Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(34)

“He was really sorry, Sarah.” With everything that happened last night, I managed to forget how humiliated Sarah had been. “His name is Dev, and he feels awful about the whole thing. He’s actually a really nice guy. He’s just not that great at magic.”

“I looked like an idiot. I actually drooled, Z,” she complained. “He made my mouth water. Daniel had to stop me from chasing after him. I also wanted to kill you for taking my man. I thought of him as ‘my man’ like I was stuck in a Tammy Wynette song. Do you know how humiliating that is for a feminist?”

“Again with the sorry.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I would have been angry, too. But I wanted to see Dev again, and I didn’t want to worry about Sarah murdering him.

Sarah’s brown eyes narrowed as she thought about her problem. “You know, the most brilliant witches are almost always female. There’s something about the female psyche that lends itself to witchcraft. Can you imagine the hexes they created and what those hexes can do to a penis? Have you ever seen one twist into a pretzel?”

“Ouch!” Neil waggled a finger her way. “You don’t want to do that to him. He’s really cool and super rich. He also just happens to own Ether.”

“The club you were at was Ether? OMFG!” Sarah was squealing now, and I felt old. Though I was only a few years older than the pair across from me, sometimes their ability to switch gears emotionally shocked me.

“Good, so you leave his penis in the proper shape, and I’ll make sure you get into Ether. That is if it’s still standing after the number we did on it last night.” Albert had only told me that Dev was alive and still asleep. It made sense. He ran a nightclub. I was lucky Albert was an early riser.

“I’ve been trying to get into that place since it first opened. Everyone says it’s awesome. If you can get me on the list, I will take that as a favor.” She smiled, and I could see she was already thinking about what she would wear and what color she should dye her hair. “By the way, I did you a favor, silly girl. You totally forgot to lock your door. It was wide open when I got there this morning. I was a little surprised since you’re usually so careful. It’s okay, though. I locked it on my way out. It didn’t look like anything was missing, not that you have much anyone would want. Have you seen that TVs don’t need rabbit ears anymore?”

Sarah kept talking, but I shoved my way out of the booth, my brain hanging on one thought. Someone opened my apartment door. Daniel wouldn’t have left it unlocked. No way. No how. He was careful, ruthlessly so.

I slammed out of the diner and crossed the street at a dead run, desperate to get to my apartment.

A thief can never be too careful. Given our internal knowledge of how many crappy things can come between a person and said person’s prized possessions, one might think a thief would be particularly careful about security. One would normally be right.

On any regular night, I have what I like to call my security ritual. It consists of securing several doors with a variety of locks. There are three deadbolts, two keyless, and another two security chains. The chains aren’t really meant to keep anyone out as even a human could simply kick through them, but the actual chains themselves are made of silver and built to burst on impact, hopefully hitting whoever decided it was a good idea to kick in my door. There are several wards in my apartment meant to keep out various and sundry undesirables. Sarah even set up one on my front door that made humans wary about knocking. It made it hard to get pizza delivered, but on the plus side the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped pestering me.

There was a separate ward on my bedroom, and I knew for a fact that I didn’t take it off or knock it down before I left the night before. I placed the ward on my bedroom door because when I had something important, I kept it under my bed. My father made fun of my hiding place, but it was more complex than just shoving something in between the mattress and floor and hoping no one glanced there looking for dust bunnies. My heavy antique four-poster sat on a thick rug. If someone managed to push aside the bed and roll up the rug, they would have to look for the seams in the wood to find the door that leads to my safe.

That safe was my baby. I spent everything I had on it. It was custom made, with three-inch thick steel walls and nylon wheels to make the noise of the serrated tumbler wheels almost soundless. I eschewed electronic devices in favor of solid structure. I picked this apartment because of its placement on the first floor.

When I moved here, Daniel helped me rip up the flooring and tear up the foundation to install the safe. Sarah and Neil knew the safe existed, but only Danny, my father, and I knew the combo.

There was five hundred thousand dollars in that safe right now. My hands shook as I opened the door to my apartment. There was no way anyone could find the safe, much less open it and take the contents. I said this over and over like a silent prayer.

I stepped into the living room and breathed a small sigh of relief. There wasn’t anything out of order. It was just as I had left it. Surely if someone had broken in they would have left a horrible path of destruction.

“Is everything okay?” Sarah asked, breathing heavily. It was obvious she’d been running to try to keep up. “I’m so sorry. I just thought you forgot to lock it.” She ran her hands across the walls. “The wards are still strong. Even without the locks, they should be enough to keep people out.”