Page 31 of Heart of Thieves

“Why did you hide Astra from me?” She steps forward, and I slide my hands around her waist, steadying her.

“My brother was there.” Hopefully she’ll think I was trying to protect him, not Lola. “He was noncorporeal, but there was a chance you might have seen him . . .”

“Ah.” Laurel nods, grimacing. “It can be difficult when family tests us.”

I force a smile.

“But you can’t let your love for him eclipse what’s right,” she says, pressing against me. “I know how hard that can be.”

“You do?”

She presses the voratium chip into my palm once more. Her magic curls my fingers around it and then delves into that icy pit in my heart.

My own power.

She tugs until it burbles forth. Sparks of light flash clumsily around us. Sounds and smells as she searches through the stream, and I try not to let her see the horror in my eyes.

After several agonizing minutes, she figures out how to access her secrets and pulls one into the voratium, filling it until it glows a pale cerulean blue. Then, with sweat beading on her brow, she releases me.

“Watch that,” she says, nodding at the voratium piece still clutched in my hand.

I should resist, but curiosity burns through me hot as hunger.

When I close my eyes, I glimpse Laurel rushing into her childhood home—the one I spent so many hours in as a youth—with moonshard fragments encrusted on her palms. “Father!” she cries, eyes bright with excitement. “The stars! They’ve—”

The tall, spindly man jolts up in surprise, then shoves the papers on his desk out of her sight, but one slips off in his haste and lands on her foot. She picks it up before he can, scanning the figures scribbled on it. I realize the same moment Laurel does exactly what this is.

An accounting of money he’s laundered from local small shop owners.

“What have you done?” Laurel lowers the paper, voice quavering.

He snatches it out of her hands. “None of your concern.”

Threads not unlike the ones I see when I focus on my magic unfurl around Laurel’s father. Laurel must have opened herself to her own power. Tiny strings of light weave through his body like a nervous system. Strings that whisper of the awful deeds that, judging by the horrified look on her face, she did not know he was capable of.

“How . . . ,” she gasps as tears film over her vision. “How could you?”

“You were missing,” he replies, swallowing hard. “We were trying to find . . .”

She shakes her head. Blood rushes to her cheeks as tears roll down them, and something far worse than anger darkens her eyes.

Disgust.

“You set it right,” she snaps. “You give it back!”

“I—I can’t, sweet pea. It’s all gone.”

“Then sell the house!” she screams, fists clenching so hard her knuckles blanch white.

“You know I cannot do that.”

“You’re a coward.”

He opens his mouth to reply, but a knock bangs on the door behind her. He grabs her, shoving her into the closet. “Stay quiet,” he whispers. “Not a sound.”

She glares through the crack between the doors as he answers the knock.

A burly pair of men crowd inside, one of them shoving a pistol to her father’s throat. “You only paid half,” he sneers, and I recognize him instantly.