Chapter 633 | I Hold All My Merchandise Tenderly

Chapter 633: 633 | I Hold All My Merchandise Tenderly

Out front, the alarm cycled into a fresh round of screaming. The red strobe pulsed through the doorway behind me and painted her goggles pink every two seconds, which made her look like a very confused traffic light. She still smelled like strawberries, and under that I caught the dusty bite of old velvet from the jewelry trays scattered across the floor.

I let my eyes drift to the canvas bag on her hip.

Near the top, half tucked under a tangle of gold chain, sat the silver pocket watch she had set down so carefully when I walked in. Everything else she had dumped in by the fistful. That one she had placed like it might break if she breathed on it wrong.

"Whose watch is that?"

Her whole face changed. The smirk stayed in place, but her shoulders crept up under the neoprene, and her fingers drifted to cover the bag.

"Nobody’s. It’s just a watch, they have them everywhere."

"You held it like a baby bird."

"I hold all my merchandise tenderly, I’m a professional."

"You threw a diamond tennis bracelet into that bag like a dirty sock."

She opened her mouth and closed it again. Her fangs found her lower lip, and when she spoke next her S came out with a tiny whistle on it.

"Itth Mithter Teodor’s."

She heard herself lisp and went bright red from her collarbones up to her goggle strap. I was going to remember that sound for the rest of my natural life, which thanks to the Demigod trait would be roughly five centuries of remembering it.

"Okay, that one you never heard." She cleared her throat hard. "It belongs to Mr. Teodor at Ninth and Rourke. His grandson pawned it in September to cover a phone bill, and Kask told the kid it was worth forty bucks. Then he put it in the window for eleven hundred."

"So you’re stealing it back."

"I’m liberating it, there’s a difference." She tossed her bob out of her goggles with a sharp flick of her head. "Teodor’s wife gave it to him in nineteen seventy-one. He used to wind it at the bus stop every morning while he waited for the number nine, and now he just stands there checking his wrist like an idiot."

Her voice went soft on that last word, which defeated the entire purpose of calling somebody an idiot.

I looked at her for a long moment. I took in the safety pins holding her boot together and the electrical tape wrapped around her grappling gun, along with the cheap aviator goggles she clearly thought looked expensive. Then I looked at the bag full of stolen jewelry, the bag she was going to carry home and sort and return in the middle of the night to people who had stopped expecting anybody to show up.

I spent the last week knocking on forty-seven doors with a dragon. She had been doing the same job alone for years, in a homemade wetsuit, with no insurance and no coffee can.

I really hated how much I liked her for that.

"Here’s the deal." I kept my voice level, my ordering-coffee voice, and she leaned forward an inch to catch it. "You leave the bag here on the desk, except for the watch. Kask’s stuff goes into the police report as recovered, and his window is still busted, so his insurance pays for all of it. Dralun runs the ledger tomorrow and finds every family on it. You walk out the side door before he gets here."

"And the watch?"

"You deliver it yourself, since you clearly want to see Teodor’s face."

She stared at me through the goggles. The strobe went red, then dark, then red again across her cheekbones.

"That’s a terrible deal for you. You get nothing out of it."

"I get to not watch Dralun’s face when he finds you in here."

That hit her square in the chest. Her mouth opened, and for a second the whole performance fell off her like a towel off a hook, and she was just a nineteen-year-old girl in a homemade costume who did not want to disappoint the one adult in this district who had never given up on her.

Then she rallied, because of course she did.

"Fine, but I want it noted that I’m only accepting because your weird ghost hand is touching my butt."

I looked down. The construct on her belt had slipped about four inches south during her wriggling and was now cupping a part of her that was very much not a belt. The amber light glowed against tight black neoprene stretched over a curve that her Constrictor Physiology had clearly been building since puberty.

"That was the belt’s fault," I said, and pulled the construct back up to the faux leather so fast that it squeaked.

? Ecchi Logic Event Logged: Unintended Construct Drift. ?

? The host’s constructs respond to unconscious intent. The interface has opinions about what the host’s unconscious intends. ?

I dismissed the notification and released both constructs at the same time.

The amber light folded back into my palms, and the office dropped into the red strobe and the dim lamp on Kask’s desk. Lamia stayed against the wall for a full second longer than she needed to, rubbing her ankle where the second hand had held her boot. Then she pushed off and slid across the floorboards toward me.

She was supposed to slide toward the desk with the bag.

She did not slide toward the desk with the bag.

She stopped six inches from my chest and tipped her head back to look up at me. She had to tip it a long way, because I had nine inches on her even with her platform boots. Her goggles were fogged at the bottom edge from her breathing, and up close I could see a tiny chip in one of her fangs and a smear of plum lipstick at the corner of her mouth that she had missed.

"You know," she purred, and the purr was back, but it wobbled on the second word, "you’re kind of cute when you’re being responsible."

"I’m provisional, I’m legally required to be responsible."

"Mm, that’s boring." She traced one fingertip down the zipper of my Halloran jacket, from my collar to my sternum, and stopped right over the second heartbeat. Her finger had zero friction on the fabric, and it glided down like an ice cube across a hot plate. "We could fix that, you and me. You’ve got the ghost arms, I’ve got the slippery thing, and between us there isn’t a vault on the Strand we couldn’t get into."

"I have a girlfriend who can detonate a city block."

"I wasn’t asking you about her."

"She’s going to ask you about you, and she’ll be very loud."

Lamia grinned wide enough to show both fangs, and the second heartbeat under her fingertip kicked once against my ribs. She felt it. Her eyes dropped to her own finger and then came back up to mine with a look that I filed under extremely dangerous and slightly smug.

"Your heart just jumped, golden boy."

"That’s cardio, I ran six blocks to get here."

"You’re a liar, and a cute one."

She went up on her toes and kissed my cheek.

It was quick, and she aimed it a little crooked, so it landed right beside my mouth instead of square on the cheekbone. Her lips were soft and tasted like strawberry gloss, and I felt the waxy drag of plum lipstick leave its stamp on my skin. Her nose bumped my jaw on the way back down, and she made a tiny embarrassed noise that she tried to turn into a laugh halfway through.

Then she slipped past me before I could react, which should have been impossible with a hundred Agility. Her body poured through the gap between my shoulder and the doorframe like oil through a funnel, and by the time I turned around she was already in the storage room.

The canvas bag was sitting on the desk.

The pocket watch was gone.

I stood there for a moment with lipstick on my face and Leonard Kask’s stolen jewelry on the desk, and I accepted that this was my life now. Then I went after her.

She was not in the alley. The side door still had the pink gum wedged in the latch, and the wet asphalt outside threw back orange streetlight in long broken stripes. Up above me, rubber squeaked against iron.

She was halfway up the fire escape on the building next door, a five-story walk-up with laundry lines strung between the windows. She was not climbing so much as sliding up the rail with her arms out like a surfer, and she glanced down at me over her shoulder and blew me a kiss.

"Catch me if you can, sweetheart."

"You’re going to slip on that rail."

"I never slip, I’m frictionless!"

She slipped on the next landing.