Chapter 662 | Inventory Management

Chapter 662: 662 | Inventory Management

She laughed again, lighter this time, and punched my shoulder hard enough that I felt it through my jacket. Then she was moving, flowing across the rooftop toward Kask’s building like water running downhill, and I was following at a distance, watching for patrol cars and late-night dog walkers and anyone else who might notice a girl in a squeaky wetsuit breaking into a pawn shop at midnight on a Wednesday.

The roof access door opened in twenty-three seconds. I counted. Lamia’s rake was better than I’d expected, and her hands were steady even though I could see her breathing faster than normal. She slipped inside without a sound, and the door swung shut behind her, and I was alone on the rooftop with nothing but the distant hum of the city and the second heartbeat pressing against my sternum.

Three minutes passed. Then four. At five minutes, I started to worry. At six minutes, I was calculating extraction routes and trying to remember if Spectral Reach could punch through a brick wall if I really needed it to.

At six minutes and forty-two seconds, the roof access door opened again, and Lamia emerged holding a jade hairpin wrapped in a paper napkin. She closed the door behind her, locked it with a pick I hadn’t seen her produce, and crossed the roof toward me with a grin that showed every one of her fangs.

"Behind the Buddha. Covered in cobwebs. He’ll never find it unless he actually cleans, which, based on the state of that storage room, he hasn’t done since the nineties."

"Any complications?"

"There was a rat. A big one. I may have screamed a little."

"How little?"

"Little enough that nobody called the cops." She tucked the hairpin into a pocket I hadn’t noticed on the inside of her corset belt. "I’ll bring it back Friday morning during business hours. Pay exactly forty-three dollars and sixteen cents. Walk out with a receipt."

"And then?"

"And then I drop it in Socorro Vega’s mailbox with a note that says ’Sorry for the wait.’" She stepped closer to me, close enough that I could smell the strawberry lip gloss and the faint chemical scent of her suit. "And then I owe you one. A real one this time. Not a maybe-favor, not a probably-favor. A Lamia owes you a favor, no take-backs, redeemable at any time for any reason."

"That’s a big promise."

"I’m a big girl."

The interface flickered in the corner of my vision. Temptation Gauge: 14%. The number had been climbing steadily since I’d pointed out the reflection problem. It jumped another two points when she stepped into my personal space, then held steady like it was waiting to see what I’d do about it.

"I should go," I said. "Dralun’s probably back by now, and I told Ophelia I was getting coffee."

"Right. Coffee." Lamia didn’t step back. If anything, she leaned in closer, close enough that I could see the way the streetlight caught in her pupils and turned them molten green. Her hand found my chest without hesitation, pressing flat against the fabric of my jacket. Her palm settled directly over the second heartbeat. "Your heart’s doing the thing again."

"It does that sometimes."

"Only around me?" Her voice dropped lower, losing some of the performance and gaining something sharper, something more deliberate.

"Around a lot of people, actually," I said. "I’m very popular. You should see me at the grocery store. The produce section loses its mind."

She laughed and her hand slid up my chest in one smooth motion until her fingers curled into the fabric of my collar. The streetlight above us caught her scales and turned them iridescent, an oil-slick shimmer of emerald and black that traced the curve of her hip where the suit ended and her body didn’t. Her eyes were very green. They were also very, very close.

"I’m going to kiss you now," she said, and her voice had gone quiet in a way that felt nothing like uncertainty and everything like a decision she’d already committed to. "And you’re going to let me, because I just pulled off a heist without tripping a single alarm, and I deserve a reward."

"You relocated merchandise to a different shelf," I said. "That’s inventory management. That’s not a heist."

Her grin widened. "Call it whatever you want. I’m still kissing you."

"That counts as a heist."

"It really doesn’t."

"Shut up and let me have this."

She pulled me down by my collar and pressed her lips against mine. The kiss was brief and fierce and tasted like strawberries, and her fangs caught my lower lip just hard enough to leave an impression but not hard enough to draw blood. When she pulled back, her cheeks were flushed pink beneath her mask, and her breathing was unsteady.

"There." She released my collar and stepped back, smoothing down her suit with hands that weren’t quite steady. "That’s for the reflection thing. And the Buddha thing. And for making me feel like an idiot in a way that didn’t actually make me feel like an idiot."

"You’re welcome?"

"Don’t make it weird." She turned toward the edge of the roof, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. "Same time next week? There’s a music box at Harrigan’s that belongs to a kid on Fourth Street. Her mom pawned it to pay for groceries."

"I’ll check my schedule."

"You’ll be here." She grinned, bright and sharp and entirely too confident for someone who had screamed at a rat six minutes ago. "Midnight. Don’t be late."

She dropped off the edge of the building, and I heard the soft thump of her landing three stories below, and then she was gone, sliding down the alley like a shadow made of scales and strawberry lip gloss.

I stood on the rooftop for another thirty seconds, processing what had just happened. The interface was doing something complicated in the corner of my vision, calculating temptation gauge increases and flagging potential side quest progressions and generally making itself annoying in ways I’d learned to ignore.

The second heartbeat pressed against my sternum once, warm and satisfied, like a cat that had just knocked something off a shelf and was very pleased with itself.

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered. "I know."