by Robin Hale
“Why are you here?” I asked as the inconsistencies piled up beyond my ability to ignore them.
There was a low, breathy chuckle in response. “Theft, doctor. I’d have thought that much was obvious.”
“No,” I shook my head. “I mean, why are you here right now? Why am I with you? This isn’t anywhere in your MO.”
“Been studying me, darling?” The Silhouette asked lazily, a drawl that brought to mind late morning sunlight among bedsheets. The lockbox in front of her clicked with a soft release and the door popped open. “But you’re right, of course. I’d imagine you’re used to that. Being right, I mean.” Her grin was wicked but not unkind, and she dipped her gloved hands into the lockbox. A black, velvet-covered box was out of the compartment and into one of the many pockets on her belt almost before I could see what had happened.
Silhouette rose in a graceful wave and prowled toward me. “This job is slightly different, darling. There are about three minutes left on the intercepted CCTV footage, the ping-backs to the police department will go live again in about five minutes, and the folks we’ve left in the lobby will find their spines any moment now.” Her hands came down on the arms of the chair and her proximity pressed me back against it. “It’s time for us to get out of here. You’re my ticket home, doc.”
10
LANA
Izzy had always teased me about my flair for the dramatic. She’d done it when we were kids and I would try to keep things from her for the thrill of having a secret, no matter how stupid and insignificant the payload. She’d done it when I started running my own jobs and I dressed all in black like something out of a cartoon. She’d done it when I left that carefully framed shadow on the doorway of the Broadchurch Diamond vault, my first public claiming. My first signature.
And if she had been there to see the way I’d leaned over Dr. Molly Fawn — the way I’d moved closer than I needed to, simply to see her eyes widen and her lips part, the thrum of her pulse in her throat — if she’d seen that, she would’ve done it then, too.
Fawn had followed me easily after that. She’d barely needed guiding at all, just yielded to the press of my hand on her back while we walked through the carefully rigged side door that led to my waiting motorcycle. Her eyes had gone wide again as she’d stared at the bike.
“Is that — are we —” she’d sputtered.
“We are indeed, darling.” I pulled the spare helmet from the compartment at the back of the bike and grabbed my own as well. I didn’t have a full riding kit for her, but I was confident we wouldn’t be going fast enough that we would need it. I’d plotted the route to the safe house meticulously. Little-used alleyways and residential streets made up the majority of the route, and there were too many turns to build speed, even if I hadn’t been aware of the particularly valuable brain I was bringing with me.
“Better hold on then, and lean with me.”
THE RIDE to the safe house, the slowest I’d been on since I first taught myself to ride, was also the most thrilling in recent memory. Fawn had been rigid behind me, arms around my waist like a pair of iron bands. The wind at that speed was negligible, and I could almost convince myself that I had heard Fawn gasp as we went around our slow speed turns, gripping me tighter as she did.
It was almost enough to make me gun the engine.
Almost.
It was that warm rush from feeling Fawn cling to me that left me blindsided by what she did next.
I leaned into the next turn, following the natural pull of gravity with the wheels and changing the course of the bike as smoothly as I’d done since I first learned to ride. And then we kept leaning. Fawn was pushing further into the turn, pulling the bike in a hard right that threatened to send us careening into the corner of a brick building at the end of the alleyway or risk than laying the bike down. Asphalt whizzed by at gut-churning speed, too close to our faces, too close to Fawn’s exposed legs, her knitwear-covered arms. She wasn’t wearing anywhere near enough gear to take hitting the ground at any speed, especially if she’d never learned to roll.
My heart leaped into my throat, blood pounding in my ears to drown out the bike’s engine, the sound of Fawn’s exertion, the way the rubber on the tires squealed as it resisted the sudden jerk. Adrenaline pulsed through every inch of my bloodstream, and it was like the first heist I’d planned, the one where everything nearly fell apart because my timing hadn’t been quite right. The one that I’d only gotten out of by the skin of my teeth and sheer dumb luck.
