Poison Dance (Midnight Thief #0.5)(18)

Behind Flick, Kyra recognized James. He was slimmer but taller, with pale coloring and a wiry, athletic build. He exuded confidence, studying everything around him with languid readiness. His expression was impossible to read.

Both men’s eyes flickered to her hands as she came closer, then to her belt.

“It in’t there,” she said, answering their unspoken question. Perhaps her voice was sharper than it should have been, but she was tired.

There was a brief silence as the two men digested her news. Finally, James spoke. “What do you mean?”

“I flipped the whole room—the dresser, desk, the chest at the foot of the bed. No jewelry box.”

“You searched the entire room?” James raised an eyebrow.

Kyra spat on the ground. “Look, unless he sleeps with the rock in his smallclothes, it wasn’t there.”

“Maybe you went to the wrong place.”

There was a hint of derision in his voice, and it galled Kyra. Trying hard to control a flush of anger, she reached into her belt pouch for the handkerchief she’d taken from the noble’s dresser. She flicked it at James, who snatched it out of the air with surprising quickness.

“This handkerchief’s got the fatpurse’s initials embroidered on it. See if it matches your mark.”

Kyra made no effort to hide her frustration as James inspected the embroidery. Payment for the job depended on handing over the jewel, so she’d taken a long and dangerous night’s work for nothing. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Flick, knowing her temper, was silently warning her not to push anything too far. Kyra gritted her teeth. James studied the handkerchief, after a while not even looking at it, but through it. Finally, he looked up, and his demeanor abruptly changed.

“Very well,” he said, voice now smooth and agreeable. “Mayhap he didn’t bring the stone to the Palace.” James untied a pouch from his belt and tossed it at Kyra, who almost didn’t react quickly enough to catch it. “That’s the agreed-upon price, plus some extra. I believe this will cover your effort.”

Without another word, he turned and walked away.




Acknowledgements


IT truly takes a village to create a book. And since Poison Dance was my first self published work, this was doubly true.

Since I usually write about teenage girls, writing a story from James’s point of view did not come naturally to me. I credit Barry Eisler’s John Rain books, Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie Lacrosse Series, and Dan Simmons’s Endymion books with providing me with good models for badass male characters.

Thanks to my alpha readers Amitha Knight, Rachal Aronson, Emily Terry, and Jennifer Barnes for early encouragement and sniffing out of plot holes, and beta readers Coral Frazer, Anna Redmond, and Jessica Corra for looking over the completed drafts.

My editor Shannon Barefield offered fantastic insight into my story, and copy editor Mary Thompson put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Then proofreaders Letty Kwok, Joe Moran, Christine Hahn, Beata Shih, Bethany Lau, Tracie Chuang, and Cassie Eng were kind enough to give the book one more read through.

Thanks as well to my cover artist Lauren Kudo for a beautiful design.

The learning curve for digital publishing is quite steep, but I was lucky to have writer friends who’ve walked the path before me and offered valuable advice: Barry Eisler, Joanna Penn, CJ Lyons, David Vandagriff, Moses Siregar, and the very talented and generous authors of Marie Force’s self publishing loop.

Poison Dance is a tie-in story to my young adult novel Midnight Thief, which is published through Disney Hyperion. Many thanks to my Disney editor Rotem Moscovich and the rest of the Disney-Hyperion team for being open to experimentation, and to my agent Jim McCarthy for facilitating everything.

And last but not least, thank you to my husband, who doesn’t roll his eyes too often when I ramble on about James and Thalia. And a big thank you to my parents. To my mom, for buying me those first books, and to my dad for always having good business advice.