Page 44 of The Hood and his Thief

Instead, a familiar silhouette, dark against the hazy evening sky swung up effortlessly, perching in the window frame with all the ease of a sparrow in flight.

Rhosyn blinked at the maneuver as Ansel paused, seemingly spotting her defensive posture. Even Scarlett, who for some reason insisted on entering through Rhosyn’s bedroom window even though she was perfectly welcome to use the door, didn’t boast such gravity-defying maneuvers.

This was also Ansel’s own room, which begged the question, “And you chose to risk me punching you out of a fourth story window frame instead of using the door to your own room because…?”

Ansel dropped into the room, his boots barely making a noise despite the creakiness of the old building’s floors. “I wasn’t particularly worried about falling. I am rarely a victim of gravity,” he admitted.

Rhosyn put her hands on her hips, but he just shrugged.

“After years on a trapeze, falling from a window doesn’t seem like an immediate threat.”

Realization dawned. “Your Talent.”

She had been so concerned with learning of the dual role of Archer’s Circus as the up-and-coming Foxes that she had barely registered Ansel’s admission that he had a Talent—and that he had stopped performing as an acrobat because it had become obvious.

He smiled wryly. “Don’t ask me what exactly it is, because I’ve never really had a satisfactory answer. The closest I’ve come is enhanced balance, but that doesn’t seem to capture it. Whenever I climb or do acrobatics though, I can almost see in advance how things are going to work out. Like…”

“Like a sixth sense,” Rhosyn finished for him. It was something Nate had said about his Talent, which also seemed to defy definition, especially to someone like Rhosyn who had no Talent at all.

“It makes running over rooftops easy, and can even come in handy in a fight, but unfortunately does not give me an advantage at many other things,” Ansel admitted. “For example, I forgot that I locked the window in case you decided to make an ill-advised escape attempt, and now I have a broken latch.”

“Which once again prompts me to ask, what do you have against doors?”

Ansel considered her, saying after a moment, “You wanted discretion. I left this evening and none of the Foxes saw me return. If we leave and return for the palace the same way, nobody has to know that I alone wasn’t responsible for stealing the sponsorship documents.”

Silence stretched, as Rhosyn drew a blank on any appropriate response. She and Ansel had pushed against each other at so many junctions, but here he had gone out of his way to honor her preference for secrecy. It was an acknowledgment of the concession she was making by doing this for them, and calculated as it was, it tugged at a string under Rhosyn’s sternum she hadn’t known was there.

“We better get going then,” she eventually said, and the moment dissipated.

Ansel nodded, stepping around her to the foot of the bed. He opened the trunk there and rustled inside for a moment before emerging with a familiar garment: a jacket with a deep hood. He pulled it on and lowered the hood over his head, before tossing a similar article to Rhosyn.

She followed suit, glad to have something to cover her hair. The garment was too broad across the shoulders, and too short at the wrists, but it would do the job.

Next, he reached into his pocket and produced a bland-looking bundle. He handed it to Rhosyn, who unrolled it curiously, only for her heart to stutter at the shine of a full set of lock picks.

“I got them especially for you,” he admitted.

She chuckled as she rerolled the packet and tucked it into her boot. “You really know how to charm a woman.”

When she stood, the police officer was gone, replaced by a gangster with a shadowed face and hidden lockpicks. He was the Hood, and she was his thief.

Ansel looked at her and nodded in satisfaction before stepping towards the still-open window. He hesitated when he reached it. Then he reached for his sleeve, rolling it up to reveal a hidden sheath much like the ones that Nate—and now Contessa—had always used to conceal his numerous knives.

Ansel unstrapped it hurriedly and thrust it at Rhosyn’s chest, as if doing it quickly before he had a chance to change his mind. “Don’t make me regret this.”

“I make no promises about regret,” Rhosyn said as she took the outstretched offering and began strapping it to her own forearm. “But I do promise not to stab you when your back is turned.”

“I guess that’s the best I could hope for.” Ansel’s tone was rueful, but he smiled, nonetheless.

Rhosyn found herself smiling at him too. At the feeling of the leather straps against the skin of her forearm—the familiar yet foreign weight of a blade—the sleepy Lion in her mind perked up in interest. She had grown comfortable with the weight of a baton at her hip in the past years, but this awakened something in her that she had been denying to herself that she missed.

In the dark of night, she was about to climb out a lower city window in secrecy, a hidden knife at her wrist, to steal people’s freedom back from their captors. Her heart fluttered, and a strange lightness took hold at the base of her skull. Rhosyn was excited.

She clamped down on the realization by scowling. “Well, we better get moving. I may be better than you at picking locks, but I am not as good at climbing down a wall from the fourth story.”

“Then I’ll be a gentleman, and not propose we race.” Without further prelude, Ansel turned back to the window and levered himself over the sill. Rhosyn darted forward, knowing he wouldn’t fall but heart rate skyrocketing, nonetheless. She leaned out into the night air just in time to watch him catch a hold of a clothesline in the back alley the window faced. He swung from it, putting the excess momentum into a somersault before landing on the ground.

It was so much like the first time they met, and Rhosyn suppressed a sigh at the realization that, just like that day, she would be following at a much slower pace. She turned and lowered herself down over the sill backwards, muscles in her arms straining as her toes scrambled for purchase on the wall. She picked her way down carefully, trying not to let the fact that Ansel was staring up at her rush her movements. Given the choice between having him enjoy a rather suggestive view of her backside from below or witnessing her falling, she would take the former. As he had so annoyingly pointed out, it was nothing he hadn’t seen before.