Page 65 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“Excellent.” The duchess rose, smoothing already perfect silk. She caught Nore’s eye and smiled. “I look forward to your reports.”

Nore studied the information she had on the thief with a ceaseless fervor. She kept the dossier in the false drawer at her office, pulling it out to review late at night, staying at work while Cas was at the pub, or she went in early in the morning to put her ideas together.

In her review, she started to map out a pattern.

The thief tended to work at night, which was unsurprising—Nore did most of her spycraft at night, too. They struck every few weeks, usually going for some item with either historical or monetary value. They rarely went for anything artistic and often avoided other very expensive objects in order to take one single object.

Nore flipped through the missing items: a Minhoch vase, a Ruskayan medallion, an old book of spells from the Cartalans, who had lived in Lindan before the country was unified hundreds of years before. Like Celestine said, all of them had some assumption of magical value.

She sat back, thinking. It was clear the thief was targeting items they thought might be able to amplify magic, but she didn’t think that was a difficult conclusion to come to. No, there was some reason the thief was evading capture. Awareness, perhaps? Location? She had heard rumors that it was possible for someone with a strong command of magic to strip power away from an object, but she could not fathom doing such a thing herself.

Nore flipped through the pages again, reading the incident reports. She tried to focus on the owners she knew, either from wine trading or spying—though the circles of influence were often concentric. Edith was a well-established merchant of a good fortune in a city with a small upper class, so Nore knew most of the victims of the thefts, either socially or as a client.

For the talisman, it could’ve been missing for days—there was an account of it being in its box on the first of the month, and then missing by the fifteenth. One of the relics from Idistra was accounted for, then days later, it was not. A triptych of holy Nish figures was present before a party held at the home and missing after.

Something about the party with the Nish figures caught her attention.

Nore bit her lip, going into the top desk drawer for Edith’s diary. She opened to the weeks in question and searched Edith’s appointments.

There was crossover between Edith’s social schedule and the thefts—not for all of them, but enough for it to be notable. Was it possible the victims were always robbed when they were hosting some event or other?

Nore assumed the investigative magicians who had failed to solve the cases had not made the link themselves because sometimes, the parties were a month or more before the artifacts were discovered missing.

And sometimes, they were private affairs, probably not even worth noting or remembering: small dinners and close soirees, places in which the participants would be trusted. The only reason Nore picked up on the pattern was because she was there sometimes.

Nore ran her fingers over the chain around her neck, weighted with her wedding ring. She thought of it all, staring out at the nighttime harbor from the office she had started to think of as her own.

And if she could figure out when the next victim would be hosting, then maybe…

All she had to do was set a trap.

The realization that she had a solution filled her with giddy joy. Nore packed up her things and hurried home. Cas had called off from his shift and lay on the couch, icing his knee, looking quite sorry for himself. He was recovering from a disagreement with gravity he’d had at a class the day before.

Nore shut the door and slunk across the room, sinuous as a cat. Cas shifted to sit, his eyebrow raising as Nore lowered herself to her knees in front of him and ran her fingers along his waistband, gripping the back of his neck with her other hand, drawing him down for a kiss.

“What’s this?” he asked as she kissed her way down his chest, her hands slipping his shirt over his head then moving back to the waistband of his trousers. He lifted his hips to help her remove them; she nibbled at his hip bone.

“Am I not permitted to greet my husband?” Nore asked, running her hand down the hardening length of him.

He hissed through his teeth as she took him in her mouth. “It’s not often you greet me like this,” he said, his head dropping back even as his fingers knotted in her hair, making a mess of her careful braids.

Nore looked up at him, considering. “What can I say? It was an enlightening afternoon.”

Cas’s eyes were dark as pitch as he dragged her up his body. “One can only hope it’s the first of many.”

A week later, Nore had a plan and was well on her way to setting it in motion.

She went through most of the midrange antique dealers before she found something suitable. True magical artifacts were far too expensive, but she easily found a Nish urn that looked convincing enough; a trip to the docks, to one of her suppliers, and a bit of glue, and she had a solution. From there, it was a matter of making up a story and using her connections. By the end of the month, the Friesen family was the proud owner of an urn that supposedly held the ashes of one of their courtesan magicians, with the purported ability to improve the virility of any man who rubbed it twice before fucking.

Nore was unsurprised to find it sold as quickly as it did.

Two weeks later, the Friesen family threw a party. Nore stayed home that night, pacing in front of the fire until Caspian got home from his shift, irritating Grimsby with her anxiety. Edith was there, but Nore thought it best to stay behind—she was so nervous her stomach was in knots. If she attended, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold back from bursting into the room, trying to catch the thief in the act.

“What’s wrong?” Cas asked, unlacing his boots and hanging his coat. “I thought you were supposed to be out tonight.”

Nore looked over. She wore one of his shirts and her hair loose down her back. “I decided to stay home. Not feeling great,” she said, which was not really a lie. She always felt better when she told him half-truths instead of full lies.

“Do you want a bath?” he asked, halfway in the bedroom. He stripped out of his dark work clothes—he hated to wear his pub clothing inside. Nore barely heard him; she was over by the window, looking out, as if she could see all the way to the Friesens’ parlor.