She readjusted herself against the closet wall and let herself have this. His voice in the quiet. The easy rhythm they’d built over days of talking.
They went back and forth for a while. Easy, aimless, the kind of conversation that didn’t go anywhere because it didn’t need to. He told her about a venue he’d walked that afternoon with bad sight lines and an elevator that made a sound he described as “a robot dying of loneliness.” She told him her coffee maker had broken that morning.
Then the conversation shifted. A subtle tightening in his voice, a pause that lasted one beat too long.
“I’ve been thinking about the other night,” he said. Half a register lower. “The part before the closet. The guards.”
“Isaac—”
“You would have walked right into it. You didn’t know they were hunting, and if I’d been posted ten feet in either direction, I wouldn’t have seen it in time.”
She was quiet.
“You need to stop.” The warmth was gone. What replaced it was something harder, something she’d never heard from him before. He wasn’t asking. “The pickpocketing, the theft, all of it. You need to find another way to live.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
The word sat there. The most dangerous question anyone could ask her, and she had nowhere to put the answer.
“It just isn’t.”
“That’s not a reason. That’s a wall. I’m asking you to let me past it.”
“And I’m telling you I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” he asked.
“Both.”
“Then give me something. Anything. Help me understand why a woman who can read a room better than anyone I’ve ever met has to steal to get by.”
Because I’m not stealing to get by. Because the man whose house I’m sitting in right now ran a fraudulent charity that skimmed donations from families with dying children. Because I’m about to take everything he’s hidden in that safe and make sure it goes back to the people he stole it from.
She closed her eyes and fisted her hand against her leg.
“I have my reasons,” she said. “Good ones.”
“I believe you think they’re good.”
“They are good.”
“Then why can’t you tell me what they are?”
Because telling him meant trusting him with the whole picture, and the whole picture would put Cassandra at risk, andthe families, and every operation she’d ever run. Because he was a man who worked in security and followed rules and believed in systems, and what she did existed outside every system he’d ever served.
“You’re asking me to explain something I’m not able to explain,” she said. “I know that’s frustrating. But there are things about my life that I can’t share with anyone.”
He exhaled. She could hear the frustration and something rawer underneath it. “Are you addicted to it? The thrill?”
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
The silence lasted too long. The honest answer was complicated. There was a thrill. The focus, the precision, the moment when a plan clicked into place and she moved through a room like a ghost. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel it. But the thrill was a side effect of a job that mattered for reasons she would never be able to share across this phone line.
“It’s not about the thrill,” she said finally.
“But there is one.”
