by Robin Hale
Her mouth hovered close to mine and she let her eyelids slide lower, her gaze hooded. The languid movement drew my attention with all the force of a black hole, her eyes coaxing the heat that longed to coil low in my belly. I could feel the air between our lips, the near crackling of lightning, the hint of the scent of ozone.
“Another time, perhaps.”
The door burst open, latch erupting from the wall in a spray of splinters and broken bits of wood. I winced. The door hadn’t been locked.
The thief smirked at me and turned her head to catch Captain Colossal’s eyes where he posed in the now-open doorway.
“Why hello, Captain. It seems I’ve found something of yours.”
The Captain surged forward, hands outstretched as he reached for the thief, but she slipped away from his touch like water. Like shadow. Like mist dissolving and reforming away from where he clawed at the air. The lights went out in the little office, jarring my newly adjusted sight into darkness, and the sound of the Silhouette’s laughter echoed from the open hallway.
She’d gotten away.
My heart gave a rapid, trilling patter, and I swallowed hard to try and get it back under control.
“The switch is on the wall to the left of the door, Captain,” I said once my tongue obeyed me again.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the light and opened them only reluctantly. I didn’t really want to see what his face would look like, right then. He must have realized that the Silhouette was taunting him with that near kiss. Surely he wouldn’t blame me for it?
“Sorry about that, Fawn.” The Captain’s voice broke through my self-recriminations and surprised me. He scrubbed at the back of his neck, grimacing in obvious discomfort. “I had my comms off.”
I nodded. “I figured.” I offered a weak smile, but it seemed to be enough to put the hero at ease. The awkward expression fled from his face, replaced immediately by a sunny smile and a wink.
“Well, I’ll get you out of these and we can finish up here.” Colossal’s broad, square hands slid over my wrists and kept the plastic from biting into my skin as he popped the ties apart. “The police have arrived. They’re taking the intruders into custody. Seems like you called me just in time; they didn’t take anything, and no one was hurt.”
The obvious pride in the Captain’s voice warmed my heart to an embarrassing degree. I wanted to sit up straighter, accept the praise like a well-trained poodle.
I was under no illusions about just how pathetic I’d become. I stifled the urge to groan at myself.
“The Silhouette took something.” I rubbed my hands over my wrists and stood from the desk chair, taking stock of the tablet and my bag where it leaned against the wall. “Do you think they’ll need anything else from me tonight?”
“No, I think they have it under control.” A heavy hand landed on my shoulder with a companionable squeeze. “Go home. You’ve had a rough night.”
I nodded, biting my tongue to keep from blurting out, in embarrassing detail, what had made it so challenging. I ducked around the Captain’s broad chest and headed for the door, grateful for the chance to flee the building and run home where no one would see my burning cheeks and wonder what had gotten so thoroughly under my skin.
At the last minute, stomach churning with indecision, I reached out and caught myself on the shattered door frame. “It’s a little unlike her, isn’t it?” I asked, casting a glance back at the Captain. “Working with people like that, I mean.”
Captain Colossal frowned like the idea hadn’t occurred to him until just then. “You’re right.”
The nodding movement of my head seemed to shake loose a number of thoughts that had been stoppered by the Silhouette’s magnetic presence — by her perfume, her lips, her eyes. Suddenly, all sorts of things piled into my brain. The thoughts were a mishmash of interconnected nodes on a graph. It would take time to sort them, to move the pieces into their proper order, but the expanse of the problem in front of me began to take shape.
“She’s always worked alone,” I said more firmly than I had spoken before.
“Go home, Molly,” the Captain said with a fond smile. “You’re dead on your feet.”
“No, I think I’ll head to the lab.” I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder with renewed vigor, my intellectual second wind finally overtaking the strange, white-walled panic that the Silhouette’s intrusion had inspired. “I’ve got an idea about what happened here tonight and I want to work on it.”
I set out from Robinson’s office, striding purposefully out of the building and toward the Opal City Research Laboratory, where I knew I could tease apart the strange occurrences of that evening. The churning in my stomach settled, the heat in my cheeks abated. I had a puzzle to work on and I was sure that I had all the pieces I needed to solve it.
4
LANA
Itwirled the hard plastic of Molly Fawn’s driver’s license between my fingertips. It’d been peeking out of the billfold in the bag at her feet, and I’d hardly needed any of the finesse I’d acquired in my decades of dedicated practice to slip it into my palm without her noticing.
I snorted.
There probably could’ve been a line of naked can-can dancers in that office and she wouldn’t have seen a single one of them. Her eyes, brown like I’d suspected, had been comically wide since the moment I’d dropped onto that depressingly industrial carpet. Like a deer in headlights.
A charming deer, to be fair.
I slipped the card into a pocket and retrieved the burner cell phone I was using that week. My thumbs flew over the keys as I tapped out a message.
‘Need information about Molly Fawn’
I included her birth date — a birth year later than I had expected, and when had I gotten old enough that the women I noticed were born in some appalling decade like that? — and the address she’d registered for her license and sent the directive to my contact.
