Page 22 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Checkmate? Clearly this one didn’t actually play chess. She did, however, and played it well. Her father had taught her when she was twelve years old, had told her every great general and military strategist in history had used the tools learned in chess to win a war: always keep your goal in mind; have a plan but stay flexible; think at least three moves ahead; protect your assets; and last but most importantly, don’t trust your emotions, because they lie.
She’d learned that final lesson the hard way. The very hardest way of all.
Her gaze went to the handsome, green-eyed man in the corner. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, his face had darkened, and his mouth had thinned to a grim, bloodless line.
“How do you know I was trying to steal a painting?” she challenged. “Maybe I just got locked inside the museum before it closed—”
“Naked?” Green Eyes interrupted, hard.
“—because I fainted in the ladies’ room and didn’t wake up until the lights were out and everyone was gone, and in my state of panic at being alone in the dark I wandered around the museum trying to find a way out—”
“Naked,” he repeated, even harder.
She lifted a shoulder. “Some people cry when they get scared. I get—”
“Naked,” he finished, and now he sounded like he really wanted to break something.
She smiled at him, a cheerless curve of her lips. “Exactly. It’s a tic. As I was saying, maybe I was trying to find a way out of the big, dark, scary museum—it’s over seventy thousand square meters, you know, which is a lot, especially in the dark—and I wound up in front of the Degas and was distracted for a minute from my extreme fear and disorientation and just stood there admiring it.”
“With your hands on the frame,” interrupted Chubby in a high, disbelieving voice. “Trying to lift it from the wall!”
Eliana looked at him. “I never touched that painting.”
He made a sound like he was choking on something and jerked his hand to indicate everyone else. “We saw you! You had your hands right on it—”
“It was very shadowy in there. Maybe your eyes tricked you. Have you dusted it for prints?”
No one said anything. One of the standing officers shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“No? Well, don’t bother. Because unfortunately you’re not going to find any.”
They wouldn’t because they couldn’t. Intangibility in shadow allowed her to sneak around undetected, leaving no fingerprints…she was as invisible as air.
In the shadows, that is. When pinned in the highly focused beams of flashlights—like the one Chubby and company had wielded—she could be seen plain as day.
She’d heard of this only once before. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was also a Shadow Walker and had also been an accomplished thief. That was where their similarities ended, however; to hear the story told, her great-grandmother stuck to jewels and absolutely loved thieving. It was said she wore so much of her pilfered booty she jangled when she walked.
Green Eyes addressed her directly. “You like to play games, don’t you.”
It was a statement, not a question. Beneath the soft tone of his voice, she felt the challenge and also sensed a dark, growing undercurrent of excitement.
Holding his gaze, she leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. The shirt rode up even higher on her bare thighs, and that searing gaze flickered down to her legs. When his gaze traveled back to her face, it was bright and burning hot.
It did something to her, that look. An old memory flickered in her mind, beautiful dark eyes that looked at her with that same, fevered hunger. She quashed it as quickly as it surfaced.
The memory of those eyes and who they belonged to was even more dangerous than capture by humans.
“I like to do all kinds of things,” she answered, staring unsmiling at him. “What did you have in mind?”
He stiffened. His nostrils flared. Judging by the sour tang that suddenly permeated the air, she’d really pissed him off. In one swift motion, he shoved away from the wall. “Everyone out,” he snapped. He crossed his arms over his chest and stood staring at her, his face now hard as a slab of granite.
“Édoard,” Chubby protested, turning to him with knitted brows, but Green Eyes cut him a glare so vicious he snapped his mouth shut and rose stiffly from the chair.
“Vous l’avez entendu,” Chubby snapped to the other four standing officers, and one by one they filed out the door. Chubby slammed it shut behind him, leaving her alone with the unpredictable, agitated Édoard.
They stared at each other for what felt like an hour. The only sound was the whisper of air through a ceiling vent. A muscle in her bicep began to cramp and twitch, and she longed to stretch her arms overhead and massage it. But of course, the handcuffs prevented it.
Then into the tense silence he abruptly said, “What are you?”