I gritted my teeth. I was going to get us out of the slide. I was. I threw my own bodyweight in the other direction, fighting the momentum of Fawn’s lean, and managed to get the bike upright again. I squeezed a smooth, rapid stop out of the brakes and kicked down the supporting stands before hopping off.
She’d done it on purpose. Most beginning riders fought turns, nervous about leaning too far, unable to trust that the driver knew how hard to push. New passengers tended to go stiff and resistant out of an animal fear of falling. That turn? That wasn’t a mistake.
The leather of my gloves squeaked as I wrapped my hands around Fawn’s upper arms and lifted her off of the bike.
We were close to the safe house and I pulled her the half-block that remained. I barely paused outside the door, punching in a keycode from muscle memory and ducking the pair of us inside the partially renovated loft that served as my bolthole in this sector of the city.
There came a soft gasp, a gentle grunt of surprise when I pinned Fawn back against the loft’s front wall. I pulled the helmet from her head, tossed it carelessly to the floor — barely managing to fight down a wince as I realized that I had just rendered the helmet unsafe, it was only rated for one collision, after all — and checked over every exposed bit of her skin to make sure she hadn’t grazed anything. I checked for exhaust burns on her legs from the pipes, road rash, even something as benign as a run in her leggings.
She was fine. No damage.
I pulled off my own helmet and laid it gently on the floor. “For a genius, that was a real dumb move, doc.” I didn’t mean to growl at her but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “If you’d been riding with someone else, you’d be laid out on the pavement right now. Covered in burns and bleeding from who knows where.”
“So I was supposed to just let you take me?” She demanded. There was a new fierceness in her voice. It was still soft, still musical, but she didn’t seem likely to back down just because she’d scared me.
Fuck. She’d scared me. I felt the truth of that thought coil through my gut, wrapping itself around all of my calm self-assurance. I was angry at her because I was afraid, and, fuck me, but I was proud of her too.
“In general, avoiding being taken to a secondary location is a good idea, darling.” I swept my gloved fingers down the side of her face, feeling a warm swell of pride as Fawn didn’t so much as flinch. “But if you’re on a bike, don’t try to take it down.”
“I ran the calculations, we were going less than thirty miles per hour. Even without gear, the impact was survivable.” Fawn furrowed her brow, and I could tell she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Instead, she was running over the numbers one more time. Velocity, force, the tensile strength of her skin versus the asphalt, the degree of trauma she could withstand before it was fatal.
God save me from heroic geniuses.
“You ran the calculations,” I murmured, leaning in closer to the other woman, watching as her pretty eyes went wide and those soft cheeks turned pink once again. “But you managed to miss that I’m not going to let anything hurt you if I can help it.” I paused, opening my mouth and letting myself taste Fawn’s breath on the air. The pounding of my heart had slowed slightly. I no longer felt the specter of unrecoverable disaster looming at my back. Instead, I had the thrill of survival thrumming through my veins. “How is that possible, doctor? How is it that you managed to forget that if nothing else, I’ve kept you safe?”
Fawn’s mouth opened and closed in rapid successio
n. I could see her trying to find the words to say, the logical conclusion to her planning and calculating that would help her out of the predicament she found herself in.
“What was in the lockbox?” She asked, voice barely more than a whisper.
I chuckled, pushing off from the wall to give her space to breathe as I retrieved the small box from my belt. I opened it and presented the contents to her with the flourish of someone proposing to their significant other. “A pearl, darling. It was a pearl.”
Fawn stared at the pearl. She blinked and her mouth snapped shut. Long seconds stretched in the air between us before the furrow in her brow returned and she stopped sagging against the wall.
“A pearl?” She demanded, sounding annoyed. “You kidnapped me so that you could steal a pearl?”
“That’s an awfully ugly way of looking at it,” I drawled. “After all, it’s not just any pearl. This pearl was said to belong to Grace O’Malley. The pirate queen.”
