Velvet Vices

The lock gave way with a sound like a held breath released. Odette slipped her picks back into the hidden pocket inside her sleeve and pushed the window inward, slow, watching the hinges for rust. They didn't betray her. She'd oiled them herself three days ago, during daylight, when the house was empty and she was just another servant girl hauling linens through the merchant's quarter.

She swung her legs through the opening and landed on the balls of her feet. The study smelled of cedar and old paper and something sweeter underneath, incense, maybe, or the residue of expensive candles. Moonlight cut through the shutters in thin blades, striping the floor in silver and black.

The safe was behind the painting of Lord Ashwick's late wife. Odette had known that for a week. She'd also known the painting was hideous, all those pale blues and the woman's expression of mild disappointment, as if she'd foreseen her husband's remarriage before the wedding even happened. Odette lifted it off its hook and set it against the wall, face turned away.

"You'd think a man with this much money could afford better taste," she muttered, and went to work on the safe.

Three tumblers. She had the first two in under a minute. The third resisted, stubborn, and she pressed her ear to the cold metal, eyes closed, feeling for the click through her fingertips. There. The door swung open.

Inside: ledgers, a velvet pouch of something that clinked, and a small iron box with no lock at all. Odette frowned at that. No lock meant either nothing valuable or something so valuable the owner hadn't thought a lock would matter. She opened it.

A ring. Gold, heavy, set with a stone that seemed to drink the moonlight rather than reflect it. Black opal, she thought, though she'd never seen one so large. The band was warm. That was strange. Metal shouldn't be warm unless it had been worn recently, and Lord Ashwick was three days gone to the capital for the harvest festival.

Odette slipped it onto her thumb, just to feel it. The warmth spread up her hand, into her wrist, a pleasant sort of heat, like holding a cup of tea on a winter morning. She flexed her fingers. The ring stayed.

She tried to pull it off. It didn't budge.

"Right," she said, very calmly, because panic was for people who hadn't planned their escape routes. "That's fine. That's a problem for later."

She pocketed the velvet pouch, tucked the ledgers back where she'd found them, and was reaching for the window when she heard the footsteps in the hall.

Not a servant's tread. Too heavy. Too deliberate. The door opened and Lord Ashwick walked in.

He should have been in the capital. He was not in the capital. He was standing in his study in a traveling cloak still damp with rain, holding a candle that threw his shadow huge and crooked against the wall. He was a big man, wide through the shoulders, with the kind of face that had been handsome once and had settled into something harder. He looked at the painting on the floor. Then at the open safe. Then at her.

"Well," he said. "A thief."

"A guest," Odette said. "You really should lock your windows."

He set the candle down on the desk. He didn't shout. That was worse, somehow. Men who shouted could be managed. Men who went quiet had already decided what they were going to do.

"You're the one from the market," he said. "The girl with the linens."

"Wrong girl. Common mistake. We all look alike."

"I remember your eyes."

He crossed the room. Odette moved sideways, toward the window, and found her path blocked by a bookshelf she could have sworn wasn't there a moment ago. She glanced at the ring. The warmth had turned into something else, a faint pulse, like a second heartbeat in her thumb.

"You're wearing it," Ashwick said. His voice had changed. Not angry. Something else. "Do you know what it does?"

"I'm guessing it's not a fashion statement."

"It binds." He was close now, close enough that she could smell the rain on his cloak and the wine on his breath. "To whoever holds the match. It won't come off until I say so."

Odette laughed. It was a real laugh, too, sharp and bright, because this was absurd, this was the kind of thing you heard in tavern stories told by men who'd had too much ale. "And you're the match."

"I am."

She tried the window. Her hand passed through the latch like it was made of smoke. The ring pulsed again, harder, and a wave of heat rolled up her arm and settled low in her belly, and that was not a sensation she had agreed to.

"Let me go," she said. "I'll leave the pouch. I'll leave the ring. I'll leave the city, even. I hear the coast is nice this time of year."

"You stole from me."

"I steal from everyone. It's not personal."

"It's about to be."

He reached out and took her wrist. His grip was firm but not rough, and the moment his skin touched hers the ring flared hot, and Odette's knees went weak. Not fear. She knew fear. This was something else, a pull like a riptide, dragging her toward him, and she hated it, and her body didn't care that she hated it.

"What did you do to me," she said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to.

"The ring does what it does. I only choose who wears it." He turned her wrist over, studying the ring like a jeweler. "You're prettier than the last one."

"The last one."

"She didn't last long." He said it the way you'd mention a broken chair. "She couldn't be trusted."

Odette's mind was already running, two steps ahead, three, mapping exits that no longer existed, calculating whether she could break his grip and whether breaking his grip would even matter. The window was closed to her. The door was behind him. She had a knife in her boot and a ring she couldn't remove and a body that was starting to feel like it belonged to someone else.

She did the only thing she could think of. She smiled.

"Then I suppose we should get to know each other," she said. "Since we're going to be so close."

Ashwick's grip loosened, just slightly, just enough. Surprise. Good. She filed that away.

"You're not afraid," he said.

"I'm terrified," she said. "I'm just better at hiding it than most."

He let go of her wrist. She didn't run. There was no point, and running would have told him something true about her, and she wasn't ready to give him anything true. Instead she stood there in the moonlight, in a stranger's study, wearing a stranger's ring, and she thought about the coin she'd meant to steal, the families in the low quarter who wouldn't eat this week because she'd failed, and the fact that somewhere in this house was a woman who had worn this ring before her and hadn't lasted long.

The candle guttered. Ashwick watched her the way a man watches a fire he's just lit, waiting to see how high it will burn.

Odette watched him back, and she started counting the ways she was going to kill him.