Page 17 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

The Past

Mark had been the worst boyfriend Charlie had ever had.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that her relationship with him was also the only one that had started out honest. He knew exactly what she was—a con artist, just like him—and he told her that he liked her that way.

He admired her scams, kissed her pickpocket fingers, and wrapped his lying tongue around her own.

When Rand had first taken Charlie under his wing, he’d described the life of the swindler in glowing terms. Laughing hyenas, prowling the edges of society, looking for the weak and the slow. With Mark, that’s really how it had been.

She’d met him competing for the same score.

A gloamist named Edith wanted a book that an antiquarian dealer refused to sell for what Edith believed was a reasonable price.

Personally, Charlie thought Edith’s haggling made her a prime suspect, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. Her problem was how to get the book.

She set up an appointment with the antiquarian dealer. Then she covered her tattoos, and put on glasses and a black vintage dress. Cosplaying a sexy librarian. If the bookseller remembered Charlie at all, she’d hoped he would remember her outfit more than her face.

When she got to the bookstore, she spotted a thin man in an ill-fitting suit leaving in a rush.

And while Charlie leafed through an illustrated collection of Japanese folktales—the volume she’d asked about so that she could check out the shop security—she talked the book dealer into telling her what the guy had been looking at: the book she’d come to steal.

Dread twisted her guts.

Charlie found Mark an hour later, at a bar across the street, nursing a beer. He’d traded in the blazer he’d been wearing for a leather jacket.

“You’re not great at this,” she’d said, sitting down next to him.

His mouth slid into a boyish, mischievous grin. He wasn’t bad-looking.He had the face of someone who could disappear into a crowd, except for the startling sky blue of his eyes. “And who might you be?”

She sat down. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

He turned to examine her lingeringly, head to toe. He had a pale, slightly bruised under the eyes look she found compelling—as though he was nursing some secret pain. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Why not? Charlie thought. She knew other thieves, but most of them were of a different generation. “Whiskey, please.”

“Rocks?” he asked as he got up.

“A big one if they’ve got it.”

They didn’t, but that was fine. She took a sip. Wild Turkey, she guessed, trying to decide what that choice meant about him. “So,” she said. “You want to make a bet?”

“That you can get it first?” he asked.

She nodded, swirling around the brown liquor in her glass, making the chips of ice melt faster.

He grinned, clearly liking the idea of a contest. “What do I get when I win?”

“What do you want?” Charlie leaned back in her chair. Flirting with him on a job was exhilarating—probably because it was such a terrible idea. All her favorite ideas were bad ones.

“You,” he said, grinning.

She raised an eyebrow. He was certainly bold, and at least a little drunk, but flattering nonetheless. “And if I win?”

He leaned in and whispered against her ear, as though telling her a secret. “ You’re not going to .”

She shrugged, keeping a little smile on her face, then whispered back. “ What kind of con artist warns their mark? ”

“Everyone has always said I was a cocky fucker, but I guess the fun is in the game.” He took another sip of his beer. “What do you want?”

“To know who hired you,” she said, although she had a sneaking suspicion. “And what they offered to pay.”

“Done,” he said, putting out his hand. “Shake on it?”

“Or,” Charlie said, making no move to touch him, “we could do the job together and split the money.”

“Why would I agree to that when—” he began.

“When you already stole the book?” Charlie finished for him.

She had the satisfaction of seeing the shock on his face. And then the scramble for his bag, his horror at finding it empty. “You—” He cut himself off, flashing her a look full of actual malice. “You’ll regret this.”

Charlie saw the red flag, signaling danger, but she liked danger. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Let’s be partners. I bet she was going to pay you more than me.”

“You were working for Edith?” he demanded, his anger finding a new target.

“It looks like we were partners already,” Charlie said. “We just didn’t know it.”

“I’m Mark,” he told her with a sigh. “Let’s work out a deal. I can be a gentleman when I’ve got to be.”

Charlie didn’t hear the warning in that.

She’d gotten every bit as cocky as Mark, every bit as sure that she couldn’t lose.

She’d been killing it for the last couple of years, socking away cash.

And she had a plan. Once she had the money for a down payment, she’d have a house of her own.

Then she’d hook up college for her sister.

Once they were sorted, she’d invest in a safe with a military-grade door and some real cover-your-ass ID that allowed for traveling to the really tricky jobs overseas.

She was the Charlatan after all. She could steal the stars from the fucking sky and leave a forgery so good no one would ever even know they were gone.

Once they’d worked out their deal, she and Mark went to Edith together.

Embarrassed at being caught hiring two thieves and expecting them to compete, she paid them both.

Charlie and Mark spent some of that money on a hotel room, room service, French fries, and champagne—which they had in bed.

When she’d asked him what he planned on doing after that night, he just laughed.

Mark believed you worked when you didn’t have money, then spent until it ran out.

Only then did you take another job. Mark had no interest in building a reputation.

He had no interest in mundane work that gave you cover.

He was a good con artist, but not an ambitious one.

And he didn’t believe in long-term plans, full stop.

Also, he was in a band.

