Sasha stared at Derek’s retreating form as he disappeared down the hall, battling the strangest urge to follow and ensure he made it home in one piece. The way the lights dimmed as he passed didn’t seem like a good sign. The man was barely functional, exhaustion evident in his sunken eyes and pallor.
Wrinkling her nose again, she propped open the door to air out the room. Based on the smell in here, he hadn’t left since Saturday. She bit her lip, glancing again down the hallway. What was she thinking? Derek Arthur was a grown man, fully able to take care of himself. The man was fine to look at, when he didn’t smell like last week’s leftover Chinese, but he was her adversary.
She rolled her shoulders to shake off the worry. She meticulously put away her purse and hung her black wool coat, which she’d removed in the lift, behind the door. Hand raised, she froze mid-movement.
No way.
There, on the ground by Derek’s chair, sat his laptop bag. Had the man seriously just given her the opportunity to troll through his information and figure out what security measures he’d put in place? Fate never gave her any handouts. In fact, the bitch seemed to have it in for her on a daily basis.
Sasha almost didn’t trust her luck. Almost.
Hmm, getting down to his car would take Derek at least five minutes, so she’d give him fifteen to remember and return. She patted her coat, then returned to her desk and pulled up her email.
For someone essentially immortal, time could move both incredibly fast and agonizingly slow. The fifteen minutes she forced herself to wait fell under the second category. The tiny clock on her computer screen mocked her at every glance, barely budging. Finally, her self-imposed wait was up. Even then, she strolled to the door and closed it before taking Derek’s laptop bag back to her desk.
She refused to examine too closely the small prick of guilt that made her hesitate before extracting his computer. Derek had shared with her how this job could make or break his fledgling security company. Why should his success matter to her in the slightest? It didn’t.
She fired up his computer.
His fault for leaving the thing in the first place.
Being a jewel thief searching for that damn rock for more than a thousand years, she’d learned and grown with the times to become more tech savvy to keep up with the advances in security systems. Luckily, she and computers got on like tea and scones. The machines, with their cold logic, made total sense to her. Computers didn’t need emotional attachment to get the job done.
As she expected, Derek had installed extra security measures on his personal laptop. She spent the first forty-five minutes of his absence simply trying to hack her way in. Thank goodness she got in to work early. She’d about given up when the final barrier, a complicated password, crumbled beneath her prowess.
Maybe after she broke the Immortality Stone, in theory making her life mortal once again, she could live out the rest of her numbered days as a programmer.
Sasha chuckled at herself. “Like hell.”
She’d go to some tropical island and spend the rest of her life in an all-inclusive resort, enjoying well-earned, pampered peace. One of the benefits of working with jewels for centuries . . . she’d accumulated enough wealth to support herself in lavish comfort for many lifetimes, not just one. It helped that her father, able to produce wealth and riches with a whispered word, had left her a wealthy woman to start with.
Quickly, Sasha copied Derek’s files to a flash drive. She’d look at them closely on her own computer at home, without the concern of his returning any second, though she wished she had more time now. If Morgan was after that stone, nothing Derek did would stop her. Sasha needed to get to it first.
After getting the files, she spent another hour investigating the equipment he’d installed throughout the offices, the vault, and . . . Bollocks. They’d moved the stone to a private safe in Lance’s office, the one she already tried to get into but failed. Now Derek had added additional measures around it.
Shit.
Infrared sensors were damn difficult to fool. She could deal with cameras—adjust the feed or memorize the timing. But she could not fool sensors. Fine. She’d get in touch with one of her contacts on the black market and see what options she had to get around this issue. At least she had the specific make and model number for the devices. Everything had a weakness.
More concerning was a new, more complex entry code for the safe. Derek had not noted the code anywhere that she could find on a quick glance through. She’d search his files more carefully tonight.
Urgency pressed down on her. She’d been a distracted mess all weekend, worrying about Morgan beating her to the stone. If Morgan got it first, Sasha was shit out of luck. But what could she do? It’d probably take days to go through Derek’s documentation and work out her plan. Possibly more time to set up a trial run or two—time she did not have.
Maybe she’d have to employ her mind-compulsion power on the dwarves, plant the seed to give up the stone to her. It was what she should’ve done in the first place, but the idea of getting close enough to Lance to do so made her skin crawl. That arrogant bastard had messed everything up. All interactions thus far indicated he hadn’t learned any humility in the last fifteen hundred years. Take how he’d treated Derek. If the dwarves suspected Morgan had a hand in this, why come down so heavy on their human, non-magical security man? Mortal means would be no match against a powerful sorceress like Morgan. Which was another reason to get away as quickly as possible.
