine? I feel like nothing is clearcut or really even a lead to latch on to.

“Oh noooooo. Oh nooooo,” the bird continues on.

“We’re not being bad. We’re just looking for something,” Ellis assures it.

The bird’s probably considering how hard it’d be to tear out our jugulars.

“That thing creeps me out,” I say as I start unhooking the computer tower. I stop midway when I feel like I might have heard something, but the racket the bird is making might have covered it.

“What’s wrong?” Ellis asks.

“Not sure if I heard something. Just keep looking,” I instruct as I head to the sliding glass door that leads out onto a balcony. I unlock it and slide it open before stepping out onto the balcony, but I don’t see or hear anything.

I leave the door open just in case. “Bird, can you shut up?”

The bird looks offended, and I swear she sharpens her beak on the floor so when she goes for my jugular, she can tear it out with precision.

“How do you get this thing to stop talking?” I ask.

“Just ignore her,” Ellis says as he flips through the documents. “I’m not seeing anything.”

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