Page 17 of Heart of Thieves

“Why not?” I study each shadow for a hint of the angle of her jaw or the slope of her shoulders.

“You know as well as I that deals with beings of starlight come with dangerous strings.”

I swing my fist at each shadow. A test. Only one of the shadows flinches ever so slightly, but I pretend I don’t notice.

“What could I do to change your mind?” I ask.

“There isn’t—” she begins, and I hurl myself at the apparition that flickered before.

She cries out as she hits the ground, and the smoke melts back into her face. She glares, trying to push my hands off her shoulders, but her grasp is still feeble.

“Please.” My voice quavers. “I just need to know how to seal a moonshard.”

She glares, and a prickle of recognition runs through me. I’ve never met her, yet there’s something about the curve of her jaw that feels . . . familiar. The furrow in her brow, her unblinking gaze.

The hairs on my arms rise.

She opens her mouth as though to speak, and hope claws up my throat, making it hard to breathe.

Then she says “No,” and darkness slams into me. A weight from all sides compressing every bone, every tendon, every cell.

It doesn’t feel the same as when my brother first cursed me to become the bodiless specter I was before I learned how to steal corporeality, but it’s similar enough that adrenaline sets me ablaze. My nerves vibrate. My eyes bulge. My lungs seize.

A scream tears through my teeth. “Nocturne!”

“Let go.” Her voice comes from somewhere far away.

But I can’t release her. Not here in the depths of the kind of terror that splinters bones.

Not when she’s the last shred of hope I have.

CHAPTER SIX

NIC

Forsyth is pretty good at Riptide, but the one thing he lacks is my keen talent for artifice. After years of manipulating people, I don’t need to see their lies or smell their secrets to be able to predict what they’ll do. I simply have to pay attention.

So I let Forsyth gain the advantage for a while, just for fun, before annihilating him in the final round.

When I drop the winning card onto the pile between us, he stares at it, pressing his palms flat against the table. “I—wow. You . . . shit.”

“Now for that secret you owe me.” I share a knowing smile with Laurel that feels like oil on my face. I hope to the Deep that whatever I get from him won’t give us too direct a first target for her purge.

Forsyth clears his throat. “Well, I suppose there was this one night about two years ago—” he begins, but I shake my head, reaching out to Laurel, who drops an empty voratium die into my palm.

“Allow me,” I say, tugging Forsyth’s collar aside to press the metal to his sternum.

Forsyth stares down at the die, gulping.

“Hold still.” I close my eyes, and soullight unspools around me like threads in a tapestry.

Years of doing this, of strumming my hands along secrets like they’re strings on a harp, has given me an instinct for the juiciest, most salacious secrets. But if I want to keep Laurel spinning her wheels, I can’t show her any of those. I shuffle through the more middling memories, grasping one at random and drawing it into the voratium. Then I curl my fingers around the die to let the secret sink through my fingers.

Stardust dances on the inside of my eyelids, coalescing into the form of a pair of people—Forsyth standing alongside a young woman I recognize instantly as Ostena Vesnes, one of the contestants in my tournament this year. Then St. James sprouts in a high-backed leather chair behind his desk, scrutinizing them over steepled fingers.

“Ostena,” he says. “I’d like you to be my right hand.”

“What?” Forsyth splutters. “But, sir—”