A shiver zinged down her spine along with a memory.
She’d observed through her charmed looking glass as Morgan captured her father. Without a clue as to how she could help, Sasha had run to the castle, where, hidden in the alcove, she’d watched in abject horror from the shadows as Morgan killed Arthur. His seven knights, held immobile in their seats at the round table by some spell, could do nothing. She’d heard with her own ears the curse that had changed the Knights into dwarves, the same curse apparently bouncing back on her somehow. Morgan probably didn’t realize that, or Sasha would’ve been discovered, tortured, enslaved—or some other grisly consequence—centuries ago.
Instead, she’d passed out in the hallway. When she’d come to, Morgan was gone, the Knights were gone. Arthur was gone. Sasha had searched the whole damn castle before running back to find her cottage ransacked, every magical object except her ring, which she wore, also gone.
She needed to nick that flipping stone and clear out. No way did she want to ever encounter Arthur’s sister again. Ever.
White noise suddenly filled Sasha’s ears. What the hell? Where had that come from? In a rush, she shut down and replaced Derek’s laptop.
She’d barely sat down at her desk, when the shadow of a figure in the hallway caught her eye.
Derek.
She glanced at the clock hanging above the door: 8:15. He must’ve finally realized what he’d left behind and come back a bit early. As exhausted as he’d looked, hopefully he at least had gotten some sleep. Adrenaline spiked through her blood—she’d come so close to getting caught. Because this fluttering in her chest couldn’t be her irrational concern for Derek or the small thrill running through her at his presence.
Face thunderous, Derek hustled inside their office. Spying his laptop, he slowed his steps and let out a long, relieved breath. “Thank God,” he muttered.
He glanced over; she arched her eyebrows in what she hoped was appropriately mild surprise.
“I thought you’d get more sleep,” she said.
He gave a rueful smile, and attraction sucker-punched her right in her chest. How could a man, rumpled and still exhausted, look this appealing? Though he’d obviously showered and dressed in fresh clothes—grey slacks and a sinfully attractive black button- down—they looked thrown on in haste. But, damn, he smelled good.
“So did I.” His words snapped her attention away from her traitorous body. “But I forgot my laptop. I got home and sacked out. Then, mid-shower I realized my mistake.”
“Yikes. Well, good news for you. I’ve been the only one in here since you left.” She lifted her finger to her lip, a nervous habit from childhood, but caught Derek watching and lowered her hand again.
Derek blinked and ran his hand through his still-damp hair in an agitated gesture he’d been using more and more lately. “It was a careless move. I never make mistakes like this. I’m in security, for fuck’s sake. I know better.”
Wow. She didn’t have to feign the shock she knew had to be reflected in her wide eyes. So unlike him to open up. Did it mean he trusted her? She knew his secret now. Shared a bond, so to speak.
Suddenly, she was back in Camelot, in the small home where her father had secretly housed her most of her adult life. Arthur—her childhood-friend-turned-king after he pulled Excalibur from the stone—sat at her quaint kitchen table, castigating himself. He, too, had beaten himself up over every little thing, taking his responsibilities more seriously than anyone expected.
“You were exhausted,” she felt compelled to point out to Derek now, just as she’d done her best to soothe the man she had loved then.
“No excuse. Shouldn’t have happened.”
Guilt ate away at her usually numb emotions. Despite his tendency to play white knight, Derek was a truly decent man—hard-working, determined to do the best job possible for his employers.
Nice even.
Look at how he’d taken her to dinner to help her relax after she hadn’t been all that welcoming.
Total bitch might be a more appropriate term for her behavior.
Too bad he stood in the way of the one thing she’d been seeking so long. Would he be able to stand in the way of a power-mad sorceress? Whether the dwarves meant to do it or not, Derek had been set up to fail. Morgan held that much power, or at least she had once.
Maybe Sasha could help him with that last bit. After all, she couldn’t let Morgan get the stone either. Damn, how was she going to protect the stone by getting to it before Morgan? It was going to be more difficult to retrieve it without being seen after all the security upgrades Derek had installed over the weekend. There was no doubt in her mind that Morgan would find a way around it. If only Sasha had way to slip past the cameras and sensor undetected.
