The Lunar Heist

Silver's POV The lock was telling me it couldn't be picked. I told it to try harder. My picks were thin as whispers and half as loud: two pieces of a snapped crossbow spring I had filed down over three nights in the back of an Ashfen tavern while Dex snored loud enough to rattle the shutters. Dex Calloway, my crew's muscle and my closest friend in the world, was a bear shifter built like a siege wall who somehow managed to be the most quietly decent person I had ever met. He had been with me for three years. He had never once let me down. I worked by feel in the dark beneath Lord Callum Vane's counting house, crouched behind a stack of merchant ledgers that smelled of old money and older lies, and I listened to the lock the way my father had taught me to listen to everything. Not for what it's saying. For what it's trying not to say. The third tumbler gave. The fourth was stubborn. I breathed through it, slow and even, the kind of breath that keeps the wolf quiet and the hands steady, and eased the pick left instead of right, which was counterintuitive and probably the whole point. Lord Callum Vane was the sort of man who hired other men to be clever on his behalf and then took credit for it at dinner parties. The lock opened. Inside my chest, my inner wolf stirred with quiet satisfaction. Her name was Vael, and she had arrived the night I turned eighteen, the way wolves always do, with the first shift, sudden and complete, as if she had always been waiting just on the other side of a door that finally opened. Five years of knowing her, and she still surprises me sometimes. She was the other half of my consciousness, ancient in a way I could not fully explain, patient in a way I never managed to be, and currently very pleased about a lock. Vael: 'There.' "Didn't ask for your opinion," I breathed. Vael: 'You never do. You still get it.' She was already nosing ahead of me in the dark, cataloguing the room in scent the way she always did. Three heartbeats on the floor above. Two moving, one still. The moving ones were tracking away from the staircase. The still one was either asleep or very patient, and in my professional experience, Lord Vane's guards were not patient men. Asleep, then. I slipped through the door and pulled it shut behind me with a click so small I almost didn't hear it myself. Eight steps across the counting room floor. I had counted them two days ago when I'd delivered a very convincing invoice for a shipment of river timber that did not exist. That particular deception had been Nyx's idea. Nyx was my vampire information broker, a woman of impeccable taste and extremely flexible ethics who had been feeding me intelligence on Ashfen's wealthy and criminal classes for two years. I had yet to catch her in an inaccuracy. The portrait of Lord Vane's late wife hung exactly where Nyx had said it would be. She gazed down at me from her gilded frame with the expression of a woman who had once had opinions and been talked out of them one by one over many miserable years. I gave her a sympathetic nod on the way past. The strongbox behind her was a Veldrin make. Double-layered, interior mechanism, the kind that fought dirty. I respected it for approximately ninety seconds before I had it open, and then I found the problem. Two seals, not one. The Vane seal was where Nyx had described it: small, flat, copper-coloured, stamped with the family crest and wrapped in a paper binding. Worth three months of crew expenses, easy. The second seal sat right beside it. I didn't recognise the crest, a tower with a broken crown, and I should have. I made it my business to know the crests of every lord, broker, and criminal organisation operating within four days' ride of Ashfen. My wolf made a low sound in my chest. Not threat-response. Something older than that. Vael: 'That one is significant.' "I see it." Vael: 'The pull behind your sternum. That is not normal resonance.' She was right. I could feel it, a low warmth below my ribs, like standing near a hearthfire in a cold room, warmth you don't notice you're leaning toward until you have already moved. I had always been able to sense enchanted objects in a vague, uncontrolled way. Whatever was inside that second seal was old and powerful, and it was reaching for something in me with a specificity that made the back of my neck prickle. Which meant it almost certainly belonged to someone who would notice it was gone. Vael: 'Take it.' "We're already in enough trouble." Vael: 'More is just more of the same.' I took it. I wrapped both seals in the paper binding, tucked them against my ribs, replaced the strongbox contents as I had found them, and closed it. The portrait went back against the wall. Eight steps back across the floor. I eased the counting room door shut behind me with the same careful click as before. Up through the lower passage. Out through the drainage grate in the lane behind the building. The kind of exit that left no evidence that a person had ever been there. I was three minutes down the road on my way home when the trouble arrived. Not guards. I had handled the guards, which had required a distraction on Cael's end. Cael was our scout, nineteen years old, barely a year past his first shift, fast enough to make your eyes water, and possessed of an