Leaves & Beans

“You think you know people—until the truth shows you a stranger wearing their face.” — Kelly Bales

Kelly had expected many things when she and Rhona entered the tunnels. Finding Daniel and Nathan wasn't one of them. Her mind raced to contextualise this impossible scene—Daniel Campbell, the owner of Leaf & Bean where she'd worked for nine years, standing in a secret chamber beneath a royal palace, surrounded by ancient maps and artefacts that belonged in a museum.

His daughters, whom she had watched grow from children to young women behind the café counter, now huddled together like frightened animals. Nathan, the newest hire whose quiet competence had quickly made him indispensable, now looking at her with an alertness that contradicted his usual easy-going demeanour. And a stranger—watching her with calculated assessment that reminded her of desert predators from her Arizona childhood, patient and deadly.

Nothing made sense. The pieces wouldn't fit together no matter how she tried to arrange them. The coffee shop owner and his family hiding underground, ancient manuscripts, a knife-wielding barista—it was like finding herself suddenly thrust into the middle of a film whose first hour she had somehow missed.

Before she could react, before she could voice the questions crowding her throat, Nathan moved.

The transformation was instant and terrifying—the gentle barista who crafted intricate latte art and joked with regular customers vanished, replaced by something leaner, harder, more dangerous. His hand latched onto her wrist, fingers closing like a vice around her arm as he slammed her against the tunnel wall with a force that knocked the air from her lungs. The impact sent a dull shock through her spine, the cold stone biting through her jacket, rough-hewn rock scraping against the wool fabric.

A single luminous thought flashed through her mind—you don't know people, you never truly know people—a revelation that hit harder than the stone, sharper than her own breath catching in her chest.

Pain bloomed across her back, bright and immediate, as her head snapped back, nearly connecting with the wall. The physical shock was almost secondary to the cognitive one—this was Nathan, who had helped her carry boxes of coffee beans, who had covered her shifts when she was ill, who had never shown the slightest hint of violence in all the months she'd known him. The Nathan who debated the relative merits of single-origin versus blended beans with the earnestness of a philosophy student was now pinning her against an ancient wall with the practiced efficiency of someone familiar with violence.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Nathan hissed, his voice low but laced with undeniable fury. His face was inches from hers, close enough that she could smell the faint trace of coffee that seemed permanently embedded in his skin, now mixed with sweat and something sharper—adrenaline, fear, determination. His pupils were dilated, black overwhelming blue, transforming familiar eyes into those of a stranger.

Kelly gasped, instinct overriding shock. The self-defence classes she had taken after a late-night scare in Leith kicked in automatically.

She twisted against his grip, her body shifting automatically into defence mode. But Nathan was stronger than she had anticipated, his stance suggesting training far beyond casual fitness. This wasn’t just anger. It was skill. And it terrified her.

"Get off me!" she snapped, her free hand shooting up, shoving at his chest. The solid wall of muscle beneath his jacket barely yielded to her push. The fear that had momentarily paralysed her gave way to anger—hot, clarifying anger that burned through confusion and flooded her system with renewed strength. Her Phoenix upbringing surfaced in her stance, in the steel that suddenly straightened her spine—desert-bred and unaccustomed to backing down.

Rhona let out a startled yelp, lunging forward from the tunnel entrance where she had been hanging back. The beam of her torch swung wildly across the chamber as she moved, creating disorienting flashes of light and shadow that added to the chaos of the moment.

Her face, when briefly illuminated, showed a mixture of shock and protective fury, her usual café composure completely shattered by the scene before her. The New Zealander, typically laid-back to the point of horizontal, now moved with the urgent determination of someone witnessing an incomprehensible injustice.

"Hey! What the hell are you doing?" She grabbed at Nathan's arm, trying to pry him away, her nails digging into the fabric of his jacket. Rhona—always the peacekeeper during staff disputes, always the level head when customers became difficult—now radiating a fierce protectiveness that transformed her typically reserved demeanour. Her Dunedin accent thickened with stress, vowels elongating and consonants sharpening in distinct South Island patterns.

