Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(2)

And still my feet moved. I shuffled toward it.

“Darlin’, please.” My father looked down at me. He’d aged ten years in the hour we’d been there. The lines around his face were already deeper, as though grief had tunneled into his body in record time. “You don’t have to do this.”

I pulled away. I knew I could take a seat in the waiting room and my father would do this for me. He’d been the one to identify Daniel’s father’s body all those long years ago in a city far away while Daniel and I sat together, our feet not quite touching the ground. I remembered how blank his face had been and how he’d reached for my hand.

“I have to see him.” My mouth felt numb, like someone had shot me up with Novocain and now I had to try to speak. I needed to see him or it wouldn’t be real.

“Daniel wouldn’t want this.” My father’s Irish accent was so much worse when he was emotional. Sometimes I could barely understand him, but this time I could.

“What Daniel wants doesn’t matter now.” I walked into the room, unable to stand there a second longer.

It’s a little like ripping off a bandage, I think. After many years of considering it, I think we all fall into one of two categories. We either pull it off, slowly, trying to process each moment, terrified of the agony but drawing it out in the process. Or we rip it off because we can no longer stand the idea of the pain and think the sooner we get through it, the better.

But in the end, the pain is all the same. Aching. Never-ending.

“Are you ready?” The coroner—or his lackey, or whoever held the sheet at two in the morning around there—asked. His gloved hands clasped the edge of the sheet. There was no question what was under that rectangle of off-white cotton. A body was there.

I wasn’t ready. I would never be ready. I would be stuck in this place for the rest of my life. I could stand there and be content because until he pulled the sheet back, Daniel could still be alive.

Please wake up.

He didn’t wait for me to be ready. A good thing, really, because we both might have grown old there. He pulled the sheet back revealing a body that looked nothing like my Daniel.

Oh, it was him. I knew that right away. Daniel lay there, unmoving. He wouldn’t smile at me again, his face crinkling and his dimples making me sigh. His blue eyes wouldn’t widen in laughter or roll when I did something stupid. He wouldn’t do anything again.

I nodded. I wasn’t struck by a need to hold him. He wasn’t there. What was left behind was just stupid flesh and bones, and they meant nothing now without his soul to animate him.

And I was nothing without his soul to lift mine up.

I walked out of the morgue, a different human being.



I thought death was the worst thing that could happen to me and Daniel. I was very young then.





Chapter One





Dallas, TX

Five years later



“I have to say I’m surprised,” the gentleman across the table from me said. “I honestly expected someone of your reputation to be, well, a bit older.”

I looked up from the menu I was pretending to study. There was no actual need to read it. I had it memorized, but it gave me time to make assessments concerning my potential client.

Lucas Halfer made a memorable first impression. By all appearances, he was a man in his prime, perhaps forty or forty-five. The world I dealt in was rife with secrets and things that were not what they seemed to be, so I took nothing for granted. If he’d come to see me, he likely had something to hide.

Lucas Halfer glowed with the suave inner confidence of a man who knew he looked good in his tailored Armani suit and what had to be thousand dollar Italian shoes. He was well groomed, but there was nothing metro about him. If I had to guess, I would say he had not always been so wealthy. He’d probably fought his way to any power he accumulated. There was a certain roughness to his features that no amount of polishing could eliminate. It was his obvious wealth that put my guard up the minute he’d walked into Canelli’s for our meeting.

Why would a man who always bought the best be looking to hire me?

“Looks can be deceiving, Mr. Halfer,” I replied with what I like to think of as my sassy smile. Perhaps I could make up for my lack of designer labels with youthful flirting.

He studied me for a moment, assessing me with a singular purpose. Those dark eyes pinned me. Black as night, they seemed to have a power all their own.

And then the moment was gone. He smiled, a smooth expression that spoke of social ease. “A truer thing has never been said, Ms. Wharton. There is a reason we should never judge a book by its cover. Even when the cover is so very lovely. Now, what’s good here?”

I breathed a little sigh of relief, the odd moment behind us. It was easier to talk about the menu. But suspicion was playing at the back of my mind.

I was twenty-five years old and liked to consider myself quite the up-and-comer in the world of procurement. That’s a fancy way of saying I was a thief. I was a good thief, on her way to being a great thief, but as Mr. Halfer pointed out, I was young. There were more experienced thieves out there with more ferocious reputations. Since striking out on my own, I’d run a solid ten jobs with an excellent rate of return and a very small mortality rate.

Still, the jobs had been smallish up until now, and there was that incident in San Francisco. I didn’t blame myself for that screw up. Normal people use alarms and high tech lasers to protect their valuables. Civilized people don’t set bear traps. It was a rookie mistake I didn’t plan on making again, God rest Morty O’Brien’s poor soul.