“My lawyers are currently in contract negotiations with those representing the final three. Until that is all dealt with, I refuse to give any party unwarranted hope.”
“It’s all so clinical, Mathi. You deserve better than a ‘good’ deal. You deserve someone who cares.”
“I have you.”
I rolled my eyes. “That is not what I’m talking about.”
“When it comes to matters of the heart, I am a desert.” His voice was dry, but amusement danced in his blue eyes. “One emotionally close contact is all I have room for.”
I snorted and chucked my purse at him. He caught it with a laugh.
As he did, the harp began to sing.
Chapter
Ten
Iswore and thrust upright, the movement so abrupt tea lapped the cup’s edge and splashed over my jeans. I swore again, but placed the cup down on the coffee table and said, “Our thief is at it again.”
“Well, there goes my date,” he said, obviously unperturbed.
“Andmy much-needed soak in a bubbly bath. And no, we cannot combine the two later on.”
I took my purse from him and tugged out the harp. As I touched it, the discordant tune sharpened, and the room briefly faded. What I saw instead was music, each note a visible entity that leapt from the strings and danced through the air, forming a conga line that slipped through the building’s front windows and continued on unseen.
If we followed it, it would lead us to our thief.
“We need to go.Now.”
I tossed my purse down but kept hold of the harp. I didn’t even pick up my coat, keys, or phone. There simply wasn’t time. He was close—realclose, if the strength of the harp’s off-tune song was anything to go by—but if we wasted so much as a minute, we would lose him.
Why I was certain of that, I couldn’t say.
“Do we need the car?” Mathi asked as he chased me down the stairs.
“No. He’s near.”
I hit the ground floor, ran for the front door, and flung it open. Evening had settled in, the streetlights washing bright puddles of light across rain-darkened pavement. Overhead, thunder rumbled, a deeply ominous note through which an old goddess spoke, telling me to hurry the fuck up....
Imagination? Probably, though when it came to Beira, one could never be truly sure.
The stream of notes went right down Eastgate Street toward the Cross.
I ran after them, dodging pedestrians as the wind picked up and urged me on. The Cross’s red sandstone gleamed in the warm light coming from the nearby shops, briefly bloodying the notes as they danced past it. They continued on into Watergate Steet, but a third of the way down, went right and disappeared through the windows of a blue-and-white-painted building that held no signage other than a small logo on the door that said Dusty Diamonds.
I slid to a halt, pressed a hand against the window to shield my eyes from the lights behind me, and peered in. As I did, a shadow darted up the stairs at the back of the room; the notes stilled and then faded. He’d stopped using the pectoral, meaning we were in danger of losing him again.
“We need to get inside, Mathi.”
“Already on it.”
He dragged his lockpick out of his wallet and did his thing. A few seconds later, he opened the door and stepped inside. As I followed him in, something shattered on the floor above us.
I doubted it was a window—the glass sounded too fragile.
“You head upstairs,” Mathi said softly. “I’ll head around to the back of the building in the event he decides to clamber out on the roof or use the fire escape.”
I nodded and, as he headed out, ran through the crowded room, trying my best to avoid the shiny bits and pieces that covered all the shelves and nearly all of the floor—the dusty diamonds the shop was named after, no doubt. None of it looked particularly expensive; in fact, while I was no expert, most of it seemed more aimed at tourists than any real collector. But maybe the expensive stuff was kept upstairs; many collectors did that to save themselves the worry of “window shoppers” breaking something valuable.