It was an old habit and possibly a bad one, but I hadn’t stayed out of law enforcement’s hands so long by not being careful. I’d hear from my network what they knew — I already suspected that it would be next to nothing, Molly Fawn didn’t seem to be the type to carry around a past full of shady secrets — and then she’d be neatly filed away. A non-threat. Nothing to waste my time worrying over.
The motorcycle humming between my thighs rumbled, reminding me that I was sitting in an alleyway I had intended to vacate, not linger in while I pored over the mysteries of an accidental hostage’s identity. My helmet slipped snugly into place and I coaxed the engine to roaring life, bursting from the narrow lane like a bat out of hell.
THE PROBLEM with a well-informed information network, cultivated over decades and built of everyone from the largest names in Opal City’s criminal underworld down to the least little snitching schoolboys, was that the truly obsessive never really believed that they had completed the task.
Partially because it had failed.
Well, it hadn’t failed. They’d found Molly Fawn easily enough. They’d found her parents, her employer, the tidy apartment she rented in a nice-enough neighborhood near downtown. They’d found that she scrupulously maintained her driver’s license despite never having owned a car — practically unheard of in the Midwest. They’d found that she had sterling credit, a friendly relationship with the Opal City Police Department, and had never so much as owed a library fine.
But they had nothing on where she spent her days off. What her nights looked like when they weren’t spent being tied up in someone else’s office by the local master thief. And they’d found, too, that Ms. Fawn had only been there because of her commitment to helping her alma mater, a noble dedication to educating the city’s next wave of best and brightest.
It all had the feeling of being entirely too neat.
It itched underneath my skin. Surely Ms. Fawn didn’t spend her waking hours at that lab only to transport miraculously into her modest apartment and spend her nights with a faithfully-returned library book befor
e tucking herself into bed. She went places. She did things. She had vices, for god’s sake. She must.
The lack of any of that information in the report convinced me that there was more going on than I had first guessed.
I stared down into my coffee and watched the cream spiral and swirl into the espresso. The cafe was pleasant enough, a sunny spot that would be lit with charmingly industrial lights in the evening. It had exposed brick on one wall — a wall that had clearly never actually been made of brick — and there were reclaimed wood signs all over the inside of the space. It was like a theme park. Like someone’s imagining of what a building constructed at the city’s founding might look like, updated and molded into a coffeehouse.
There were thirteen other patrons at the moment. Seven of them sat at tables by themselves, each with their own laptop working on something they considered important enough to drag into their moment with a cup of coffee. The other six were paired off around the room, chatting and laughing in that low, polite way people had when they didn’t want to interrupt the laptop users.
I sipped slowly at the piping hot coffee in my hands and stared out the front window toward the apartment building on the opposite side of the street. In the next forty-six seconds, Molly Fawn would exit that door and begin her walk to the Opal City Research Laboratory.
It would take her twelve minutes to reach the lab, depending on how the traffic lights timed out.
The sight of that dark hair swept up into its usual bun caught my attention immediately and, with a cautious glance around, I disposed of my compostable coffee cup and left the coffeehouse to follow Fawn across the city.
She was a friendly sort. Waved at her neighbors, picked up a coffee at the newsstand on her way rather than detouring to the fancy coffeehouse where my americano had been made. It was practical. It was charming. I hadn’t drifted near enough to hear the words she exchanged with the woman who ran the newsstand, but the bright smile on Ms. Fawn’s face wasn’t forced. She was not a polite customer, she was a genuine one.
I felt a moment of satisfaction at the kernel of information I had gathered, useless though it might be. My network hadn’t picked it up, and that was enough to confirm my suspicion that my net had too many holes in it. I’d have to see to that.
She’d smiled at countless people along her route, not stopping even once she arrived at the Opal City Research Laboratory. I held back and wandered down a narrow lane toward the back of the building. It was blocked off on all sides by tall structures and offered a secluded vantage point from which to watch Fawn arriving at her office.
As soon as the laboratory door closed behind her, there came a familiar sound. That rush of wind, that snapping of a cape…I turned to look behind me and watched as the bright yellow suit of the city’s resident hero streaked across the sky to land behind the laboratory.
And wasn’t that something?
No self-respecting low-life in Opal City would be surprised to hear that the OCRL backed Captain Colossal, but I was damn sure that no one else knew that it was where he spent his nine to five.
I didn’t break stride as I changed directions. The information I’d gathered, the missing pieces connecting Ms. Fawn’s presence at the university, the earpiece, her confidence in the good Captain, they all tumbled over each other in my mind, locking into place like the tumblers in a high-grade security system.
Far from a bystander caught in the crossfire of the little incident at the university, Ms. Molly Fawn was one of Captain Colossal’s pets.
A smirk spread across my face and I ducked my head to hide it beneath the brim of my hat. It was early for anyone to be paying much attention, but there was no reason to court disaster.
Not when so many interesting possibilities had just come into play.
5
MOLLY
Itook a triumphant sip of my coffee as I stared up at the cork board in my office. It was the first time I’d used the thing since I’d started at the lab. Most of my work was done on the whiteboard on the other side of the rack or the massively overpowered computer that dominated my desk.
