Page 25 of Stealing Tink

Just as planned, the key slides into the back door’s lock, and I slip through the opening. It almost feels too easy, and I find my paranoid mind racing, searching for an explanation. This was the Nomad’s plan, after all. Perhaps it’s some trick, just part of the game he’s playing. Luring me into trusting him before he kills me.

I stop mid-hallway and rest my back against the wallpaper, my heart pounding. I’ve broken into a very dangerous man’s home. It’s just adrenaline pulsing through my veins, making me paranoid. That’s all this is. It’s ridiculous to think the Nomad would catch me, let me go again, only to ensnare me once more.

I search the house, scanning for anything that might give me a clue as to where Vulcan hid his muses’ magic.

I come upon the living room first, but it seems an unlikely place to hide something so valuable. The room itself is disheveled, presumably from when Nolan Astor killed not only Vulcan but several of his bodyguards. There’s still blood staining the peony-patterned carpet, though there are no bodies to be found.

From the looks of it, I’m not the first to visit. The only evidence of anything valuable ever gracing this room is the indentations left behind on the velvet cushions in the display cases.

I can only hope that wherever Vulcan hid his muses’ magic, it was somewhere the thieves wouldn’t have found it.

I survey the rest of the rooms, finding nothing that heightens my suspicion. I even search the bookcases for secret passageways, and though I find one in the living room, it leads only to a chamber full of beds and canopies.

The room seems untouched, but as I rummage through it, I find nothing there either, except for a bed with a plaque at the base that has me pausing.

Tink.

The engraving reminds me of the one time my parents took me to a traveling zoo. I shudder, thinking of what would’ve befallen me had Vulcan caught me that night.

Men like Vulcan are the reason I’m forced to work with the Nomad, the reason I can’t survive as a faerie without my voice. Maybe I could’ve made it in this world if it were one or the other—if I were a faerie, my dust coveted, but I had a voice to talk myself out of dangerous situations. Or if I’d lost my voice, but had no faerie wings, no blood to be let.

As it is, both disadvantages work together and against me. I need to rid myself of at least one if I plan on surviving long outside a cage.

I follow the secret passageway back down to the main room, then begin to scan the upstairs. There, Vulcan’s rooms are scraped bare of almost everything. Finally, I reach a hall lined with paintings untouched by robbers.

According to the muses, Vulcan considered himself an artist.

What they didn’t mention was that art is subjective.

As I survey the pieces, the question that’s had my mind itching since I entered this hall finds itself answered already. There’s a reason no one bothered to take these.

Vulcan might have considered himself an artist, but it’s clear he was only one in his own mind. These reek of the type of paintings that some scholar will “discover” two hundred years from now and read into the scribbles as if they were some intentional form of genius.

It might just be my untrained eye, but I doubt it.

If the painting of the waterfall I probably could have done myself when I was five wasn’t convincing enough, the blank canvas in the center of the room would be.

If I could laugh, I’d need to stifle it. Only an aristocrat could hang up a blank canvas and call it art.

I bet his guests even told him what a genius he was. Money will do that—buy compliments.

I’m on my way out when a voice sounds from behind me. “I wasn’t aware thieves could be so pretty.”

I whirl around to find a man twice my size blocking the doorway. He’s clean-shaven, with slicked-back brown hair and cunning eyes. Judging by his dark leathers and hood, I take it I’m not the only thief in this room. If those weren’t enough, the leather gloves would be a dead giveaway.

I wait for him to step toward me so I can maneuver around him and out the door, but he’s smarter than that and stays put, blocking any chance of escape. I glance around, but he quickly says, “No windows in here. The idiot had to maintain his paintings.” He says paintings with the same level of derision I might. His eyes flick over me with curiosity. “Who sent you?”

I pause for a moment. After examining my options, I determine I only have one.

I grab the notepad and quill from my cloak, the ones the Nomad lent me in case of a situation like this. I think for a moment, then begin to write.

“What, you don’t speak?” says the man.

Beauty demands silence, I write, then hold the note up for him to see.

His eyes pick up on it quickly enough. “You’re one of those appraisers, aren’t you? Sent to value Vulcan’s handiwork? Which Guild are you from?”

Before I have to answer, he says, as if he should have realized this, “The Silent Sisters. Of course.”