“My beloved Sylvia is engaged to be married this Saturday,” Oliver said, as he poured Elsie some more tea. “She does not love this man and I cannot bear to leave her. Please, Elsie, you must help me.”
Elsie stood up. She didn’t quite see the plan at all here. “If she’s already engaged to be married then I think it might be a little too late. Oliver, you can’t surely plan on pulling her away from her home and her family. She has everything she could ever want here. Are you certain you can provide a better life for her?”
“This was her idea,” Oliver rebuked, “not mine.”
She could sense the desperation in his voice, but she went along with it for now. “Okay, so what’s the plan?”
Oliver moved over to the pin board and removed a sketching of an exquisite-looking ring. It was intricately made, and encrusted with colours of emerald, sapphire and ruby. It must have been worth a fortune. “The man my beloved has been promised to is a Mr. Joseph Cunningham, heir to the most powerful family in Warren City, and this beauty right here,” he tapped on the paper, “is their ring. My plan so far is simple; you can’t have a wedding without a wedding ring, so we steal the ring prior to the official ceremony and the wedding will have to be called off, giving Sylvia and I an opportunity to escape this place for good. We can then sell the ring to a broker of mine and use the money to start our new lives somewhere out in the countryside of Victoria City.”
“After you get us into the brass vault,” Elsie reaffirmed. “You have a lot of faith in your skills, don’t you?”
“Normally I am a very modest thief, but the fate of my beloved is on the line, so I say there isn’t another thief in all of Warren City who could pull this off.” He then bounced back to his pin board, which happened to be filled with sheets of paper – building designs, maps of guard patrols, an approximate guest list, and so on. “The wedding party is going to take place at the Parlow villa near the centre of the city. I plan on speaking with Sylvia to see if she can ascertain some last minute invitations for us; once we’re inside I should be able to handle it from there, but I will require assistance from one of your friends.”
Elsie shuffled over some of the papers, but in the end they proved to make her dizzy. “Good,” she said. “I’m sure Jack will be happy to assist. He does enjoy weddings.”
“Excellent! Meet me here tomorrow with Jack and we will work on the rest of the preparations.”
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