“Stay here,” he whispered when he pulled back. “I’m going to take care of those guards, and then we’ll crack the vault together.” He slipped away on silent feet and left me peering around the corner with anxious eyes. What was he doing? Just walking up to them like he was supposed to be there? Like he didn’t stand out, shirtless, and an entirely different species from anyone else we’d seen here. The guards responded, but they looked so baffled by his appearance that they weren’t moving very fast. Then Flack was right next to him, and suddenly he wasn’t Flack but a beast on two legs. White fur sprouted, his head reshaping into that of a fox, and his clawed hands whipping out lightning-fast. Two blows and an elbow to the sternum later, and the guards lay in crumpled heaps at his feet. He gestured for me to join him, and I tiptoed very carefully to his side. Were theystill breathing? Did I care if they didn’t? I wasn’t sure. Unlike the pirates who Iknewwere definitely bad guys, these guards could be totally innocent. They looked scary as hell to me, with those skull-like markings, but that was hardly a fair standard to judge them by. When Flack started to tie their hands behind their backs, I drew in a relieved breath. He wouldn’t do that if they were dead.
Flack in his hybrid-form—the one shape I hadn’t seen yet—was just as terrifying as the pair of downed guards. Yet the look in his blue eyes, rimmed with black, still made my heart flutter eagerly in my chest. Trust him. I could trust him, and I could trust the way my heart and body responded to his nearness without fail. That didn’t mean I was prepared for it when he abruptly began yanking down his pants. “What the…” I stuttered.
Fur retreated over his big thighs, and then he was leaning down to peer at the tattoo on his leg, totally not caring about having his cock out in the middle of a strange hallway. “In hindsight,” he muttered, a grin tilting his mouth as he traced the lines of the artwork gracing his skin, “I should have asked Thatcher to put the tattoo on my arm instead. It would have been more practical.”
“A tad,” I agreed. At least there wasn’t a shy bone in Flack’s body; he didn’t care that one of the now-tied-up guards was getting an eyeful. I turned to look back down the hallway, but it appeared nobody had been alerted to our presence yet. That surprised me because there were cameras everywhere. I knew we’d walked a rather convoluted path to get here, likely to avoid them, but there was no avoiding these. Then an alarm began screaming, and red lights flashed across the ceiling.
“You stand here,” Flack said, completely unperturbed. He yanked the knife I’d stolen for him free from a holster by his leg, and then went to work on the vault’s control panel. A massive metal door with no discernible handle or hinges. Why I had to stand off to the left was a mystery, but he’d claimed this was a two-man job, so I waited for instructions, not-so patiently. That alarm was awfully loud, and I kept expecting armed guards to come marching down the hallway. We were trapped in here; there was no way out.
“Aha,” Flack announced cheerfully, his blue eyes twinkling, ears still shifted like a fox’s, and his tail flinging left and right behind his back. He’d pulled his pants back on and was elbow-deep in circuitry. His triumphant sound came on the heels of the footsteps I’d been dreading. I turned to press my back to the wall and watch for whoever was approaching. Flack was still so calm, and he’d said—sworn, even—that he’d not put me in danger for a diamond… I was beginning to believe that my definition of danger and his wereverydifferent.
“Sorry, I usually go in through the back door. This is more my friend Mitnick’s thing,” Flack said as he waved some broken cables around before carelessly dropping them at his feet. “You don’t fit through the ventilation shaft, though, but I’ve almost got it.” So this was just to get me in? What was he planning? Anxiously, I peered at the flashing lights again and caught sight of armed men marching toward us. Oh fuck, this was bad. We were lucky they seemed to think they had us trapped, or it would be like shooting fish in a barrel in here.
The vault door made no sound as it began to swing open, so I didn’t notice it until Flack picked me up and carried me through. The door was at least three feet thick, clearly solid metal, andit fell shut behind us just as the first laser began to fire. Then, silence. I stood on a cold stone floor, tightly held in Flack’s arms, surrounded by a darkness so deep I felt blind. The massive vault door had shut behind us, sealing us in. While that kept us from being shot to bits, I wasn’t sure if we were now just delaying the inevitable.
“Oops,” Flack grinned. I couldn’t see that grin, but I heard it in the deep sound of his voice, felt it in the way his chest vibrated against my head. His heartbeat was steady, not even elevated from the excitement. “I cut that a bit closer than I meant to. I’m sorry, my love.” He stroked my back, outrageously lowered his hand to cup my ass, and squeezed.
