Thick as Thieves

This story has foul language, violence and murder.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Alastair

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!

Of all places. Of all jobs. She had to be here?

And worst of all.

Before me.

I clench and unclench my fists as I watch her fumble with the lock, attempting to pick it while the guard stationed downstairs patrols. He typically takes ten minutes before making his way back here.

I’ve been studying the manor, and clearly, so has she. I can’t change the fact that she’s here, so I’ll take the small victories where I can. Let her struggle with the lock and break her picks while I save mine.

I know it’s her—Anneliese. The only thief in Highwick with pointed ears, one brow bleached white, vitiligo creeping down the left side of her face like she was dipped in the snows of Wildmoor and pulled out too soon.

Bad luck, people call her.

I don’t disagree. Only those who wish ill fortune upon their kin would give them a name already tainted by murder.

She curses as another pick breaks.

The tiny ping echoes in the stillness of the night, and it takes everything in me not to charge at her. I glance over the bannister. The guard is checking the locks on the windows, just as he has every night, and thankfully didn’t hear anything.

She hisses through her teeth, and then the lock gives in.

The door creaks open.

For fuck sakes.

My magic hums to life before I even need to call on it. The guard turns, but instead, I make him forget about the sound. My illusion magic compels him to walk away until he is out of sight. It’ll only buy us a couple of minutes; he’ll soon wonder why he isn’t where he should be and come back for a thorough check.

I move quickly, shoving Anneliese hard into the room, earning a grunt as she stumbles, face plants, then impressively flips to her feet. I don’t need to see beneath the mask covering the lower half of her face to know she’s pissed. There’s nothing but malice in her eyes—one brown, the other void of colour.

“Alastair,” she hisses my name like a warning.

“No time to chat, sweetheart,” I reply, closing the door as quietly as I can.

I step past her, treating her as though she’s no threat. The crystal is exactly where Silas said it would be. As unassuming as ever. I don’t care what it is. I care what it pays. And Silas is paying enough to make me not ask questions. I reach for it, but before my fingers can touch it, a shadow swoops in and snatches it away.

My hand clenches where it would have been.

I take a breath, walk to the window, open it, and look down, estimating how far the ground is from the second floor. Anneliese watches me curiously.

Then, while she’s still confused, I grab her and throw her out.

She yelps, but clamps a hand over her mouth, throwing me the bird as she falls.

I don’t care.

I jump, flip through the air, and land on my feet beside her. She’s panting, clutching her ribs, her bottom lip split, and her mask slipping as she regains her composure. A sense of guilt threatens to wash over me, but I push it aside.

I reach for the crystal.

And she fucking bites me.

I clamp my mouth shut, refusing to scream lest we alert the other guards and turn to slap her.

She dodges. Gets to her feet. Kicks mine out from under me.

We move silently—punches, kicks, cries swallowed—until the crystal tumbles, clanking until it comes to a stop.

I will not let her beat me at a job again.

She steps back onto the crystal. It cracks. We both freeze, then dive for it—but her shadows get there first. She slices her hand open on the crystal. Hisses and drops it.

I lunge. Catch it. Slice my hand too.

But I don’t let go.

I smile, turn to gloat, but she’s already charging.

The moment she touches me, though, energy rips from my hand around the crystal, down through my feet, back up, and into her palm. She gasps. Loudly. And it floods back into me from her hand—hotter.

More forceful than before.

We break apart.

“Here!” A guard shouts.

I don’t think. I run. Anneliese runs the other way.

We make it a few feet before something yanks me off my feet and slams me into her. We collapse in a heap.

“Let me go!” She scrambles up—and I watch as she gets yanked straight back, landing knee-first in my groin.

I cry out.

“To… gether…” I manage through the pain and drag her up with me.

There’s panic in her gaze as she stares at me, then at the approaching guards, then at the crystal. Whatever happened, we cannot dissect it here. And I’m in too much agony to explain that.

But she seems to understand and follows me.

Anneliese

Alastair drags me along, gripping my wrist as if he thinks I’m stupid enough to consider running away again. I have no idea what he’s done to me, but I need to escape quickly and with the crystal. I thought my father had destroyed all of them before he died. Then the rumours started—some elite socialite bragging as he paraded a vinisha quartz around at his parties.

I had to steal it.

Destroy it.

Before anyone learned what it could actually do.

Mage lights flicker to life as we pass beneath them, making it easier for the guards to track us. I’d have chosen a more discreet route. But Alastair has other plans, and the ache in my ribs—which tells me they’re broken—doesn’t leave much room to argue.

We round a corner, boots skidding on cobblestone, as a guard steps into the light.

Alastair raises his hand. His fingers bend and contract, a furrow forming on his brow. Like his magic is fighting against him.

Then, shadows burst from his palm.

