Silhouette

by Robin Hale

  Fuck, she was gorgeous.

  Her dark hair was piled into a bun on the top of her head, soft tendrils falling around her face and neck like invitations to tease at the sensitive skin there. Her eyes were wide, impossibly wide behind her glasses. My goggles refused to render their exact color, but even money said the warmth in them was caused by a shade of brown that would have me drowning in normal light. Her generous curves were draped in a softly knitted, lightweight sweater, a gauzy thing that clung to every soft bit of her that I suddenly wanted to feel beneath my palms like the throttle of my bike. So much potential in those curves.

  The perfect petal of her mouth dropped open into a surprised ‘o’, and I snapped back to myself.

  Get it together, Lana.

  My mind ran over the staff photos of every person with access to the chemistry building, every professor, maintenance worker, grad student. She was not any of them.

  No, this woman sitting in the dark, face lit by the glow of a tablet, was not anyone I had expected to find. A scowl lurked behind my placid smile. I didn’t care for surprises.

  I cocked my head to the side and dragged a slow, assessing look down the length of my find’s body. Her eyes went even wider, impossible as that had seemed only an instant before, and her pupils were so dilated in the dimness that they nearly swallowed the whole of her irises. The grin that pulled at my mouth was wicked, comfortable, and I began to adjust my opinion of surprises.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I mused.

  The tablet went dark from disuse, and the room was plunged into the inky blackness in which I had made my mark. I fluttered a light touch at the edge of my goggles, engaging their night vision settings and watching as the woman seated before me flinched.

  Flinched and then coiled.

  My smile widened in surprised amusement. She was going to make a run for it.

  She tucked her legs beneath the chair, bracing against the floor like a sprinter on starting blocks. And then she erupted into motion. She swept her tablet into her arms, fixed her eyes on the office door, and launched herself forward with the determination of a charging bull.

  It was charming, really.

  I stepped into her path and redirected her momentum, pinning her against the locked office door as easily as I’d opened the air vent above her head.

  “Now, now, darling. None of that,” I whispered. I ducked my head close to hers, watched as she shivered beneath the gust of my breath against her face. And wasn’t that interesting? She should’ve shuddered. Flinched. Instead, she rode the feeling of my words against her lips like a lover’s caress.

  “You really have nothing to be afraid of,” I continued as I maneuvered the other woman back into the chair where I’d found her. “I’ll be out of your hair in just a moment.”

  I slipped a hand into the belt at my waist and retrieved one of the sets of zip tie cuffs I carried with me on jobs. It was in its designated place, as expected. My fingers wrapped around the other woman’s wrists as I guided her into position and tightened the cuffs.

  I paused, leaning in close and murmuring softly, “Does that hurt?”

  There was a surprised huff of breath, and I let the insult slide. Surely it was a strange day for her.

  “N-no,” she said after a moment. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  I ran a perfunctory stroke along the cuffs and confirmed they didn’t bite into the softness of her skin anywhere. “Good.”

  A quick survey of the office found the safe in the precise location I had expected beneath Robinson’s desk. It was the standard make and model that had been installed in the chemistry building when the university opened it and had never been replaced. Its key combination, however, would certainly have been changed from the factory default. Individual safe owners were idiots, in my experience. But a security team managing a full complement of them would be more practiced in how they were deployed.

  “Could you —” The soft, fluttering voice of the woman seated to my left broke my concentration like the tinkling of bells.

  “Could I what, darling?” I was getting distracted. I should’ve been halfway through cracking the safe by then. More than that, perhaps. My careful sense of where I was in the timeline of my plans, my uncanny ability to accurately track the smallest movement of time was completely shot. How long had I been in that room? Seconds? Minutes? I didn’t know.

  And what was worse, I didn’t seem to care.

  “The light.” That pretty throat worked as she swallowed. “Please. Could the light be on?”

  I sat back on my heels where I knelt in front of the safe and looked up at the bound woman. “Afraid of the dark?” I asked, not unsympathetically.

