Page 6 of Heart of Thieves

“The explosion was on the eighth floor with you,” Soren’s voice crackles through.

Enzo meets my eyes, then sets the diffuser on the windowsill.

He doesn’t even need to speak. I’m already bolting across the room.

Together, Enzo and I fade into noncorporeality and lurch into the hall.

At the other end of the corridor, a broad man in charcoal holds Jade with her arms pinned behind her back, one of his hands fisted in her frizzy red curls, baring her throat to a second man, who’s pointing a pistol straight at her. She drags on her captor’s arm with her finger-nails, her Tentacle tattoo peeking out of her sleeve, glowing and full of soullight.

She can’t use it—she must have filled it to capacity setting the explosives.

Still invisible, Enzo and I barrel at them, Enzo going for the man behind Jade as I tackle the one with the drawn weapon. I go corporeal in time to yank the pistol out of his hand, slamming him onto his face and pressing the barrel to the back of his head.

Enzo seems to have pulled the second man’s gun out of his belt and shoved it against the back of his head, too, because Jade stumbles forward, gasping.

“It’s her,” Enzo’s captive gasps. “St. James’s daughter.”

“Magnolia?” My hostage cranes his neck to look at me.

“Oh, cute. You work for my father,” I purr as a smile curls my lips. “If you survive this, be sure to tell him I say hello.”

CHAPTER TWO

LOLA

Enzo’s eyes meet mine. “We’ll both shoot on one, two . . .”

“We can’t shoot them,” I say, images of the bullet hole in my nursemaid’s forehead flashing through my mind.

“Yeah, the lady’s right, you can’t shoot us,” my victim pipes up.

“You shut it,” I snap, shoving the pistol harder against his head.

“What?” Enzo says, exasperated. “Why the depths not?”

“Because that is something my father would do.”

Enzo purses his lips, mopping a hand over his face with his free hand. “You know what else is something your father would do? Use every single bit of information he can get out of these two goons to track us down. Who we are, what we’re up to, what we look like. You want to put us all in danger because you’re afraid to pull a trigger?”

I glare. “I’m not afraid to pull a trigger.”

“Then pull it.”

“We are better than him, Enzo,” I retort. “We don’t have to sink to his level.”

“What if I want to, though?”

I hold his gaze, jaw hard. Frustration blisters from him in our heart, a twisting that’s become all too familiar the past four months as he’s tried to give me a looser rein, let me take the lead sometimes, and treated me more like one of his Tentacles and less like the prisoner I was for so long.

He sighs. “What do you propose we do instead?”

“We don’t have to kill them to keep them quiet,” I say.

“It’s safer for all of us if they’re dead,” Jade adds, eyes darting back and forth between Enzo and me. “St. James’s men have been showing up at more and more of our heists. They’re catching on to our patterns. He’s not going to give up looking for you.”

Enzo nods. “Jade’s right.”

I can’t compromise the Tentacles, but after all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through, I also cannot be like my father, like Hildebard, like Ostena . . . willing to trample people to death on my way to my own goals. For so long, I refused to see the rubble in my wake because I wanted to believe in my own goodness. But Nic’s words from the tournament echo in my ears now, as close and as soft as though he’s whispering them against my cheek. Claiming you haven’t hurt anyone just because you haven’t allowed yourself to see that hurt is humankind’s favorite self-deception.