Nathan didn't budge. His stance remained rigid, his body coiled with tension, his gaze locked on Kelly with the sharpness of a predator assessing its prey. The gentle barista had disappeared completely, replaced by someone Kelly didn't recognise—someone dangerous, someone trained, someone whose eyes held calculations and assessments that had nothing to do with coffee preparation or customer service. The contrast between the man she thought she knew and this version was so stark it seemed impossible they could inhabit the same skin, impossible that the same hands that crafted delicate leaf patterns in cappuccino foam could grip with such violent intent.

"Nathan!" Daniel's voice cut through the charged air, snapping like a whip. "What the hell are you doing?"

Nathan ignored him. His grip didn't loosen. If anything, it tightened, the pressure increasing until Kelly felt the bones in her wrist grinding together. The pain was sharp, immediate, drawing an involuntary hiss through her clenched teeth.

The others were frozen, watching in a mixture of shock and fear. Maeve and Rowan were pressed against the far wall, their wide eyes flicking between Nathan and Kelly. The artistic middle child and the tech-savvy youngest now looked impossibly young in the ghostly lantern light, childhood vulnerability reasserting itself in this moment of adult violence. Isla, though tense, seemed ready to intervene if necessary, her body angled slightly forward, hands unclenched, calculating the moment when action might become necessary.

Then—Nathan's gaze dropped to Kelly's wrist.

To the tattoo.

A simple, inked white flower, nestled just below her wrist.

The shift in Nathan’s expression was immediate.

His features hardened, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring slightly, jaw clenching so tight a muscle jumped along his temple. His grip became crushingly tight for a split second before he let go abruptly, stepping back as if she had suddenly become toxic. His chest rose and fell with rapid, shallow breaths, but his eyes were like flint—hard, sharp, capable of striking sparks. Where there had been anger, now there was something colder, more calculated, more dangerous—recognition that seemed to validate whatever suspicions had driven his initial violence.

"You're one of them."

Silence fell like a hammer, heavy and sudden.

Kelly, breathless and still catching herself from the force of the shove, blinked in confusion. Her mind raced to process the accusation, to understand what 'them' might mean, to contextualise this reaction to a tattoo she had borne for most of her adult life. Her wrist throbbed where his fingers had dug into her flesh, the pain a pulsing counterpoint to her racing heartbeat. The physical discomfort anchored her to reality even as the situation seemed to spiral further from anything recognisable as normal.

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

Her voice sounded strange in her own ears—higher than usual, threaded with genuine bewilderment and the lingering effects of adrenaline. The confusion was total, absolute.

None of this made sense—not finding her colleagues in an underground tunnel, not Nathan's violence, not this sudden focus on a tattoo she'd had since university. The desert-bred practicality that had carried her from Phoenix to Edinburgh, that had sustained her through nine years of Scottish winters and café work, offered no framework for understanding secret passages and violent accusations, no reference point for navigating this sudden descent into apparent conspiracy.

Nathan's expression wasn't just furious—it was something deeper. Something edged with betrayal, with the particular bitterness of someone who has discovered enemies where he thought allies stood. The look seemed personal in a way that transcended their workplace relationship, suggesting layers to Nathan that Kelly had never glimpsed during their shifts together. His entire body language had changed, becoming something alien to the casual, poetry-reading barista she thought she knew, transmuting into a combat-ready stance that spoke of training and experience far beyond anything their shared café work could explain.

"You're with them," he said darkly, each word enunciated with precision, weighted with accusation. "The White Rose Society."

The name meant nothing to Kelly. Absolutely nothing. Yet it was delivered with such gravity, such certainty, that it created an immediate sense of significance despite her complete lack of reference. Whatever this "White Rose Society" was, Nathan clearly believed it merited the violence he had just displayed, the suspicion that now radiated from him like physical heat.

Kelly stared at him like he'd just spoken in another language, her brain struggling to process words that individually made sense but collectively meant nothing to her. The absurdity of the moment struck her—standing in an underground tunnel beneath a royal palace, being accused of membership in some organisation she'd never heard of, by a colleague who had apparently been hiding skills and knowledge that had nothing to do with coffee preparation. It was so far beyond her normal experience that it generated a momentary sense of unreality, of dislocation from the established parameters of her life.

"Are you insane?" she snapped, the words emerging before she could filter them. The fear was receding now, replaced by indignation and genuine bafflement.