  “No,” she shook her head. “No, I just — I keep waiting for something…awful to happen. It would be better if I could see it coming.”

  I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t. Darkness had been my greatest asset since I had begun my career as a teenaged delinquent slipping into bodegas and liberating densely caloric food so that I could get through another day.

  The dark was practically my accomplice.

  But there was something about the way the raven-haired woman’s voice trembled. Something in the way she swallowed, tried to keep her voice even. I wouldn’t hurt her — hadn’t hurt anyone, not really — but she had no reason to believe that, and I found that I didn’t like the taste of her fear.

  “Of course, darling,” I breezed and leaned up to flip the light switch on the wall. The next touch was to my goggles, resetting them so that the night vision mode would not impede my view, and then a brief graze of her knee. It was an apology, or maybe I just wanted to watch her bite her lip again. “You’re in for a treat. Not many people can say that they’ve watched the Silhouette crack a safe.”

  “I’ll have to blog about it,” she said brightly, then winced at herself.

  I indulged the chuckle I felt building behind my lips, dragging my eyes once more from the task at hand. “I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

  Focus, Lana. Focus on the locking mechanism.

  I ran through the familiar steps, things I had known how to do on an instinctive, muscle-memory level since before I could legally drive. I felt the catches of the tumblers behind the keying mechanism. I listened to the tones of the pins sliding over one another as they sang their way to opening beneath my hands.

  “How did you learn to do that?”

  I suppressed the jolt, but it did nothing to keep me from losing my place in the process. I raised a curious brow at the bespectacled, surprisingly daring young woman seated next to me. Her posture was remarkably casual, given that she was tied up. Her ankles were crossed, her knees held together as though someone might disapprove if she allowed her legs to relax.

  A sudden flash of what she might look like if she would slowly spread those knees tore through my gut like a blast from Sergeant Cinders’ power.

  Pathetic.

  I had a job to do. And I was suddenly struck by how lucky I had been in the past not to run into unexpected brown-eyed beauties, if that was all it took to distract me.

  “Oh the usual way, I expect,” I said easily, affecting a casual tone that I didn’t really feel. The acceleration of my heartbeat was too fierce to be the rush I usually felt on a job. It was thready. Almost too far. And I had the alarming sense that, if I wasn’t careful, I would become addicted to the feeling. I forced my fingers back to the safe, determined to get it open without any interruptions that time.

  And if I managed to do it quickly, while entertaining my captive audience, rapt with attention, so much the better. Vanity wasn’t a sin I felt any particular shame in.

  “I learned that there were things in safes that I wanted.” My fingers flew over the keying mechanism on the safe and I followed the now-familiar cadence of its spinning tumblers like a dancer running through their warm-up routine. It was safe, comfortable, and I was eager to push myself faster until the woman watching me was suitably impressed. “From there it was
n’t such a large leap to figure out how to get them out.”

  The latch on the safe released, a whirring sound that even my guest seemed to hear, and a rush of pleasure swept through my gut. She was paying attention.

  The door popped open just enough to get my fingertips behind it and I coaxed it the rest of the way on its well-oiled hinges. My eyes rose from the safe to meet the other woman’s once more, triumph flooding my veins.

  “Tell me, haven’t you ever wanted something you were told you couldn’t have?” A wicked grin spread across my face and I watched as her cheeks went pink and that pretty mouth slid open in surprise.

  3

  MOLLY

  The thief lifted her goggles, sliding the opaque lenses up her forehead until they rested in her hair like a strange headband. Her eyes…her eyes were a dark riot of hazel tones. There was a wicked glint in the thief’s flinty gaze, and the sight of it sent a thrill through me that I couldn’t suppress. I shivered, heat rising in my cheeks as I did. Ugh, that was embarrassing.