But the cork board was really coming together. Crime scene photos from each of the Silhouette’s known heists were laid out in carefully chronological order with an offset for the location in the city where they took place. Each of the armed intruders from the university, the ones that the police had arrested and booked, were tied into the timeline via their own colorful criminal histories.
That part had been much easier.
The Silhouette’s record, prior to the theft of the Broadchurch Diamond, had to be pieced together entirely on conjecture. Before that theft, the Silhouette’s jobs were mostly recognizable through the complete lack of evidence left behind.
I frowned, biting at my lower lip as I considered the web of photos and string tying all of the pieces of this mystery together.
The Silhouette was not in the habit of getting caught. As far as I could tell, none of the goons who had been part of the armed intruders had ever managed to pull off a crime without getting caught. It seemed shockingly sloppy to think that the city’s greatest thief would’ve brought a pile of incompetents in on her plans. And they were obviously attempting to grab something else. Something from one of the open labs.
Was it all a distraction? Had she hired them to commit a crime, badly, at the same time she needed to get into that office?
I turned back toward my desk to set down my coffee and pick up the ball of string I was using to draw connections in the web. It didn’t seem likely that the Silhouette could get away with hiring a squad of sacrificial lambs, at least not very consistently. Surely no one would work with her once it got out that she was setting other criminals up that way?
“It’s starting to look like an episode of Dangerous Brains in here, Molly.”
The sound of that voice startled me out of the trance I’d been in, that deep, cotton-wool covered place I seemed to slip into when I became lost in thought. I jumped and turned on my heel to see Captain Colossal — to see Kevin, when he was standing in my office in a checked button-down and heavy plastic glasses he was Kevin — leaning casually against the doorway to my office.
“Kevin!” I blurted inanely. I resolutely blamed the fierce double beat of my heart on the adrenaline from being startled and painted what I hoped was a casual, friendly smile on my face. “Are you here for the — ?” If he was there for the next version of the serum, I was in trouble. The formula sat, neglected and half-finished, on the whiteboard side of my Silhouette mind map, waiting for me to complete the next iteration of tests and reformulations.
“No, no. Nothing like that.” His smile was easy, fond, and he strolled into my office like he owned it. What must it be like, to be so comfortable in your own skin that you can just be anywhere without worrying about it?
Unbidden, a traitorous part of my mind reminded me of the casual smirks and lazy, elegant poses the Silhouette had effected in that office. How she’d seemed to relax against the floor, the wall like a cat, utterly at home in the foreign space.
“I just wanted to check in with you.” Those blue eyes of his clouded with concern, and his smile grew a trifle less bright. He held out a hand, and for a moment I was sure he was going to touch me. Either clap a fond squeeze over my shoulder, ruffle my hair, or stroke along my cheek like he sometimes — maddeningly — did.
But in his hand there was a coffee cup, and I blinked my surprise.
“I picked this up for you,” Kevin said proudly. “I thought maybe you could use it, after last night.”
A slow, affectionate pleasure kindled in my chest as I smiled up at the hero. He brought me coffee. He brought me coffee. “Thank you,” I said softly, surprised.
“Well, couldn’t just let things go without checking in with my favorite lab nerd, could I?” Kevin laughed, although his eyes still held that veneer of seriousness. “Are you okay? Can’t have been easy, being tied up in there with someone like that.”
The marks
on my wrists had faded before I’d even left the building and there hadn’t been any other physical danger to speak of. To be honest, it was probably the safest I’d ever felt while being taken captive. It was something that had started happening more and more frequently as I took over responsibility for running the Captain’s tactical support. I’d been captured, tied up, taken hostage at least five times in the last year alone.
I frowned down at the gifted coffee. It probably wasn’t a good thing that I had started considering any hostage situation in which I didn’t get hit on the head to be a win.
Kevin’s palm fitted itself against my jaw and tilted my face up to look at his. Oh. Oh, no, he must have gotten the wrong idea from that frown.
“Hey,” he murmured, stepping closer until the incredible warmth that poured off of his body wrapped around me like a blanket in the air. His voice was soft, kind, with an underlying heat that had come into and out of Kevin’s interactions with me so sporadically that I never knew if he intended to be flirting or not. “You were great, Molly.” His fingertips stroked the sensitive skin beneath my ear, tracing shimmering electric currents through my nerve endings and stealing my breath away. “You were very brave.”
My eyes went wide, my breathing shallow, and I held so still that I might’ve been mistaken for a statue, I was so paralyzed with the idea that any response might shatter the moment.
Kevin’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled and leaned down, closing the distance between us at an agonizing pace. My heart beat out a furious tattoo inside my chest, and all systems were set to PANIC. Oh god. He was going to kiss me.
I sucked in a sharp little breath, let my eyes slide closed as my brow furrowed, and…felt Kevin’s lips press softly against my forehead.
Oh.
Right.
I laughed, a nervous tic in the sudden free-fall of my own embarrassment. I opened my eyes again, smiled broadly, and stepped back as Kevin’s hand slipped from my jawline.