by Robin Hale
It’d been a life full of embarrassment. A steady hum.
But all of that was nothing, apparently, next to the feeling of my coworker-slash-boss-slash-local-hero catching me in the arms of my lover while investigating a crime. A crime that lover could very well have pulled off, even if it seemed unlikely. More than unlikely. But I knew how it would look to the Captain. Anytime there was a break-in or a theft, the Captain’s thoughts went to the Silhouette first. He was almost more obsessed than I was.
It’d been — a quick glance at the clock confirmed — three and a half days since I’d gone to Core Labs with the Captain and wound up startled out of Lana’s embrace. The only thing more embarrassing than my startle reflex was the need that I knew was driving it. There would always be that part of me that was a teacher’s pet. I hated disappointing authority figures. Hated it.
And it had been more than disappointment that had the Captain taking a swing at the Silhouette when he saw her near me. There was a part of me that would always find that charming, that the Captain cared so much about keeping me safe, even if the things he did to accomplish it weren’t the most effective. Attacking Lana Blake as a means to protect me? That was worse than tilting at windmills.
Unease stirred harder in my gut.
The Captain didn’t have any way of knowing that I was safe with her. It wasn’t like I’d kept him up to date on our relationship. It wasn’t like he even knew there was a relationship. I’d set myself up for exactly the mess I found myself in and there was no one else to blame.
I stared morosely down at the empty basket where the front desk left memo notes. The basket where every cup of perfectly prepared coffee, every surprise bouquet of flowers, every late-night delivery of my favorite yogurt and granola had been announced. It’d been three and a half days since Colossal caught me in Lana’s arms, and three and a half days since I’d last seen the master thief or any of the small, charming things that had been her constant calling card. It’d been lovely, really, the reminders that she was thinking of me.
It made me feel cherished in a way that I never really had before. And it was a nagging, ragged edge now that it had stopped.
Had I hurt her feelings? The thought tormented me as I gnawed on my lip. I must have. I’d just been so embarrassed. It was like having my mother walk in on me and my high school girlfriend all over again. But even that I’d been able to laugh about with Jade. For some reason, this felt different. I didn’t want to have to confess the whole jumble of feelings to Jade, even if I knew she’d help me sort through them with the blunt assertiveness that had always marked her affection for me.
I sighed and drummed my fingertips against the top of my desk. I was avoiding telling Jade because I knew she would tell me that it was up to me to reach out. That Lana had been putting in the work, and if I’d hurt her feelings the other night, then it was up to me to apologize and try to make it up to her.
Brain-Jade was right. I knew she was right. I just needed to stop wallowing in my own embarrassment and fix the mess I’d made.
My phone was out of my bag and in my hand to fire off a text message before I realized that I didn’t have a phone number for Lana. We’d never phoned. Never texted. All of our interactions had been in person, or via thoughtful gifts left where one of us would find it. After a brief moment of hesitation, I turned to the same resources that had helped me find Lana’s apartment and discovered that she had no registered phone number.
Perfect.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. She probably rotated SIM cards and used a series of proxies to prevent tracking. She might even swap physical devices on a regular basis. There was no reason for her to have a valid phone number associated with her civilian name, not really. Most of her business was conducted in a mask.
Okay, Fawn. Think. I could show up at her apartment, hope that she was there, and try to apologize. I frowned. Something about that idea felt wrong to me. It was too much pressure. It’d be harder for Lana to leave if she didn’t want to talk, and I really didn’t like the idea of cornering her.
Besides, she probably wasn’t there. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Lana didn’t strike me as the type to stay in her house all the time, even if she were planning her next job.
So where would she go?
I scowled at the empty search field as I wracked my brain. I had no idea. And no clue who to even ask — wait. That wasn’t true. I did know who to ask.
My fingers flew over the keys, typing ‘ISOBEL VERDERA’ into the search field and bringing up a business registration for a consignment store. Before I could think better of it, I had keyed the number into my phone and was waiting with bated breath for ‘Izzy’ to answer.
“Verdera’s Fine Consignment and Restoration, this is Isobel, how may I help you?” A bright soprano voice came over the line, managing to sound both friendly and professional, like the sort of person you might expect to help you sell your aunt’s thousand-dollar fur coats, or locate a genuine art deco Asscher diamond.
Hopefully, the kind of voice that would help me locate a master thief.
“Isobel?” I began. “This is Molly Fawn — please don’t hang up!”
There was a pause, a building tension, and then a sigh like someone giving in. “What is it, Dr. Fawn?”
A thrill ran through me at the use of my title. Lana had told her about me. Lana thought enough of me to mention me to her friends. I’d spent ages with Jenna not wanting me to accompany her to her friends’ parties, she’d insisted they weren’t my kind of crowd, that she was afraid that I wouldn’t like them. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she’d been embarrassed of me.
“I’m looking for Lana,” I said. “Do you know where I could find her? It’s just…I haven’t heard from her in a few days and I may have stuck my foot in it.” I swallowed and tried to decide how much was too much to tell this stranger, even if she was a close associate of Lana’s. “I’d like to apologize, but I thought I shouldn’t just…drop by her place.”