  And that question…what was the Silhouette playing at? Had I ever wanted something I couldn’t have? Of course I had. I constantly did. For instance, right that moment I wanted the thief’s mouth on mine like I had never wanted anything in my life. She was poised at my feet, coiled in elegant, sinewy grace and covered in so much black leather it would’ve made a biker blush. Her skin was pale in the light, bright like porcelain and flushed with just the slightest, most tempting hint of pink on her cheeks and the delicate dip of her collarbone. Her sleek dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her lips were painted a cold red shade that suited her to perfection.

  An entirely inappropriate coil of lust began to build its beguiling heat low in my belly. Oh, no. No. That wouldn’t do at all. The last thing I needed was to develop a crush on a criminal.

  Desperate to hide the turn my thoughts had taken, I answered her question as honestly as I knew how without revealing myself. “When I was a kid I wanted the fire opal,” I blurted.

  Those hazel eyes, just seconds ago nearly black with promise, blinked. “The Opal City fire opal? The one in the museum?”

  Embarrassment heated my face to the point of burning. The Silhouette ought to sit back or I’d ignite the perfume she was wearing. It was something subtle, with just the barest hint of jasmine. If I’d been three inches further from her I never would have been able to smell it.

  ‘Perfume is intimate,’ Jenna had said. ‘It should invite someone in. It isn’t for the rest of the world. It’s for you and the person you allow close enough to taste…’ Her gorgeous smile had been bright, wicked as she’d laughed at my blush. The way I’d leaned helplessly toward her, smelling her expensive perfume. Jenna had danced away from me then, and I hadn’t been smart enough to realize that she was always dancing away from me. Never back in.

  “That’s the one,” I confirmed with a self-conscious grimace. I shrugged as well as I could with my hands behind my back. “I always…I always thought it was beautiful. I was always so sad to go home and leave it there.”

  There was something brighter than the seductive tease in the smile that Silhouette wore then. Something…honest?

  “A girl after my own heart,” she laughed. There was nothing teasing in it, nothing predatory. It was just…happy. “What ever happened to that larcenous little angel?” The thief raised a perfectly manicured brow.

  A lot of things had happened. A lot of awkwardness and heartbreak. A lot of burying myself in books, ignoring the things I couldn’t have, and focusing on the things I was allowed to want.

  I shrugged helplessly. “Grew up, I suppose.”

  The Silhouette’s painted lips pursed in a displeased moue. “Tragic.” She cocked her head to the side, and the pale column of her throat should have looked absurd in the fluorescent light of the office but it didn’t. God, how it didn’t. “I think a fire opal would suit you.” She lifted a hand and the leather of her gloves painted whispers of her fingertips down my cheek. So soft, so gentle that I couldn’t quite believe she had actually touched me. “You have the coloring for it.” She dropped her hand back to the devastating curve of her thigh and quirked a smile. “I could never pull it off.”

  “Oh no, I think you could.” What the hell was I saying? Was I honestly reassuring the Silhouette that she’d look fetching in a piece of stolen jewelry? Nerves and panic raced up and down my spine like frightened rabbits.

  I was in way over my head.

  The smile that spread over the Silhouette’s face was pleased and definitely amused, even as her eyes slid from me and back toward the now-open safe. There was the sound of paper sliding over paper and the clattering of small objects. Possibly metal? Or hard plastic? It was difficult to tell over the pounding of my adrenaline-fueled heart and the truly aggressive air conditioning being piped throughout the building.

  Whatever she was looking for, she quickly found it and sat back once again to latch the safe shut. At my surprised laugh, the thief shrugged.

  “No reason to risk the things I’m not after, is there?” She rolled onto her feet in the smooth movement I associated with Olympic gymnasts and highly-trained dancers. Nothing I would ever come close to being able to pull off.

  She held something small in her hand, something silver and black and — was that a USB drive?

  Cold panic swept through my gut. Right. The Silhouette hadn’t just dropped in while I was running support for the Captain in order to give me a sexually confusing experience. She was there to steal something. Something from a chemical engineering researcher’s private office. There were very few possibilities for what it could be that wouldn’t make me break out in a cold sweat.