I stared down at the pearl lovingly. It was sizable, given what it was. Just off-round but still vibrant and shimmering like it had only just been pulled from the water. I had no specific reason to doubt the previous owner’s claims of its providence, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out they were bunk.
The incredibly wealthy, in my experience, wanted to give more weight to the things they owned than was warranted. It wasn’t enough to own a high-quality pearl, it had to belong to someone historically significant. They couldn’t just give money to charity, they needed to throw galas so that their friends could all see them do it. Their clothes couldn’t just fit well, they had to be made by some exclusive design house. Someplace their friends didn’t have access to.
Where most of the people of Opal City would be happy with a fine thing, knowing only it was a fine thing, the folks I preferred to steal from derived their identities from the things they could acquire that no one else could have. They were jealous of their wealth. Envious of the wealth of others. Their own happiness required not necessarily suffering, but an absence for someone else.
Which mostly meant that I got to pepper my thefts with a healthy dose of spite. And that suited me just fine.
The scoff from Fawn’s pretty lips drew me out of my musing and brought my attention back to her.
“Why do you do it, Silhouette?” She asked.
“Hmm? I’ve done rather a lot of things today, darling. I’ll need you to be more specific.” I winked and snapped the pearl’s box closed.
“Why do you steal these things?” Dr. Molly Fawn gestured to the renovated loft around us. “You’re obviously not starving. You’re not in danger of ending up on the street. You have more than enough to get by, so why do you do it?”
I laughed, despite myself. “Is that what you’d told yourself? That I was stealing to feed orphans or something?” Fond, genuine amusement painted itself across my mouth and I couldn’t suppress a warm smile. “When I started all of this, I’ll admit it was a matter of survival.”
I trailed my gloved hand along the carved wooden banister of the steps leading to the upper level. It was a nice enough place, not falling to pieces like it had been before I got my hands on it, but not quite a beacon of the gentrification that was definitely coming to the neighborhood. It was nice enough that young-Lana would never have been able to truly imagine herself living there. And the idea that it might be a place she kept in addition to her primary residence would’ve blown her little mind.
“But it clearly isn’t now,” Fawn said. Some of the bite had gone out of her voice. Her brown eyes were betrayed concern. Had I coaxed some empathy out of her heart for my sake? Well, that was embarrassing. I didn’t need her to feel bad for me. I was fine, had been for ages.
“So why do you do it, Silhouette? This place…it’s nicer than anywhere I lived when I was in school. You’re clearly doing well. And you’ve got the skills to —”
“To what?” I asked, voice bright with amusement. “To go straight? To do penetration testing for banks and wealthy clients? To help my current targets protect themselves against people like me?”
Those soft shoulders lifted in a helpless shrug. “And why not? You’d make more than you needed doing that. And you’d still get to do all the things that seem to thrill you so much now.”
“Not quite all of them, darling.” My mouth quirked into a rakish smirk. “This white hat future you’re laying out for me doesn’t have a lot of room in it for whisking away unsuspecting young women, does it?” I prowled toward her again, eating up the space between us and relishing the way she didn’t back down. Damn, she was something.
“Is that the fun, then? That the young women are — are unsuspecting?” Pearly white teeth bit gently into the plump curve of her lower lip, and I wanted to taste it for myself.
“No,” I admitted. “That isn’t the fun.” I braced myself on the wall on either side of Dr. Fawn’s head, letting myself drift forward into her heat, her soft, feminine scent. “At the end of the day, I like to win. And there’s no game when you’re playing against people like me. Playing for people like that.”
The explanation didn’t seem to satisfy whatever constraints Fawn had set up. It didn’t cover all of the bases or assuage her concerns. It looked like it needled at her, and I would’ve been pleased if I had set out to do it. As it was, I was mostly miffed about the rigidity in her spine, so different from the way she’d melted into my grasp in her living room barely two weeks before.