His eyes widen as he tries to pull them back, but it’s already done. The guard vanishes into black, and a sickening crack tells us the rest.

The familiar sting of using my magic tingles through my entire body. Only I had not done anything. Alastair had.

My eyes widen as I stare at him.

“That’s my magic!” I lunge for his hand.

“What the fuck—”

“Give it back!”

“I—” He stares at his hand. Then the guard. Then me.

Guilt seizes my chest. I had no control over it the first time it manifested either.

“Give me back my magic!”

“I didn’t fucking take your magic!” He seethes, eyes burning like he’s ready to kill me. “It’s almost like—”

He stops. We both stare at the crystal in his raised hand.

It’s no longer split down the middle—no shard sticking out where I sliced my hand open. Mended. Smoother than before. But that’s not the strangest part. Inside the clear crystal, two deep red droplets float, carelessly, where none had been before.

“What did you do?” I snap.

His gaze finds mine, fury thinning his lips—and it’s ridiculous, how beautiful that fury makes him, when there’s a body cooling ten feet away.

“You are the one who is cursed,” he hisses, and my cheeks burn under his glare. I can’t tell him why I look the way I do without exposing myself. I wasn’t born like this, like everyone assumes. I’m not cursed. But I can’t explain what happened either.

Voices sound in the distance, filled with panic over the dead guard. I turn to run, but Alastair’s grip tightens on my arm, forcing me to spin into him. I jab my elbow into his jawline, and he stumbles backwards.

“Don’t run from me!” he snaps as he spits blood to the ground.

“Then keep up!” I retort.

This time I’m dragging him, wincing, toward a bush of flowers lining a spiked fence. Another guard rounds the corner. Alastair raises his hand, but I snatch it down, holding it tightly as I shove us both into the thicket.

We wait.

“Sound the alarm.”

His breath is unsteady beside my ear. I can see the guilt carved into his face, and something shifts in me I don’t want to name. He’s never killed anyone before. It’s written all over him—his pale skin gone paler, almost matching the white of his hair, his hand clammy where it grips mine like I’m the only solid thing left in the world.

Then I remember he threw me out of a window, and I let myself stop caring.

I lean into him, and he flinches.

“We need answers,” I whisper, my mouth closer to his jaw than I intend. “About what’s happening with us.”

My father was never clear on what a vinisha quartz was. Only that it would be the kingdom’s downfall.

Alastair’s face hardens.

“I know a witch who can help,” he seethes—too rough for words that simple.

“A witch?” I snap. “How can we trust a witch?”

He doesn’t respond. Instead, he glares at me, as if looking at me is the only thing preventing him from saying something he shouldn’t.

***

I hunch over again, taking long, deep breaths to try to dull the pain consuming my ribs. We haven’t stopped moving—not for a day and a night. I’m wheezing but holding back so Alastair cannot hear me.

He has been so focused on trying to destroy the stone since we left the manor, and I'm too stubborn to tell him that only dragon’s fire can achieve that.

So, I let him frustrate himself while I hang back, concealing my own pain.

But to my dismay, when I look up, he is approaching me.

“Let me see,” he demands, reaching out a hand. I fumble backwards, only to have an invisible force drag me toward him. The moment I am in his arms, we both stare at one another, breathless and utterly confused by whatever magic is at play.

“She’ll never forgive me if I don’t make sure you’re okay."

“She?”

He stares off into the distance, and I follow his gaze, still locked in his arms. A small cottage with smoke billowing from the chimney sits in the distance.

I scoff. “Do you really care about what a witch thinks?” I ask, assuming the cottage belongs to her. It certainly looks like the kind of place a witch would dwell.

He drags his gaze back to me, and he reaches for the laces of my corset.

I shove away from him.

“Don’t you dare,” I warn.

Shadow creeps from him as he glares, and my body ignites with energy. I can feel the magic stirring within me, but it’s under his control, not mine!

“Stop using my magic!”

He flinches, notices the shadows, and shakes his head, retreating from me.

“I don’t want it!” he insists.

“Then give it back.”

“I don’t know how to!”

Suddenly, a staff swings in from behind him and collides with his head.

“A woman should not be spoken to like dat, Ally,” a calm voice with a thick accent says as a woman bends down to pick up a basket filled with herbs, making her way through the moist forest floor, barefoot.

“Is that your witch?” I ask, pointedly looking at him. “Ally?”

“She calls me that. Not you!” he growls.

I laugh and follow her.

“I like her! Do you think she has a staff I can borrow?”

***

“Drink,” Torvi, the witch, commands as she hands me a foul-smelling liquid, rolling her r’s. “Vinisha quartz in da wrong hands can bring down even da most powerful of kingdoms,” she explains.

I don’t say anything because I already knew that; my father had told me as much.

