Chapter 2: On His Arm
Dinner, it turned out, was the dangerous part.
You'd expected the heist prep to be the hard thing. It wasn't. Duvall's house had a pressure-plate floor in the vault antechamber and a biometric lock that was six years out of date, and Kieran had pulled the blueprints from a contractor who'd been only too happy to sell them. By the second afternoon you had a plan you liked, a backup you liked less, and a little bag of custom picks you'd filed yourself at a borrowed bench in the basement while Luke sat on a crate and asked you questions about your life with the bright, sincere interest of a golden retriever with a criminal record.
Dinner was different. Dinner was Sylus.
He didn't eat in a dining room. He ate in a long, low room at the top of the building, glass on three sides, with N109 spread out below like a spill of embers. The table was set for two. There was always wine. There was always something you'd never had before, cooked by someone you never saw, and he watched you try it with an attention that made you forget to chew.
He asked about everything. Where you'd learned to pick locks (a neighbor, an old woman who'd run a safe-cracking crew before you were born, and who had taught you on her own front door because she said it was a crime to let good hands go to waste). Why the stall (because you liked fixing things, and nobody shot at you over a broken comm unit). What you wanted (you'd hesitated, and he'd waited, and you'd finally said "a workshop with a window," and he hadn't laughed).
You asked about him, too. He answered maybe one question in three, and the answers he gave were never the ones you'd expected. He liked old films. He didn't sleep much. The crow had been a gift to himself. The first night, when you asked how he'd ended up running N109, he swirled the wine in his glass and said, "Somebody had to, and the alternatives were boring," and then turned the conversation back to you so smoothly you didn't notice until you were back in your room, lying awake, staring at the ceiling.
On the second night, he reached across the table and brushed a crumb from the corner of your mouth with his thumb.
You froze. He didn't move his hand away right away. His thumb rested there, at the edge of your lip, warm through the thin leather of his glove.
"Practice," he said softly. "For the gala."
"Right," you said. Your voice came out strange. "Practice."
He took his hand back and went on eating, and you didn't taste anything else on your plate.
The gala was the kind of party that existed to be photographed. Duvall's mansion in the Upper Ring was white stone and gold leaf, with a fountain in the forecourt and fake gaslights lining the drive. Three hundred guests. A string quartet. A champagne tower. A security detail that was large and obvious and, Kieran had assured you, mostly decorative.
You arrived on Sylus's arm in a dress he'd had made for you, black silk cut close, with a slit up one thigh that hid the holster for your picks and made walking an exercise in confidence. Your hair was up. You had never in your life worn anything that cost more than your stall. When you'd come down the stairs at headquarters, Luke had whistled, Kieran had elbowed him, and Sylus had gone very quiet and looked at you for long enough that you'd started to feel exposed.
"Is it wrong?" you'd asked.
"No," he'd said. Just that. And then he'd offered you his arm, and his hand had been warm at the small of your back the entire drive.
Now, in Duvall's ballroom, that hand settled there again, and every head in the room turned.
You felt it like weather. Whispers ran along the walls. Sylus, here. Sylus, who never came to the Upper Ring, who never came to anything. And with someone.
"They're staring," you murmured.
"They're staring at you," he said into your hair. "Smile. Look like you'd rather be anywhere else with me."
You didn't have to fake that part.
Duvall found you within ten minutes. He was a thick-necked man with a sunburnt face and a tuxedo straining at the shoulders, and he came across the floor with his teeth bared in something meant to be a grin. Behind him, two bodyguards. His eyes went over you once, slid off without recognition, and you understood with a jolt that he'd never seen your face. He'd hired you through a broker. He didn't know who you were.
"Sylus," he said. "This is a surprise."
"I'm full of them." Sylus didn't let go of you. His thumb moved idly on your hip. "Lovely house. You've done well for yourself. Is that marble real?"
"Of course it's real."
"Mm," said Sylus, in a tone that suggested he had doubts, and Duvall's face went a shade redder.
Then the music changed, and Sylus said, "Excuse us. My companion wants to dance," and turned you away before Duvall could answer.
He was a good dancer. Of course he was. He moved the way he did everything else, with a lazy, total control that made it seem effortless, and he held you closer than was proper and not as close as you suddenly wanted. His hand spread at the small of your back. His other hand held yours, gloved fingers laced through your bare ones.
"East corridor," he murmured, turning you. "Second door past the portrait of his mother. Guard changes in four minutes."
"I know."
"I know you know. I just like saying things into your ear."
You laughed despite yourself, and his eyes dropped to your mouth, and the laugh died somewhere around your collarbone.
