It was nearly eleven o’clock in the evening as Ember sat at a table in the Chesarie tavern in a middle-class neighborhood in Bucharest. The sky was cloudy, so no stars nor moon were visible from the window she had sat next to for the past couple of hours.
Nothing particularly interesting had happened in what seemed to be a regular night of drinking and laughing in the tavern. Earlier Ember had asked a few of the bartenders if they’d seen a man with Donovan’s description; none of whom she asked had known anything about him. Yet, when Ember asked one man with sandy blonde hair and a bushy mustache if he remembered Clarice Rusnek, he told her that she had been there a week before.
“Was she alone?” Ember had asked him urgently, her heart rate rising in anticipation.
“No,” the blonde man