Another pause. Longer. I could feel the emptiness stretch between us and it was tempting, so tempting to fill the silence with justifications. Explanations. I bit my lip to quell the urge. The last thing I wanted was for Lana to let me get in touch with her again just to find that I’d run off and spilled her personal matters to someone else.
“Yeah,” Isobel sighed after a long moment. “You’re probably right about that.” There was the sound of pages flipping, the sound of a pen scratching across a piece of paper. I cringed. I’d really just phoned a known acquaintance of Lana’s — someone welcome in her personal space, so hopefully I hadn’t completely misjudged — and asked for help in my romantic entanglement with her. It was like I was sixteen again.
“All right, Dr. Fawn,” Isobel said, her voice brighter than it had been a moment prior. “If you feel you owe our mutual friend an apology, I’m not going to stand in your way. However,” that voice was suddenly cold, threatening even as it still passed for polite. “If you take advantage of the information I’m about to give you, if you pass it along to certain other people of your acquaintance, or I find you’ve used this in any way that isn’t simply to apologize to Lana, I’ll quite cheerfully make sure that the rest of your life in Opal City is a series of inconveniences and annoyances without interruption or end. Clear?”
I swallowed, feeling properly chastened and embarrassed by the rebuke, as well as a sympathetic rush of fondness for Ms. Verdera. It was nice to see that Lana had someone like that at her back, although I certainly shouldn’t have been surprised. The Silhouette might work alone but she was anything but lacking in charisma and there was no reason to think that she was lonely if she didn’t want to be.
“Perfectly, Ms. Verdera,” I said, trying to sound somber and serious rather than humiliated.
“Wonderful! In that case, you’ll likely find our friend at The Shady Dame. She spends most of her afternoons there.”
The line clicked and went silent before I could blur
t out my thanks, and I stared at the phone in my hand, feeling quite certain that I hadn’t grasped everything that had just happened.
The Shady Dame? I made a quick search to confirm the address and then swept my bag up from the desk and onto my shoulder. If I hurried, I could get there in about twenty minutes.
I hurried.
THE SHADY DAME wasn’t anything like I expected it to be. If pressed, I would’ve guessed that it was an exclusive club, in the regency sense. I expected to be asked at the door for the member I wished to reach and to find elegantly dressed villains holding court in leather chairs, sipping shockingly expensive scotch. I rather thought that I’d see Sergeant Cinders there. The Piper. All manner of Opal City’s most famous masked criminals, clad in silk and velvet as though out for an evening at the opera.
What I found instead, was a dive bar.
A rather classic dive bar. It was covered in exposed brick where there wasn’t aging wallpaper, billiard tables, televisions mounted on the walls with varying levels of sound coming from them. No one there was in a mask, although I suspected that the blonde near the door was the Siren. The Siren didn’t wear a mask so much as indulge in theatrical eye makeup, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what she might look like in civilian clothes. People stood around bar tables or sat at comfortable, well-worn four-tops, drinking pints in varying shades of brown and gold, munching on popcorn and peanuts, and laughing uproariously.
It was a dive bar. There was even a jukebox in the corner, lit up and playing a mix of classic rock tunes.
And there, across the carefully polished wood floor, was Lana Blake. She was seated in an upholstered booth, notebooks and documents spread across the table in front of her, a pint of something dark at her right hand. The sight of her sent a frisson of anticipation through me, made my stomach flip and the back of my neck go warm despite the cool air flowing through the space. Her hair was plaited over her shoulder in a messy fall of dark silk that drew my eyes to the long, pale column of her neck. Her deft hands and elegant, long fingers — fingers that I could practically feel on my skin even from across the room — swept over the pile of paperwork in front of her, and I watched, enraptured at the way her eyes narrowed and refocused on piece after piece.
It was probably a heist of some kind. She was probably planning to break into another bank vault or plotting to steal something from a museum. Surely there was nothing good about the fact that watching the Silhouette plotting a crime made my blood run a little hotter and my breath go shallow.
“You lost, honey?” The blonde by the door — and really, if that wasn’t the Siren I’d give up coffee for a month — asked in a musical purr.
The sound of that voice cut through the low murmur of the bar like a shattered glass, and suddenly I had far more eyes on me than I was comfortable feeling. Oh god. What on earth was I thinking? It wasn’t exactly someone’s secret lair, but I’d walked into that place expecting to find a laundry list of the Captain’s enemies and I had.
“Sasha.” The Silhouette’s velvety alto was lined with cold steel and the Siren’s — Sasha’s — eyes snapped to the booth where the master thief sat. “She’s with me. Over here, Dr. Fawn.”
The blonde nodded and settled back against the wall, hefting her pale golden pint in an ironic salute as she watched me cross the bar. Slowly, agonizingly slowly from my perspective, the sound in the bar returned to normal. Conversations, laughter, billiard balls striking all filled the unnatural silence that Sasha had summoned with a single crack of her voice.
I slid into the booth across from Lana and tried not to let my face show how unsettled the experience had made me. Instead, I aimed for a friendly smile as though I’d just happened upon the bar and fancied a drink, rather than having sought Lana out as would be plainly obvious to the other woman.