“That guy, Rand,” Mark would say, when she talked about some aspect of the business. “He was embarrassed to be a thief so he tried to dress it up, make it nice. You’re the same way. What’s the point of being a criminal if you have to live like the suckers?”

For a while, despite their differences, things went great.

Charlie got part-time work at Top Hat and plenty of under-the-table jobs through Balthazar and a few other contacts.

Even though Mark occasionally gave her a hard time, he appreciated that she did the legwork on jobs and he liked the money they made.

He reserved the weekends for playing music.

His band was forever reforming itself with new members and a new name.

Sometimes, there was an overlap with people Charlie knew from bartending or through friends who worked in kitchens.

She watched him onstage, his face shining with joy, and loved him so much that it hurt.

Not everything was great, though. He’d disappear from time to time and be unwilling to tell her where he went. A bender? A job he didn’t want her on? Visiting a lover? He’d get mad when she pressed, accusing her of not trusting him.

And she, thinking of her mother digging through boyfriends’ trash, driving past places they said they would be to see if their car was there, relented and stopped asking.

There were good times, times when they would lie in bed together and he would whisper in her ear: I love you to the moon and back. She tried to focus on the good times.

In the end, though, none of it mattered.

“Hey, come in here,” Mark called to her one afternoon when they were at his brother Brian’s place. Brian was ex-military and had been talking about becoming a cop. Mark thought this was a great idea. Charlie wasn’t so sure.

When she came in, she found them watching a video of a gloamist with shadow wings, explaining how a shadow quickened after a bar fight.

“What do you think?” Mark asked.

“I like the wings,” she said. It still seemed incredible to her that magic had turned out to be real.

“If we were gloamists, we could steal books for ourselves.” Mark said it as though Charlie had never thought of that before.

She remembered the games of pretend she’d played growing up, and where that had gotten her.

Thought about Posey and her obsession with all of the different ways people became gloamists—asphyxiation, hypothermia, extreme pain.

Nothing guaranteed to work and everything incredibly dangerous.

Charlie was forever afraid for her. “We’re not gloamists, though,” she said. “People like us don’t get magic.”

It wasn’t long afterward that the Artists—a gang of alterationists run by Vicereine, before she went respectable—wanted a memoir that had been lifted off a guy in Atlanta by a puppeteer who was supposed to be living in Albany, New York. Charlie and Mark were tasked to steal from another thief.

“No problem,” Charlie told her and went home to scheme.

But as she made and remade her plan, Mark kept talking about how it wasn’t fair that the gloamists were always going to be the ones in charge. He didn’t want to do the job. He wanted to focus on quickening his shadow.

“That’s fine,” she told him. “I’ll do this one alone.”

He was lying on the bed in their apartment, playing a video game on his Switch. “They don’t respect you, you know.”

She put her head on his shoulder. “I thought we weren’t supposed to give a shit about anyone’s opinion, as long as we got our money.”

He made an unhappy grunt.

“I put down a deposit on a house,” Charlie said. If she’d been a different person, she would’ve been trying to avoid the fight that was coming. But being Charlie, she wanted to hasten it along.

“That’s stupid,” he said, putting down his game and looking at her. “You’re a thief. The taxman is going to catch you, if someone you’ve fucked over doesn’t first.”

“No one is going to catch me.” They could both be equally unreasonable.

Mark laughed. “You want to be a faaaancy lady. Your sister’s going to go to college and you’re going to get yourself a picket fence.”

“And you want to lie in bed and cry about how your shadow is as lazy as you are.” Any mention of Charlie’s sister got under her skin.

While Charlie packed up, Mark stomped around, obviously pissed off. But before she left, he apologized.

“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is with me lately,” he told her, reaching to give her a hug. He kissed the top of her head. “I’m going to miss you.”

And Charlie, afflicted by the family curse, a sucker for love, had believed every word.

As soon as she got back, he’d stolen the book from right under her nose.

Mark had gotten the idea that he could trade it for a quickened shadow. Charlie didn’t know his plan, but she wasn’t going to let him play the same trick she’d played on him the day they met. She switched the book back, acting all unknowing.

Bad enough that Mark had demanded a payment that was taboo in gloamist circles. A quickened shadow could only be cut from another gloamist; asking for one was asking them to betray one of their own.

That was probably why, when Vicereine discovered he didn’t have the book, she cut off each of the fingers of his right hand. She told him that he was lucky she hadn’t taken the whole hand, right to the wrist. That was, after all, the traditional punishment for thieves.

No more making music for Mark. Just like that, he lost the one thing he really loved.

Charlie hadn’t known Vicereine would do that.

That’s not what she’d meant to happen. But it didn’t matter.

He didn’t care. He hated her. He hated her so much that he and Brian shot up her car, putting two bullets in her and killing the guy in the passenger seat.

Josh Ford, whose last name Charlie hadn’t even known when he died.

Mark was the worst boyfriend. The worst of the worst.

But as far as she knew, the only person Mark had ever killed was by accident. And the only person he’d ever tried to kill was still alive.

And he wasn’t a monster.

If she’d ignored red flags with Mark, now she was a bull running straight for them.