A spy.
They had to be.
His gut had never been wrong before. Shite. Where the hell was Reaper? He should have been in the shadows, keeping an eye out for any unwanted nuisances. How had his brother missed this little pest?
Another sibling who could use a good throttling.
The shadow vanished down an alleyway, and a blur shot beneath him. Bloody hell! Maxen jolted, boots slipping as a hellish cat streaked underfoot. He barely avoided stumbling and planting his face into the dirt. Another foul curse left his lips when he whipped his gaze up again and could no longer tell which alley the lad had darted into. “Damn it!”
He dragged a hand through his hair, frustration forming a poisonous pit in his stomach.
A low chuckle filled the street.
Reaper emerged from shadows, amusement animating his entire face. A dark cloud instantly pulled at Maxen’s brows. “What the devil are you laughing at?”
His brother shrugged. “You lost your prey. A first.”
Ah, yes. Trouble always occurred in threes.
Confound it. The last thing he had time for was a little rodent on the loose. “The thing was slippery,” he said begrudgingly.
“You’re getting old, brother.”
Maxen scoffed. “Do not talk about my age. Where wereyou? You were supposed to have our backs.Youmissed the boy before I did.”
“I did have your back. No harm came to you, did it?”
“You call a rat escaping no harm?” Maxen started forward and chose an alleyway he thought the lad might have darted into, but there were so many he was blindly guessing at this point. He hated guessing.
“Don’t be sour. That specific spot was cut off from my vision.”
Not good enough. “You should have scouted the area. Patrolled it.”
“I did. There was no one when I passed that section. Your mousecouldn’t have been here for long.”
Meaning they shouldn’t have overheard or witnessed too much, but they still overheard and witnessed enough. “Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“So we silence the person.” Reaper said with another careless shrug, following him with silent steps. “Are you sure this is the correct alley?”
“You tell me. I stumbled.”
“My apologies,frère, I was watching you stumble.”
Maxen grunted, fingers itching to wrap around his brother’s neck. As if calling him brother in French would spare him his ire. Fine. It might. But to silence their little crack-crawler, they had to find him first, and there were too bloody many cracks and all of them were dark.
“Is now the time to admit I can’t claim to regret not keeping an eye on the alley since I got to catch you in acat tangle?”
Maxen glared at this brother, who flashed him a grin. The arse lifted a hand, a shoe dangling from his finger. “They did, however, leave this behind.”
His brow shot upward. “A shoe?”
“A woman’s slipper to be exact.”
His gaze fixated on the feminine item. “So it wasn’t a lad after all.”
Reaper tossed the slipper over and Maxen snatched it midair. He turned it over in his palm grimly, the imprint of a heel barely fading.
A woman. A bold one. A foolish one.
