Erin woke up the next day in the break of dawn with two text messages on her phone. One from a client, and the other from a man she occasionally saw. The former offered her a job, which was to steal a family heirloom that someone else had stolen. They wanted it back, but it was being kept in a place that was quite difficult to access—even, admittedly, for Erin. The latter was a man named Lance, whose clothes—band shirt, ripped jeans, and shoes—Alaric had “borrowed" before. His relationship with Erin was nothing like that of a boyfriend-girlfriend type. It was more of an arrangement where one of them calls up the other when they are in need of a certain… intimacy. This had gone on for a few months—seven, to be exact—and since Erin was feeling pretty tightly wound herself, she found herself