  And she was about to breeze out of the office, stolen information in hand, just as casually as she had breezed in.

  I needed Captain Colossal there to stop her. I’d been talking, chattering inanely at the Silhouette since she’d bound my hands and hoping that the Captain would hear me over his comm link. Hoping that he’d put the pieces together and would storm in to stop her and — and rescue me. The idea of rescue sat strangely. I didn’t feel like I was in danger. I didn’t think she would hurt me.

  I was a little afraid that I was going to hurt myself.

  “I thought you only stole jewelry?” I blurted as the thief turned toward the open air conditioning vent in the ceiling.

  She looked back at me, assessing, then crossed her arms over her — entirely too distracting — chest and leaned casually against the office wall. Was there anywhere she wouldn’t appear entirely at ease? I could imagine her in front of a firing squad, no blindfold, favoring her executioners with a wink and a salacious grin. She’d look no more concerned than she did in that office.

  “I prefer it, that’s true.” Her eyes glittered in the harsh fluorescent light. “There’s something about the gleam of something sparkly that sends me all aflutter.” She tossed the USB drive into the air and caught it deftly, closing her gloved fist around it. “But there are other considerations, of course. Sometimes it’s as simple as the price being right.” She tilted her head, sending the silky fall of her ponytail down her leather-clad shoulder in a mesmerizing tumble. “And I’d never broken into a university before.” She flashed a grin and shrugged one elegant shoulder. “I thought it might be fun.”

  The sounds coming through the comm were starting to peter out. There was less shouting, fewer thuds like the Captain tossing someone into a wall. Surely he would unmute his comms. Right? He couldn’t possibly think that I was still on the phone with my mother?

  I needed to keep her talking. That wasn’t so complicated. Just keep talking. The embarrassment didn’t matter, the way I couldn’t seem to stop blushing didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping the Silhouette’s attention so that Captain Colossal could foil her plans.

  It had to happen sometime.

  “I suppose there’s no point in asking what you’re after?” I tried hopefully.

  “Mm, no, darling. There isn’t
.” She chuckled. “Of course, I imagine Professor Robinson will sort it out quickly enough.” She cast a glance toward the locked safe once more. “Although judging by the state of that thing, it might take him a while. Professors.” She lifted her shoulder again in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.

  “Right, yes,” I laughed, fighting to keep the edge of hysteria out of my voice. “Of course.”

  The tall woman’s brow furrowed, a line appearing just above her nose, and she didn’t seem to like that at all. She pushed off from the wall and practically glided the three steps that it took to cross the small room. “Hey, now, darling. No need to panic.” There was a frown pulling at those painted lips, and her gloved hand was lifting once more toward my face.

  That subtle hint of jasmine teased my nose again, and I fought back the urge to sway forward.

  Silhouette’s hand bypassed my face and stroked gently over my hair. The touch sent a shocking wave of soothing calm through my body. Her eyes looked soft, fond, and I was suddenly certain that if she pressed her palm against the back of my neck, all of the anxiety would flow out of my body like water. What was that about?

  “Of course not. Who’s panicking?” I said, desperate to stifle the nervous giggles that threatened to overtake me. “I mean, I’m just tied up in Professor Robinson’s office while the Silhouette steals something right before my very eyes. Who would find that unsettling?”

  I saw immediately that I had overplayed my hand.

  Those hazel eyes went from soft to suspicious. Fond to calculating. Her mouth tightened and her hand left my hair to brush loose tendrils away from my ear — the ear that housed the earpiece through which I communicated with Captain Colossal.

  “Well. That is disappointing,” the Silhouette sighed. “And we’d been getting along so well.”

  And then I heard it: Captain Colossal’s heavy, boot-clad footsteps charging down the hallway.

  Suddenly, the Silhouette’s fingers slid into the hair at the base of my skull, tangling there until I tipped my head back to look up at her with heat rising in my cheeks. Her eyes flashed, not with anger but with interest. Almost…almost playfulness.