She nods and crouches at the base of the mis-stacked bins, head tipped, reading the floor.
I watch her instead of the bins. The line of her back as she leans in. She’s gotta be walking around wearing my scent now, and she doesn’t even know it. I feel stupidly pleased about it.
“Reed,” she says, her voice quiet.
“Yeah, baby?” The name slips out before I can stop it.
She doesn’t blink and just points at the ground, nudging a drift of woodchips aside with the toe of her boot. “Tell me your crew wears these.”
I crouch next to her. There, pressed into a damp patch of soil where the chips had it covered: a footprint. Small. Narrow. A flat rubber sole with a diamond tread.
A sneaker. Size eight, maybe.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not a man’s foot,” Luna says. She’s still studying it, head tilted.
“Agreed,” I say, my throat suddenly dry as I stare at the tread. “Definitely a woman or a teenager. Excellent work, Inspector.”
Luna is still crouched there, one corner of her mouth ticking up. “You’d be surprised how much of a librarian’s job is just obsessive research and noticing the details everyone else glosses over.” She rises, brushing chips off her knees.
I don’t bother hiding the pride. Or the heat rising up my chest. Damn if competence isn’t the sexiest thing she’s pulled on me yet. I lean in until our noses are an inch apart. “I’m keeping you on retainer.”
Her breath catches, her honey and gooseberries spiking.
“What’s the retainer fee?” she says, quiet.
“We’ll negotiate.”
She lets me hang there a second... then she steps back, the look on her face shifting. Sharper.
“I think whoever did this is coming back,” she says. “Probably today.”
“What makes you say that?”
“People who do this once always do it twice. In my line of work, if someone steals a book, you don’t go chasing them down.” A small, dry smile. “You just wait until they come back and try do it again.”
I look at her. “You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“I work at a public library,” she says, deadpan. “You’d be amazed at the crime syndicates that operate in the stacks. We had someone stealing paperbacks of the same Regency romance series for six months. He’d slide them into a giant trench coat and walk right past the desk.”
I stare at her. “A Regency romance thief?”
“He was very dedicated,” she says, tipping her head. “But I caught him.”
“How?” I ask.
“You’ll see,” she smirks, gesturing toward the utility cart. “Let’s use that trusty Gator of yours, get back to the cottage, and grab a few things. I’ll show you exactly how a librarian catches a fae.”
28
Luna
I sit with my legs crossed near the front window of the shed. My fifteen-inch laptop is balanced in my lap, its screen glowing green in the shadows as I type out the final commands.
Next to me, taking up roughly eighty percent of the available oxygen, is Reed. He’s pressed so close I can feel the heat radiating off him.
The shed itself is a cramped, barely big enough to house a tall metal shelving unit loaded with tools, hoses coiled on the wall, and a slumped stack of feed sacks in the corner. It’s definitely no palace, but it’s the only spot on the property that gives us a clear view of the target.
I hitEnteron the laptop. Green text starts scrolling down the screen and the webcam blinks its little light. I slide the computer onto a stack of wooden crates right in front of us, angling the webcam so it peers directly through the window glass, giving us a clean line of sight out to the staging bay.