entirely genuine ability to cry on demand that I had never understood but had long since stopped questioning. He was the newest member of the crew and by a considerable margin the most likely to cause me grey fur before my time. Whatever story he had told Lord Vane's gate guards about a lost dog had clearly worked, because the eastern approach was empty and quiet. The trouble arrived in the form of a man stepping out of a shadow that hadn't been there a moment ago. He was well-dressed. Ash-coloured coat, silver chain at the collar, real silver rather than plate, I could smell the difference from four feet away. Dark hair oiled back from a forgettable face made memorable only by the eyes, which held the particular shade of nothing that told me someone had spent a long time practising how to give nothing away. Not a guard. Not a common thief. Something else entirely. "Silver Ardent," he said. Vael came fully alert at the sound of my name in a stranger's mouth. I was already calculating exits. Two good ones: the alley mouth ahead, which he was blocking, and the drainpipe to my right, which would take me to the rooftop in about eight seconds. He couldn't climb in that coat. "Don't run," he said, pleasantly. "This will go better if you don't run." "People who say that are usually wrong." "I'm not here to cause you trouble." "Then why are you standing in my alley at midnight knowing my name?" "Because I have a job for you." I laughed, short and quiet. "I have a job. I just finished it." "You had a job," he agreed. "I have a better one." He reached into his coat slowly, deliberately, the way a man moves when he has decided that moving like a threat would be counterproductive and very much wants the people in this specific alley to stay alive for the next ten minutes, and produced a contract. Folded in three. He held it toward me. I didn't take it. "Who sent you?" "My employer prefers to conduct introductions in person." A tilt of the paper. An offering, not a demand. "The name is at the top." Vael: 'He is not lying.' That was the limit of what she would give me. I took the contract. I unfolded it. I read the top line. The name belonged to a vampire lord who had been the shadow over my life for four years. Lord Casimir. He held a debt of mine, had held it since a job gone wrong in my second year as a rogue, when two members of my previous crew had paid for my miscalculation with their lives, and I had paid with everything else. The debt compounded the way Casimir's debts always compounded: not in coin but in obligation. I ran jobs for him. The jobs cleared the interest. The principal never moved. Four years of that. Four years of looking over my shoulder and counting the months until I ran out of them. I read the contract. I read the target. The target made my stomach drop six floors. I refolded it very carefully, the way you handle things that might explode if treated roughly. "The Iron Shard," I said. "From the Ironhold." I looked up at the man in the ash-coloured coat. "From Rustan Veyr's vault." "From Rustan Veyr's vault," he confirmed. "That's suicide." "It's a well-compensated suicide." He gestured at the contract. "In the event of success, all existing debts to my employer are considered settled in full." Settled. The word landed somewhere behind my ribs with an almost physical weight. Settled in full. Four years of running. Four years of jobs that cleared nothing that mattered. Vael went quiet. She was very good, sometimes, at knowing when to let me think. I stood in the alley with the contract in my hand and the second seal pressed warm against my side, a low pull in my sternum that had absolutely nothing to do with the heist target and everything to do with whatever was inside that seal. Two problems I didn't have names for yet, on top of the one I had been carrying for four years. "Tell your employer," I said slowly, "that I need the full intelligence package before I agree to anything. Guard rotations. Vault schematics. Magical defences. All of it." I paused. "And I'll need my crew." He reached back into his coat without a word and produced a second envelope, sealed in plain wax. He held it out. I took it. It was heavier than it looked. "My employer anticipated the request," he said. It didn't sound like a compliment. He stepped back into the shadows and was gone, confirming the magic theory, and I stood alone in the alley holding a contract that was either my salvation or a very elaborate death sentence, and an intelligence package that was already making me uneasy before I had opened it, and the sealed contents of Lord Vane's strongbox pressed warm against my side, and somewhere above me Cael was probably still talking about the nonexistent dog. I looked at the contract again. Rustan Veyr. The Iron Fang. The most feared lycan alive. Vael: 'Well.' "Don't." Vael: 'I was going to say that this is going to be interesting.' "That's one word for it." I started walking. The night was quiet around me, the kind of quiet that Ashfen produced in the small hours when the last tavern had closed. The supernatural quarter was two streets east, its lights burning at hours ordinary Ashfen did not keep. I had rooms closer than that, a boarding house run by a woman named Pella who asked no questions and expected the same courtesy in return.