“That’s not why we’re here, Aunty,” Alastair says gently, so gently it makes me look at him differently. But only for a beat. “It broke while we fought over it. Now it’s mended, but I have her magic inside me.” He side glances at me. “It feels wrong.”

“We also can’t separate either. It pulls us back together.”

“Do you not know what dis crystal was made to do?” Torvi asks. Her obsidian skin wrinkled, and her coiled hair brushed out elegantly, more pepper than salt.

I shake my head.

“The King made dem with a witch.” She scoffs, grinding herbs. “Rumours was dat da stones could take someone’s magic. Guess those wasn’t just rumours.”

My throat goes dry. My father never mentioned that. I think of the feeling I got after Alastair used my magic.

“It’s keeping us bound so he can use my magic. Through me. Without the consequences,” I think aloud.

Torvi nods.

“So da question is.” Her gaze turns menacing, landing on him. “Why was you both dere to steal it?”

Neither of us answers.

Torvi’s eyes narrow. “I thought you was done with dat life.”

“I’m done when you’re safe.”

I look away. Try to shrink myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a family to worry over me, and it doesn’t feel right, imposing on someone else’s.

“My debt is not—”

“Yes, it is!”

They both fall silent, and I can feel their gazes on me, but I don’t dare look up.

Then, the staff swung against my side, narrowly avoiding my ribs. Flinching makes them hurt nonetheless, and I grunt.

“Drink!”

I meet Alastair’s gaze, and something in it—steadier than I expect, almost concerning—makes me do a double-take. I swallow the thick, muddy herbs, forcing the liquid down as it fights to come back up.

“I can’t destroy it,” Alastair admits.

Torvi scoffs. “No, you cannot.”

“Why?”

“Dere is only one thing dat can destroy a witch’s magic.”

It's then that I notice the ugly welts littering her skin.

“Dragon’s fire,” we say together, but her voice comes out sure. Mine is a whisper.

I meet her gaze. I’d never come close to feeling sorry for a witch before—not after the war that split the realms. But dragon’s fire? How had she survived that?

Something close to admiration stirs in me, unwelcome. I shouldn’t care. She’s a witch!

“So what do we do?” Alastair asks.

I shrug. “I know a dragon.”

He scoffs. “Only the royal family can speak to dragons. And since they’re all dead, I doubt that’s true.”

I let it go.

Torvi studies me, long and hard, before she speaks. “You need to break da curse. For dat, you need a very powerful witch.”

“I have no one like that,” I say, forcing down another sip.

Alastair’s jaw clenches. “I do.”

I meet Torvi’s gaze with a hopeful one, but she shakes her head.

When I turn to Alastair, the worry on his face makes my stomach churn.

***

I wait for Alastair at the tree line, watching as he presses coin into the witch’s hands. Low words pass between them as they argue before he turns back to me. Torvi gives me a gentle nod. I return it, then fall into step behind Alastair, my chest doing something I refuse to name.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know.”

“What?”

He stops.

Turns.

And for a moment I forget I’m supposed to be glaring at him.

“I’m a thief, not a monster.” My voice comes out softer than I intend. “You’re an irritation, but I’d never go after someone you love. Especially not when I know what that feels like.”

I turn to keep walking before he can see whatever’s written on my face. “I won’t tell anyone where she is.”

Alastair

Silas is the only person I believe can help us. But as we near his manor, Anneliese grows tense beside me—and I feel it before I see it, her fear bleeding into me through the bond like ice water through a crack.

It’s frustrating, carrying so much of her at once. Frustrating and, worse, addictive—I’ve started reaching for it without meaning to.

I can’t wait to be fucking rid of her.

She’s a distraction.

Stubborn.

Hot-headed.

I glance over my shoulder. At least she’s not in pain anymore—Aunty Torvi’s potion saw to that.

Anneliese gasps. Tries to run. But the crystal’s pull yanks her back to me before I even turn—but she’s fighting it.

Worse than before.

Almost breaking free.

Stubborn.

“No! Traitor!” She seethes, and something in my chest cracks at the word.

“My… my…” Silas’s voice slithers out, and a chill crawls down my spine like the first time I met him.

“I’m sorry, Silas.” I keep my voice steady, even as his eyes fix on her like she’s something he needs. The bond snaps taut, yanking her closer to me. I hold tight—too tight, maybe—feeling her tremble against me as she fights my grip. “We had a bit of a situation.”

“Let me go!” She yells.

“I see that,” Silas replies, a cold, calculating smile spreading across his face.

“The crystal bonded us.”

“So it has.” He doesn’t look away from her once. And something ugly inside me shifts. All I want is to close the distance between him and me and make sure he never looks at her like that again.

“Can you break the curse? You won’t need to pay me, and we’ll leave—”

“She. Is not going anywhere.”

“What?” I snap.

“Princess Anneliese Safira Kimani.” His smile widens. “I’ve been looking for you.”

What.

The.

Fuck…