3. Riley
RILEY
The invitation called it "a private evening of curated acquisitions," which is just an expensive way of saying that everyone in the room will lie to your face while complimenting your earrings.
I hand my cream cardstock to the man at the door and disappear into Vivian Cole.
Art consultant. Mid-tier money. The kind of woman who belongs in a borrowed gown and doesn't blink at a six-figure opening bid.
He scans the card, scans me, and waves me through into a baroque palace dripping with gold leaf and the kind of quiet that costs more than most people earn in a year.
The preview was a sleepy thing. A few attendants, a rope, cameras I could've counted on one hand while half-asleep. I'd walked it twice, memorized it, and decided it was soft.
Tonight this is a palace. Two men flank every archway now instead of one, and they're wrong for this place—broad in the shoulder, matching suits cut by the same contractor, earpieces tucked behind clean-shaven jaws.
House staff don't move like that. House staff drift.
These ones plant. I clock a camera dome bolted into the cornice above the stairs, fresh enough that the plaster around the mount hasn't been touched up.
There's a wand scanner working quietly at the cloakroom, disguised as a coat check.
Somebody got nervous, and upgraded. Great, I think, accepting a flute of champagne I have no intention of drinking. Love it when the easy job files for a promotion.
"You're frowning, Vivian." Bastian's voice crackles into my ear, smooth as ever, the comm bud invisible under my hair. "Beautiful women don't frown at parties. You'll spook the marks."
"Your floor plan's a fairy tale," I murmur into my glass, lips barely moving. "They tripled the muscle. Where'd the extra security come from, Bastian?"
A pause. Just a hair too long. "Last-minute insurance. Big lots draw big interest."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting, love. Stay pretty, take the thing, go home rich." A breath. "Two hours. Don't improvise."
Improvising is the only thing I'm good at, but I let it go.
The guests are the real tell. Old money sits still.
These people watch each other like the chandeliers might come down.
And up on the dais, behind museum glass and a velvet pedestal, sits the reason for all of it—the obsidian relic, black and ugly-beautiful.
A man stands too close to it. Has been since I walked in.
He doesn't browse, doesn't sip, doesn't move to the canvases or the jade.
He stares toward the relic the way other men look at women they intend to own, and when the auctioneer's assistant adjusts the lighting, his head tilts a half-degree to follow the glint.
Casimir Armand. I don't need to study him twice.
I just need to know where he is, and right now he is exactly where I need to be.
Wonderful. The auction opens. Lacquered gavel, a voice like warm oil, paddles lifting in lazy increments.
I bid on three lots I don't want, just enough to be Vivian, just to keep my paddle moving so no one notices when it goes still.
A Bohemian landscape. A Roman coin. Some hideous gold clock that goes for the price of a small house.
Then they bring up the relic, and the room changes temperature.
"This is it," Bastian breathes. "Lot forty-one. When the bidding war starts, eyes go up front. That's your window."
The plan is simple. That's the only kind of plan that survives contact: a swap during the dark.
I'd paid a lighting tech named Petr more than he earns in a month to drop the room to emergency amber for nine seconds during lot forty-one—"electrical fault, so sorry, technical difficulties.
" Nine seconds for me to slip behind the dais through the badge door I'd cloned this morning, lift the relic, drop the resin decoy weighted to match, and be back in my seat looking bored.
Casimir opens at a number that makes someone gasp. A woman in emerald counters. The oil-voiced auctioneer practically purrs. Paddles climb. Every face in the room tilts toward the front, lit and greedy.
The lights die. I'm moving before the gasp finishes, low and fast along the wall, the cloned badge already in my palm.
Red eye to green. The service door gives.
I'm behind the dais in three seconds, gloved hands finding the pedestal, the case, the latch I'd studied in the preview photos until I dreamed about it.
I lift the relic free. And the world tilts.
It's cold. Not cool-stone cold—cold like meltwater, cold like it's been pulled out of somewhere the sun never reaches, and the room is warm, the room is body-heat and champagne.
A vibration runs up through my gloves and into the bones of my wrist, faint and rhythmic, almost a pulse.
The carved markings along its face seem to crawl in the amber dark, lines I swear sit differently than they did a heartbeat ago.
And for one impossible second I feel it turn and notice me.
I freeze. Half a second. Maybe less. It's enough.
"Hey—" A guard at the rear archway, a flashlight beam swinging, catching the empty pedestal where the decoy hasn't dropped yet because I'm standing here like an idiot holding a rock that's looking back at me. Move, Riley. Move. I drop the decoy, badly, off-center, and run.
"You tripped something," Bastian snaps in my ear. "They're calling it in—they know—Riley, go—"
The lights crash back on. The room behind me erupts, that particular high animal sound of the very rich realizing they're being robbed. I'm already through the service door, the relic jammed into the harness under my gown, cold seeping through the silk against my ribs.
Kitchen. Steel counters, startled faces, a server with a tray of canapés who I duck under without breaking stride.
"Pardon, hot plate, coming through, don't mind me.
" Out the delivery door into an alley slick with old rain, cobblestones catching my heels, so I kick the heels off and run barefoot, faster, the night cold and electric in my lungs.
"They've got the front sealed," Bastian says. "Two on motorcycles. You can't outrun—"
"Then I won't run in a straight line." I cut left into a passage so narrow my shoulders brush both walls, the kind of medieval seam Prague hides everywhere if you've walked it long enough to learn.
Behind me, boots. Ahead, a dead-end courtyard—except for the iron downpipe I scouted on day one, bolted to the wall, leading up to a low tile roof.
I go up it like it owes me money. Hands, feet, breath, the relic thudding cold against me with every pull.
A bullet chips stone near my hip—so they're past warnings, lovely—and I'm over the lip and onto the roof, slates loose under my soles, the whole gorgeous floodlit city spread out below in spires and shadow.
"Are you on a roof?" Bastian's voice cracks an octave.
"You said don't improvise," I gasp, leaping a gap to the next building, landing hard, rolling. "I'm being so consistent right now."
Down a fire escape on the far side, into a different street, a different world—tourists, trams, neon, noise.
I pull the pins from my hair, shake it loose, peel the upper layer of the gown away to the plain black underneath I'd stitched in for this reason.
Vivian Cole walks into an alley. Someone else walks out, slower, ordinary, invisible.
The scooter is where I left it, third post from the corner, key in the seat. I'm three blocks gone before the sirens find the palace.
By the time I climb the stairs to the safehouse above a shuttered bookshop, my hands have finally stopped shaking.
I set the relic on the table, and stare.
I did it. I actually did it. Two hours ago I was a woman in debt up to her eyebrows and now there's a payout on the other side of this rock that wipes the slate clean, that buries my father's mess for good.
I should be pouring something. I should be laughing.
Instead I stand over the thing and watch how the lamplight slides off it without ever quite warming it.
It's still cold. After a full sprint pressed against my skin, after all that heat, it should be warm by now.
It isn't. That faint pulse is still there too, patient, when I rest two fingers against it—a rhythm that doesn't belong to me.
"Bastian," I say into the quiet. "What exactly did I just steal?"
The comm is silent. He cut out somewhere on the rooftops. I glare at the stone, and I'd swear on everything I own, it looks back.
Something is wrong. I can't name what yet. But I've survived this long by trusting that cold feeling in my gut over the warm one in my head, and right now my gut is saying the score of my life just became the worst decision I've ever made.