An indignant squeak left my throat. “Flack! This is not the time or the place! You got us trapped in a vault, in the dark, with a dozen guys with very deadly laser rifles on the other side of the door!” I jabbed his chest firmly, and he just squeezed my ass again. The warmth of his big hand spread, heating my flesh in a way that made my folds tingle. He inhaled and I groaned, jabbing his chest again in warning. If he said he could smell my arousal, I was going to knock him over the head. What was it with his timing this afternoon? I should have realized that freeing Flack was only going to make himmorecheeky.
“Yes, deadly laser rifles,” he agreed. “Very nicely on the other side of a blast-proof door. Didn’t that work out great?” He seemed to know something I didn’t, so I held my tongue, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He didn’t explain his plan, though, and when he pulled a light from his pocket, I forgot about plans in the first place.
Standing inside a vault piled with riches was… well, it was probably about as transformative an experience as riding on Flack’s massive fox form had been earlier. That had felt like freedom; this felt like… avarice came to mind. To be surrounded so casually with this much gold was mind-blowing, and to think that I could just reach out and tuck some of that in my pocket. Just one of those shiny rubies would probably pay off all my student loans. Not that Ihadstudent loans to worry about, but the point stood. At no point in my life had I ever seen this much wealth gathered in one place.
The vault was about as big as my dormroom used to be. The walls were lined with shelves, each stacked high with bars of precious metals. A chest to my left was overflowing with stones that looked like opals, and various art objects in odd alien shapes were spread out on a table. A cabinet held dozens of paintings, slid neatly into racks, and a tapestry with what was probably real gold thread was rolled up and standing in one corner.
The diamond, though, that was the true eye-catcher. It was lying on a velvet platform beneath a glass dome. As big as Flack’s fist, it was a pretty pink hue. Almost, it appeared to glow with life from deep within. Carved into facets, it lookedexactlylike how I would picture a massive diamond. I guess there was one thing movies did get right. “There she is,” Flack sighed, almost as if he were talking of a lost lover. I would be jealous, if not for the fact that he still held me in his arms and had yet to let go of my ass.
“How are we going to get out of here?” I asked, already looking back at the vault door. The diamond was pretty, but it wasn’t going to help us escape. I still didn’t hear anything coming from the other side of that massive door, but Flack had gotten it open somehow, so surely they could, too. After all, they had the key,didn’t they? Or the code, or whatever it was that was required to open the door the normal way.
“The backdoor, of course,” Flack responded, finally releasing me to wander around the pedestal that held the diamond. Oh, of course, there was a backdoor there, was there? Curious, I lifted my eyes to search for it but saw nothing. Was it hidden behind the shelves, then? And why would someone build a backdoor into their vault? That seemed awfully unsafe.
“Here, try this on, beautiful,” he said, and he pulled something from one of those shelves. It wasn’t gold, and it wasn’t stone, but rather tooled leather inlaid with precious gems. Boots. Very small boots with pointed toes and tassels of gold thread hanging from the sides. I took them from him, and they felt heavy and awkward, but when I slid my feet inside, they were a surprisingly good fit and, also surprisingly, light. “Better,” Flack said thoughtfully. “I’ve been worrying about your bare feet the whole time. You didn’t get any cuts or scrapes in the forest, did you?”
He’d been worried the whole time? Oh, damn it, why did he say such sweet things? I wanted to be mad at him for dragging me into this, what still felt like a rather unnecessary part of his escape plan, but I simply couldn’t. The boots were ridiculous, probably worth a fortune, and all he cared about was making sure I didn’t get hurt. And the diamond, I shouldn’t forget the diamond. He might be looking around the vault for stuff to use, but he was definitely still eyeing that massive rock too.
There weren’t any clothes or food in there, but he did locate a fur coat that was big enough to drown me. I was happy to pull it on per his instructions, then discovered I had a bit of pirate in meafter all when I tucked some pretty gems into its pockets. Why not, right? I had nothing to lose.
That’s when I watched Flack tackle the diamond’s protective casing. He used his claws to cut through the glass cover, bypassing the need to undo the electronic lock, and that was it. It seemed like flimsy protection, but perhaps the diamond’s owner had considered the vault door protection enough. It definitely appeared to be keeping the guards out right now, but it hadn’t stopped Flack from getting in. By his own admission, safecracking wasn’t even his usual skill, so how hard had this one been to crack?