"Go," he said, low. "I'll keep him busy."
You went.
The vault was exactly where the blueprints said, at the bottom of a narrow stair behind a door disguised as a linen closet. The pressure plates were laid out in the pattern you'd memorized. You crossed them barefoot, heels in one hand, counting under your breath. The biometric lock took you two minutes and a strip of conductive tape. The mechanical lock behind it took six, because whoever had installed it actually knew their trade, and you swore at it in a whisper with real affection the entire time.
Inside, on a velvet stand, under glass, was a single scale.
It was the size of your palm, curved like a petal, deep red-black at its center and shading at the edges into something that caught the light like garnet. It pulsed faintly. You would have sworn to it later: a slow, deep glow, like something breathing.
You stood looking at it for a long moment. Then you lifted the glass, wrapped the scale in a silk handkerchief, slid it into the holster at your thigh, left behind on the velvet a single black crow's feather Luke had given you that afternoon, and walked out.
You didn't speak in the car. Neither did he.
He'd met you at the foot of the ballroom stairs as if you'd only gone to powder your nose, and he'd taken one look at your face and known. Neither of you had said a word walking out past Duvall, who was busy shouting at a waiter. The driver had pulled away from the curb, and the privacy screen had slid up, and now there was only the hum of the engine and the city sliding past in bands of gold and black, and Sylus, beside you on the back seat, not touching you.
That was the worst part. All night his hand had been on you, at your back, your hip, your waist. Now he sat with his elbow on the window and his eyes on the road ahead and left a careful hand's width of leather between you.
Your thigh burned where the scale sat. Your whole body hummed with the leftover rush of the job.
"It's yours," you said finally. "The scale."
"Yes."
"It's not a relic, is it. It came off of you."
He turned his head. In the passing streetlights, his eyes glowed faintly, the way the scale had.
"Yes," he said again.
You thought you'd be more afraid. Instead you reached down, slid your hand through the slit of your dress, unwrapped the silk and held the scale out to him on your open palm.
He looked at it. Then at you. Then he took off his glove, slowly, one finger at a time, and closed his bare hand over yours, scale and all.
The heat that went through you had nothing to do with the scale.
"Do you know," he said, very quietly, "how long I've been waiting for someone to bring that back to me?"
"How long?"
"Too long." His thumb moved over your knuckles. "And then you walked into my vault and saluted my crow."
You didn't decide to kiss him. You'd been not deciding to kiss him for three days, across a dinner table, on a dance floor, and the not-deciding finally ran out. You leaned across the hand's width of leather and he met you halfway, his bare hand coming up to your jaw, and his mouth was hot and unhurried and tasted like the champagne you'd both pretended to drink.
He kissed like he talked: slow, then all at once. When you made a sound against his mouth, he pulled back just far enough to look at you, his breathing rough.
"Tell me," he said. "Yes or no. I'm not guessing with you."
"Yes," you said. "God. Yes."
He hauled you into his lap.
The dress made it easy. The slit fell open over your thigh and his hand followed it, bare palm sliding up your leg, over the empty holster, under silk. You straddled him on the back seat with your knees sinking into leather, your hands buried in that silver hair, and he groaned into your throat when you tugged it. His mouth moved down your neck. His teeth grazed your collarbone, then the edge of the neckline, and he pushed the strap off your shoulder with his nose and kissed the skin he found there like he'd been thinking about it since the staircase.
"I have," he said, when you told him so. "Since the stairs. Since before."
His fingers found the edge of your underwear and stopped. Waited. You rolled your hips down against his hand in answer, and felt him smile against your breast.
"Good," he murmured. "That's my answer."
He touched you slowly, with infuriating patience, watching your face in the passing lights the whole time, learning what made you gasp and what made you grip his shoulders and what made you say his name. He was relentless and he was gentle and he did not hurry, not even when you begged him to, not even when you were shaking and slick against his fingers and your forehead had dropped to his shoulder. "There you go, sweetie," he said into your ear, his voice gone rough and low. "Let me see it." When you came, it was with your teeth in the collar of his coat to stay quiet, and he held you through it, one arm locked around your waist, murmuring something you couldn't make out.
The car slowed. Stopped.
You lifted your head. Through the tinted window you could see the black glass front of the Onychinus building, and Luke standing on the steps with a cheerful wave.
Sylus kissed the side of your neck, once, unhurried, and drew his hand away. Then he tugged your strap back up onto your shoulder with exquisite care.
"Upstairs," he said. "My room, not yours." His red eyes held yours in the dark. "Unless you'd rather use that lock."
You were already reaching for the door.