Nathan took another measured step back, creating distance while maintaining a clear line of sight. But his hand went for his knife, the motion fluid and automatic, muscle memory rather than conscious decision. The glint of steel caught in the lantern light, a cold, hard flash that transformed the tension in the chamber from uncomfortable to potentially lethal. The blade, utterly incongruous with the Nathan who debated coffee varietals and crafted latte art, seemed perfectly at home in the hand of this stranger who wore his face.

Rhona's breath hitched, a small, vulnerable sound that seemed impossibly loud in the tense silence. Without hesitation, she stepped between them, arms out, creating a human barrier between knife and accused. Her physical courage surprised even Kelly, who had worked alongside her for several years. The young woman from Dunedin, who made dry observations about Edinburgh weather and maintained meticulous cleanliness standards, now placing her body in the path of potential violence with unflinching determination.

"Whoa—okay, everyone take a fucking breath!" she said, her voice sharper than before, louder in the echoing chamber, the profanity reflecting the extremity of the situation rather than her usual measured speech. The Kiwi lilt in her accent deepened with emotion, vowels elongating with stress and urgency.

"We don't even know who 'them' is! What is wrong with you people?!"

Kelly shook her wrist, still smarting from the force of Nathan's grip. Angry red marks were already forming where his fingers had dug into her flesh, promising bruises by morning. Her heart slammed against her ribs, anger and confusion warring in her mind. The physical pain was almost welcome—a concrete sensation in a situation that felt increasingly detached from reality, a reminder that this was actually happening, not some bizarre dream brought on by too many late nights and too little sleep.

Pain was real. Pain could be trusted. Pain didn't suddenly transform into something unrecognisable, unlike people apparently.

"I don't know what kind of paranoid bullshit you're talking about, but I don't even know what the White Rose Society is!"

The frustration in her voice was genuine—the complete disconnect between Nathan's certainty and her absolute ignorance creating a chasm of misunderstanding that seemed unbridgeable. In all the years she had worked at Leaf & Bean, learning the rhythms of the café, the preferences of regular customers, the peculiarities of the espresso machine, nothing had prepared her for this moment of complete cognitive dissonance. The Arizona native who had adapted to Scottish weather, Edinburgh customs, and the particular rhythms of Old Town life found herself utterly unprepared for underground chambers, violent baristas, and accusations of secret society membership.

It wasn't just frightening—it was fundamentally disorienting, a systematic dismantling of everything she thought she understood about her colleagues, her workplace, and the life she had built in this city over nine long years.

Douglas, who had remained unnervingly silent throughout the entire exchange, finally moved.

He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, his gaze fixed on Kelly's wrist. The stranger's movements carried a weight and purpose that suggested authority—not the institutional kind that came with badges or titles, but the deeper authority of experience, of having navigated similar situations before. His face revealed little emotion, but his eyes were sharp, assessing, measuring every reaction and micro-expression with the careful attention of someone who had learned that survival often depended on such details.

"Let me see," he said, his voice carrying the distinctive cadence of Edinburgh's Old Town, the Scottish burr subtle but unmistakable beneath the measured tone. His words floated in the damp air like leaves on still water, creating barely perceptible ripples of reaction among those present.

Kelly frowned, breathing hard, the request momentarily failing to register through the fog of adrenaline and confusion. The pain in her wrist and back, the lingering fear from Nathan's assault, the sheer bewilderment of the situation—all of it created a cognitive load that made processing new information difficult, like trying to pour more water into an already overflowing cup.

Her Arizona upbringing had taught her resilience against many things—desert heat, isolation, loss—but nothing had prepared her for this particular variety of disorientation.

"What?"

Douglas extended a hand. Not forceful, not aggressive—just firm. The gesture was almost formal in its deliberate control, suggesting someone accustomed to defusing volatile situations through measured response rather than escalation. His palm faced upward, patient and waiting, like a gardener anticipating rain after drought, understanding that some things cannot and should not be rushed.

"Your tattoo," he said. "Let me see it properly."

The request was reasonable on its face, yet Kelly's body responded with instinctive wariness born of Nathan's earlier aggression. She jerked her arm back defensively, the movement automatic rather than considered, muscles remembering the recent pain and responding accordingly.