He held out the massive diamond to me on the palm of his open hand, his eyes glowing above the pink glitter of the gem. “Want to hold several million credits in the palm of your hand?” he asked, a teasing smirk curling his lush mouth. He wasdefinitelyhaving fun with this. The man was crazy, but then, so was I, apparently. I took the diamond, forced to cradle its shockingly heavy weight with both hands. It was ice-cold to the touch and rapidly sapped the heat from my fingers. With edges so sharp they felt like they could cut, it was not a fun experience—and yet, awe filled me.
The diamond was transparent, but at the heart of it, it was colored pink. Cut into precise facets, that pink heart seemed to dance and warp. Through the diamond, I could also see my fingers, but they wavered and danced, distorted by the million ways the light refracted on its surface. Even with only Flack’s light glowing from his belt, the diamond reflected it, too. A thousand pink-hued rainbows danced across the ceiling. It was beautiful.
I was immensely relieved when Flack took the heavy weight back from me. That thing had to be nearly two pounds, not an easy weight to simply hold in the palm of your hand. My fingers began tingling as heat returned to them. I shook them out, surprised at how much warmth that single stone had sapped from my flesh. “Oh, it was so cold!” I said, my eyes tracking what he did with the massive, sparkling gem, and somehow losing track of it anyway. Had he tucked it into a pocket somewhere in his pants? Would it even fit? I wasn’t sure, but one moment he’d been holding it, and the next it was just gone, the pretty rainbows dancing all around us winking out.
“A diamond is an elite thermal conductor,” Flack said. Leave it to him to know everything there was to know about a precious gem like that. I wasn’t surprised, but I was pretty sure I never wanted to hold it again, even if it was very pretty. It had looked warmer than it had felt, thanks to the pink dancing in its center.
Flack appeared unhurried as he inspected the rest of the treasures inside the vault, his hands trailing past the bars of gold stacked on the shelves. He checked all the paintings in the cabinet and rummaged through the chests. Like he just couldn’t help himself, he had to check if there wasn’t anything else in here he deemed worth stealing. When he began shifting a shelf, I realized there might have been more purpose to his actions than had appeared.
“Come stand here, sweetheart.” He gestured in front of him. Since last time, he’d just directed me to stand somewhere out of the way, I fully expected that to be the case again. Except it wasn’t. He began guiding my hands down the wall panel he’d revealed. “Hold here. I need you to put pressure on that spot.” I had no clue what I was doing, but I leaned into it. He moved tothe left, his hands gliding over the wall he’d revealed. Whatever he was looking for, he had his head cocked and his ears twitching as he listened for it. “Got it.”
So this was the part of the job he’d needed some extra hands for. Except for the way we’d slipped into this building through a very tiny window, I didn’t see what the size requirement was about. That changed the moment the panel suddenly came free from the wall. Flack caught it deftly and moved it aside, and a small, narrow tunnel was revealed. It was more like a pipe I could perhaps crawl through if I squeezed a little. Flack, in his current shape, would never fit. “What is this?” I asked.
“This was a panic room once, before the Asrai noble who owns this place had it converted to a vault. I managed to get my hands on the original blueprints.” He tapped his thigh where the tattoo was located. “They paneled over it and forgot it was there. Dimon won’t know about it either, so he won’t have guards stationed at the possible exits. You have no idea what kind of deal I had to make to get my hands on this map.” I didn’t, and I probably didn’t want to know anyway. I was simply relieved there’d been an exit all this time; it was no wonder Flack had been so calm.
The tunnel was very small and dark, though, which was going to make it slow going. I was pretty used to moving through tight spaces, but this one gave me pause. It wasn’t the same as moving through a completely artificial environment, each component made by my hands. This was a tunnel underground, and dirt would press in on it. My imagination was quick to conjure up all kinds of disgusting, nasty critters on the other side of that metal wall.
“I need to shift to fit, so you’re going to have to crawl in after me to shut the hatch.” That was easier said than done, and there wasn’t much we could do about the shelf we’d moved to get to the panel. Flack sorted that by moving all the shelves around, creating utter chaos in the previously neat and ordered vault. Then we were on our way, Flack helping me and my brand-new fur coat and jewel-crusted boots by pulling on my sleeve to help me inside. His tiny foxshape was shockingly strong for a creature barely the size of a chihuahua.
