Jenn tapped her fingernails against the windowpane, grinning at the quiet click-tick-click generated by the action. Turning away, she leaned her back against the frame, wrapping her arms about herself as she laughed as quietly as ever.
Oh, how much fun that had been! The man was, indeed, impressive albeit less so than he thought. He had seen through her usual act a long while back, which was amusing. Few people had ever managed that without having already ended up on her bad side. He had vision and yet he remained blind; putting too much faith in words, in stories.
Words were wonderful things; so easily manipulated. The right ones could make or break a lie, a truth, a plot, a relationship, even a person. When spoken in the right order and the right tone, they could make even a wary man believe. However, it was not the words spoken that mattered in the end; it was the ones left unsaid.
She had shared her story with him. She had even told him the truth. Parts of it, at least. He knew just enough to think what she wanted him to and enough to believe that he had the upper-hand. That was the important part. His arrogance, his belief that there was no one alive who could pull the wool over his eyes was the very thing that would make it possible for her to do so.
He had a quick mind. How she loved men with quick minds. Feed them just a good enough story and they would gloss over the cracks for themselves. They never demanded details for they believed that they could work them out simply by knowing a few handfuls of facts.
Oh, he thought himself so clever in his speech, his attempts to glean more, his methods for manipulation. Belittle a person enough and they would try to prove him wrong. Hah! How many had done so over the years, she wondered. Each tiny little mind too lacking to realise that his insults were designed to make puppets of them. It was such a crude method, so bullish, so obvious, yet it clearly worked in his experience.
How easy, then, to let his experience work in her favour. Let him believe that his words bothered her, pushed her, prodded her. Let him believe that he had the upper hand, that he held all the cards. Of course, to do so she would have to fulfil his demands, but that was far from being a problem.
Crossing the room, she opened the door and placed her small feet to the stairs. There were many rooms in this huge house, most of which went unused although the maid kept them clean. One of them held her store of vials tucked away behind false wall panneling, along with her files containing all the information she held on the people of Bree and beyond. It took only a matter of minutes to remove the correct panel and extract a very certain vial from the alcove. She held it up to the light of the window, smiling at the clear liquid. Poison had been asked for, poison would be used and this was the perfect one.