“Why am I here? You didn’t need me. You didn’t need to steal the pearl then, in front of so many people. You didn’t need me to help you make a clean getaway. You could have gotten into that vault without anyone knowing you had ever been there.” Fawn’s hands cut through the air as she spoke.
“And why do you think that, doc?”
“Because you’ve done it before.” The good doctor’s eyes flashed in the mix of sunlight and shadows, a determined cast to her brow that told me she knew she was right.
“Oh, have I?” The words were casual, calm in the way that only deceit really calmed me.
“You have. You stole the Wentworth rubies.” Her birdsong voice had a thread of steel I’d never heard in it before. It was blindingly lovely. My stomach went tight with the feeling of the danger that lay behind that sound. Too pretty. Too tempting. Too fierce for the casual touch I could offer.
“No one knows who stole the Wentworth rubies,” I countered. “Besides, there wasn’t even a Silhouette until two years after that theft.” The teasing glint in my smile wasn’t enough to push her off course, and something in my chest lurched at that. Loved it.
“Jade may have named you when you left that shadow on the security footage, but I have a whole list of thefts I know were your handiwork. You just didn’t sign them.” She pursed her lips, a gesture one might make involuntarily, a reflexive ‘thinking’ pose. But all it did was drag my eyes to her mouth. All it did was make me want to kiss her.
“You’re right,” I whispered, eyes still caught on the petal-perfect curve of her lips. “I stole them.”
“So why am I here, Silhouette?” Fawn’s voice had gone quiet, mirroring my own low tones.
“Because I’ve never been any good at staying away from the things I want. Even if I know I should.”
And then I kissed her.
The first taste was shocking. She looked like she should taste like water, mostly warm and wet and clean, rather than any particular favor. It was in that first kiss that I discovered that she had a fondness for cinnamon breath mints, and the fire of her mouth spread over my tongue. The only thing for it was to chase the flame, of course. Her lips were soft, smooth, just as perfect under my own as I had imagined they would be. It was nothing at all to coax my tongue along them, nothing at all to seek out the spice, the heat of her mouth.
She opened easily for me. Willingly. A little gasp and a surprised moan escaped from her mouth, and it was like molten desire pouring straight into my veins, pooling low in my gut and drowning out
the part of my mind that knew I was making a mistake. I didn’t have the time for the detour I’d started. I was going to ruin everything. I was going to get myself caught.
I couldn’t bring myself to care.
I brought my mouth crashing against Fawn’s again and again, drinking down every tiny sigh, every gasp, delighting in the way her hands fluttered over my shoulders like she didn’t know where to touch me. It was perfect. She was perfect.
The curve of her lip was too tempting to leave alone, even as I knew it must have been bruised and tender by that point. It was red and wet with the urgency of our kisses, but she released the most desperate, the most beautiful whimpers every time I tasted her there. I couldn’t stop. I lapped at the pleasing curve, tested its plumpness with my teeth, and hungrily swallowed every sound I could coax from her kiss-bruised mouth.
Her gasps were tender and yielding, and I chased those breaths as greedily as I had ever chased a jewel or precious metal in my notorious career.
My hands found their home around her generous hips, feeling the almost brazen way her body flowed from one beautiful feature to the next. Her waist wasn’t small, but it nipped in between the fullness of her hips and ass and the generous way her chest spilled toward me like it wanted to be close to me just as much as I wanted to be close to her. I kept my touches chaste, for some measures of chaste. I didn’t coax apart the tidy fabric of her clothes, didn’t fight buttons or zippers to get access to the golden glow of her skin, the warmth that I knew awaited me if I only chased after it.
I didn’t insinuate my knee between her legs to provide pressure, friction against her sex. I didn’t ride her thigh chasing my own pleasure. I contented myself with sweeping, grasping strokes in safe spaces and devoured every bit of her mouth she would give to me.
I pressed her back against the wall, shivering at the way her breasts pressed against mine, the tease of the lacy cup of a bra, the barest hint of where her nipples began to pull and harden and pebble beneath the rush of sensation as we collided together.