Douglas gave her a pointed look, his expression neither threatening nor pleading, but carrying a weight of significance that transcended their brief acquaintance. His eyes held a peculiar quality—somehow both calculating and compassionate, assessing threat while acknowledging humanity.

"Please."

Still glaring at Nathan, unwilling to show vulnerability by taking her eyes off the most immediate threat, Kelly hesitated, then reluctantly held out her wrist. The gesture required conscious override of her instinctive defensiveness, a choice to engage rather than retreat despite the fear still coursing through her system.

Douglas took it gently, his fingers surprisingly warm against her skin, the contact careful and clinical rather than threatening. He lifted her wrist toward the lantern light, angling it to illuminate the tattoo fully, his gaze narrowing with focused attention. The light caught the design—delicate white petals against the pale skin of her inner wrist, a simple yet elegant flower that had marked a moment of personal transformation years ago.

The flames from the lantern danced in their glass enclosure, sending shifting patterns of illumination across the inked petals, bringing different aspects of the design into prominence with each subtle movement.

Nathan's jaw tightened, the muscle along his temple jumping with tension as he watched the examination. His knife remained in his hand, but the immediate readiness had receded slightly, replaced by watchful waiting. His stance remained coiled with potential energy, like a spring compressed but not yet released, awaiting the signal that would determine whether that potential transformed into kinetic force or gradually dispersed.

Then—Douglas squinted, his brow furrowing as he tilted her wrist slightly, examining the design from different angles. The lantern light caught each line and curve of the tattoo, revealing details that might be missed in less direct illumination. His eyes tracked across the inked skin with the precision of someone reading a text in a language few others comprehended, deciphering meaning beyond mere aesthetic.

And then he shook his head, the motion slow but certain.

"That’s not a white rose."

The words landed with physical weight, changing the atmosphere in the chamber as immediately as Nathan's accusation had moments before. They fell into the tense silence like beans dropped onto a scale, tipping the balance of understanding in an entirely new direction. Nathan froze, his body tensing in a different way now—not preparation for violence but the stillness of cognitive reassessment, of data conflicting with assumption, of certainty giving way to doubt.

Douglas turned Kelly's wrist slightly, examining the tattoo more closely, his touch remaining gentle despite the intensity of his scrutiny.

"It's a white lotus," he muttered, the words carrying both certainty and significance, though the meaning of that significance remained opaque to Kelly. The distinction seemed trivial on the surface—one white flower versus another—yet the atmosphere in the chamber shifted dramatically.

Kelly blinked in confusion, her gaze dropping to her own wrist as if seeing the tattoo anew. The familiar design she had lived with for years suddenly the focus of scrutiny that suggested meanings and associations she had never considered or intended.

"A what?"

The genuine bewilderment in her tone was unmistakable—this wasn't just confusion about terminology but total disconnect from the framework of understanding that made the distinction between rose and lotus significant. In her world—the world of early morning café shifts, of regular customers whose orders she knew by heart, of staff meetings about bean suppliers and pastry selections—the difference between flower species on her tattoo had never carried life-or-death implications. The cognitive dissonance was like being told that the colour of her shoelaces might determine whether she lived or died—a fundamental reordering of significance that her mind struggled to accommodate.

Douglas let out a slow, measured breath, his gaze shifting between Kelly and Nathan. Something in his expression changed—understanding dawning, pieces clicking into place in a mental puzzle whose overall image remained obscure to everyone else present.

"It's nothing to do with the White Rose Society," he said finally, the statement simple but delivered with enough conviction to carry weight beyond its plain meaning. His voice held the quiet authority of expertise, of someone delivering judgment in a field where his credentials, though invisible to most present, were beyond question.

The tension in the chamber shifted again, recalibrating around this new information. Nathan didn't lower his knife, but his grip loosened slightly, his stance adjusting from immediate threat response to cautious reassessment. His mind was recalibrating, reevaluating assumptions that had led to his violent reaction, processing the implications of mistaken identification. The shift wasn't complete surrender of suspicion, but rather its modulation—from certainty to questioning, from immediate action to renewed observation.