She lifted her glass and quirked a brow over at the bar, where a blonde woman was wiping down the polished surface. The blonde nodded and retrieved another glass, pulling a pint of the same dark beer. It wasn’t until the new glass was on the table in front of me, the bartender thanked and sent away, that Lana broke the silence between us.
“So. You’ve found the Dame.” There was nothing readable in her voice. She sounded…miles away. Should I not have come there? Was it worse that I had breached another of her walls? Hell, maybe I really should’ve just shown up on her doorstep again.
“Yes,” I began awkwardly. I’d been so sure of what I was going to say before I left the lab. How had it all fled so thoroughly? “I wanted…” I swallowed, then tried again. “I wanted to apologize, actually.”
Lana looked up from the documents in front of her, cocking her head to the side in what looked like confusion. “Apologize? For what?”
I had the sudden, sneaking suspicion that Lana’s absence wasn’t because I’d locked up when she’d surprised me at Core Labs. Perhaps she’d simply gotten tired of our game. Maybe she’d become more occupied with something else not because I had hurt her, but because I had…lost her interest. The pleasing flip in my stomach turned to uncomfortable churning immediately.
“For…I…Look. I know that I’ve always been too much of a teacher’s pet.” I barreled on. I wanted to apologize for the behavior, even if I hadn’t quite caused the hurt that I had anticipated, so I was going to do it. “It’s a flaw. One I’m well aware of. I just…didn’t want you to think that it was anything other than that, you know? I didn’t want you to think that I…” Heat was rising in my face so thoroughly that I was sure I could’ve fried an egg on either of my cheeks. “That I didn’t want you to touch me, is all.”
Lana’s gaze returned to her notes, a strange shorthand that I couldn’t recognize. At least, I thought it was shorthand. There were blueprints, too. Unlabeled, as far as I could tell, but still the unmistakable outlines of buildings. The complex series of rooms and hallways didn’t mean anything to me, but were apparently far more interesting than what I’d dragged myself there to say.
And all at once the humiliation was too much to bear. I wasn’t exactly naive, after all. If there was one thing I was perfectly familiar with, it was the way that some women would push a lover away for the pleasure of watching them fight their way back. Jenna had done it. She’d been alternately generous and cold in her affection and seemed to enjoy the way I tried to find order in the chaos, desperate to figure out how I had won her approval one night and lost it the next.
“Don’t worry about it, Fawn,” Lana said absently, glancing back up from the pile of notes with a quick, easy smile. Despite myself, that smile warmed the icy knot that was forming in my gut.
Was I overreacting? Was she just…busy? Surely she’d been devoting too much of her time to entertaining me, lately. I didn’t know exactly what the Silhouette’s to-do list looked like, but surely there were things that she couldn’t do while waylaying me on an afternoon walk or retrieving something that another criminal organization had stolen from my lab. I was being ridiculous.
“Oh. Well, great. I’ll just…I’ll just leave you to it.” I stood from the booth, caught in the awkward position of needing to scoot to the end — and if there were a movement that completely subverted all semblance of dignity, it was scooting — and rising from the table. “Have a good afternoon, Lana.”
Her smile was dazzling, and she reached a hand out, drawing my fingers to her mouth to press a soft kiss against them. “You too, darling.”
With heated cheeks and careful focus on the door to the bar, I left as quickly as I was able.
God, that had been a mistake.
22
LANA
It didn’t take long before I’d decided that this amateur sleuthing nonsense was for the birds.
My extensive information network was one thing — certainly nothing would convince me that it was better not to know what the various criminal crews in Opal City were up to, particularly if I could use their movements to cover my own — but attempting to put something together in concise enough configuration tha
t the local authorities could act on it? Would act on it, even if it came from an anonymous source? Well, that was something else.
It was difficult, it was tiring, and it involved entirely too much of my focus. I’d become obsessed with the puzzle. Why was Popova in Opal City? It hadn’t taken too long to realize that she was not one of the usual local players, despite her welcome by the old names. She’d come in from out of town just in time, it seemed, to host Abel Johansson’s birthday party. The thought was disquieting. Who was organizing the hired squads who were executing their pathetically amateur heists around the city? How were those members being chosen? What determined whether or not something was given up, or worth another shot?
Why in the hell did anyone need that quantity of brachnine?
That last was a thorn in my side, and I knew it was because of the rejection I’d received from Fawn. I shouldn’t have worried, evidently, given the way that she had found her way to the Shady Dame and had sat in front of me and apologized for it, but it still rankled.
I drummed my fingertips across the top of a jewelry box on my kitchen island. It had arrived by courier that morning and had sat in place since then. I hadn’t opened it, hadn’t worked up the nerve to look inside and make a decision about what I would do with it.
I’d ordered it ages ago, thrilled with the cleverness of the idea, but I’d suddenly become…shy about it.
It was absurd. I hadn’t been a blushing virgin in decades and I certainly didn’t become shy about lovers, nor the gifts I wanted to give them. But the box on my island made me nervous because I knew what I wanted, and what I wanted was to see its contents against brown-gold skin and silky raven waves. Perhaps only that.