The silence stretched, the tension still palpable but shifting, no longer sharpened for a fight, but laced with something deeper—uncertainty. The sudden violence had given way to confusion on all sides, creating a vacuum of understanding that demanded filling.

The Campbell sisters remained pressed against the wall, their expressions showing different aspects of the same wariness—Isla's calculating assessment, like a chess player evaluating multiple possible moves; Maeve's artistic sensitivity to emotional undercurrents, registering the subtle shifts in atmosphere as a painter might note changes in light quality; Rowan's technological mind trying to process human variables that defied simple algorithms, searching for patterns in behaviour that might yield predictable outcomes.

Kelly pulled her wrist away, her face twisting in frustration born not just of the recent physical confrontation but the complete absence of context that might make sense of it. The familiar mark on her skin—chosen after months of consideration, bearing personal significance related to her own familial journey—had somehow become the focal point of danger and suspicion in ways she couldn't begin to comprehend. The disconnect between her private meaning and this public interpretation created a particular type of cognitive vertigo, a dizzying sense of reality suddenly operating according to rules she hadn't been informed existed.

"Would someone please tell me what the hell is going on?" she demanded.

Douglas exhaled slowly, glancing at Nathan, then at Daniel. The look that passed between them suggested shared knowledge, shared stakes, shared understanding of a situation whose parameters remained invisible to Kelly and Rhona. His face, carved with lines that spoke of experience beyond his apparent years, settled into an expression of reluctant acceptance—not of defeat, but of necessary disclosure.

"I think it's time we all started asking the right questions," he said.

The statement held deceptive simplicity, suggesting that the issue wasn't just lack of answers but failure to properly frame the inquiry. It implied layers to their situation that extended beyond immediate confrontation to deeper contexts that remained unexplored, connections between seemingly disparate elements that might resolve confusion into coherence if properly approached. His words carried the particular wisdom of someone who had learned that in complex situations, the quality of the question often determined the value of the answer.

The lanterns flickered, casting long shadows across the tunnel walls, as the weight of those words settled over them all. The dancing flames created a subtle play of light and darkness that seemed to mirror the shifting understanding in the chamber—illumination and obscurity in constant motion, revelation and concealment alternating with each flicker. The ancient stones surrounding them had witnessed centuries of secrets, of hidden passages both literal and figurative, of knowledge concealed and revealed.

Now they would witness another revelation, another layer of understanding in the complex tapestry of connections that had brought them all to this moment beneath Edinburgh's royal palace.

Rhona stepped closer to Kelly, their shoulders almost touching, colleagues from countless café shifts now united by shared confusion in this underground realm so far removed from the familiar rhythm of coffee preparation and customer service. Her presence offered silent support, a reminder of the normal world they had inhabited just hours before—a world of morning rush and afternoon lull, of regular customers and daily specials, of ordinary concerns that now seemed impossibly distant from this underground chamber with its ancient maps and hidden meanings.

"About bloody time," she muttered, the sarcasm in her voice a thin cover for genuine unease, her Dunedin accent thickening under stress. "I was beginning to think we'd just stand around comparing flower tattoos until the royal guards found us all down here."

The dry observation carried both tension-breaking humour and practical concern—a reminder that they remained in a precarious position regardless of botanical clarifications.

Daniel's gaze moved between his daughters and his café employees, the weight of responsibility visible in the tightness around his eyes, the slight stoop of his shoulders. The man who had built Leaf & Bean into one of Edinburgh's most beloved independent coffee shops now confronted complexities that extended far beyond business management or staff scheduling.

Whatever answers awaited them would reshape not just this moment but everything that followed—relationships, understanding, perhaps even identity itself. His expression carried the particular gravity of a father whose protective instincts extended beyond his biological children to encompass those for whom he felt responsible, whose welfare had become intertwined with his own sense of duty.

As Douglas prepared to speak, to bridge the chasm between knowledge and ignorance, between insiders and newcomers, the chamber held its breath.

The moment balanced on the knife-edge of revelation, of transition from one state of understanding to another, from one reality to something both more complex and more true. Whatever came next would transform not just knowledge but relationship, not just information but trust, creating new alignments and alliances in a situation whose true dimensions were only beginning to emerge from shadow into light.