She let out a silent breath, glancing down at where her hands rested on her keyboard.
My ring.
Her final gift from her father glittered at her in deep red beauty. How could she forget? She hadn’t inherited her father’s gifts as a mage, but he’d provided the ring charmed with special abilities on her eighteenth birthday.
She could still hear his rough voice. “Someday, it will help you win that which you seek.”
Fifteen centuries later, and she’d had yet to win anything she was seeking. But maybe she could use the magic in the ruby to help her keep Morgan from winning the stone she was after.
She stared at the back of Derek’s head, not really seeing him. What could she do with the magical gift? She needed to put it somewhere close to the safe. As she watched, Derek tapped a few keys and brought up the schematic of his sensors and cameras.
She bolted upright in her seat.
Perhaps she could enhance the security measures he’d already installed around the safe to sense magical interference. Getting into Lance’s office during the day was out. But the boardroom where they were about to meet sat at the center of the floor, with the dwarves’ private offices around it in a semicircle. If she could hide the ring in there before Derek, Lance, and the others gathered, maybe it would be close enough to the safe to work.
Sasha jumped up from her seat, and Derek swung around at the clatter she made as she jostled her desk. “I have to . . . visit the ladies room before our meeting with Lance. I’ll meet you up there.”
What’s got into her?
At the door, she paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Can’t a girl just have to pee?”
Derek frowned, confusion written all over his face. “I didn’t say anything.”
What the hell? He had spoken it, hadn’t he? She could compel people to do things, not hear their thoughts. Besides, she couldn’t compel Derek to do anything.
And now he was staring at her as though she were a total loon.
“I could see you thinking. Doesn’t take a genius.” As covers went, it was subpar. Time to redirect. “By the way, you missed a button.” She indicated his shirt, then escaped before he could cross-examine her.
It didn’t take her long to get upstairs. Outside the door, she paused and listened. As far as she could tell, the room stood empty. Fabulous. Still she hesitated. Whatever she did in that room would show up on Derek’s cameras, which meant she had to find a place to hide the ring where cameras weren’t.
Think, Sasha.
The loo.
A small private powder room was attached to the conference room, if memory served her right. She hadn’t specified which bathroom she planned to visit. So even if he did see her on the camera feed, going in there would corroborate her excuse. And there were no cameras in the bathrooms.
Brilliant.
She strode into the conference room, then slammed to a halt.
In place of the broken glass table stood a massive stone table with rough-hewn wooden legs.
It couldn’t be.
She crossed to the table and ran her hand along its smooth surface. Yes, they had replaced the modern glass table Derek smashed with Arthur’s original round table. She’d never gotten this close to it. The urge to lay her cheek against it, to allow the memories of Arthur to wash over her, was a physical weight in her chest. The pain of her loss, still fresh regardless of time passed, threatened to plunge her into darkness.
With a deep breath, Sasha stepped away and drew her shoulders back. She had to put a stop to this endless merry-go-round that was her life. Spinning on the stiletto heel of her boot, she headed directly to the door built into the white-painted wood paneling that decorated the walls.
Granted, the bathroom was situated at the opposite end of the room from where Lance’s office sat, but it would have to do. The space was lovely in a formal way, with Chevalier’s standard marbled flooring and a matching countertop. A gilt mirror glittered at her from above the more modern, raised-glass sink with an added step for the dwarves’ use.
This was a shared room, though the dwarves were probably the only ones who used it on any regular basis. However, the cleaning staff would come in daily, which meant the drawers and cabinets around the sink were out as hiding spots. She’d need a screwdriver to access the vents overhead. Her glance fell on the toilet.
Sasha sighed.
Shit happens. Get over it.
Determined to get the job done quickly, she pulled the lid off the water tank to the toilet. Good, no freshening products had been added, which meant the cleaning staff wouldn’t mess around with the tank unless the toilet stopped working.
Still, she didn’t want her gorgeous, antique ring knocking about in there or run the risk of its getting sucked into the toilet bowl. She flipped up the hem of her cream sweater and checked the underside seam. Sure enough, extra decorative buttons were sewn in there, in case she lost one. With extreme precision, she removed both buttons, careful not to break the thread.
Not an expert on toilets, first she fiddled with the tank, checking to see which parts moved and which seemed to stay still. Using the strings, she tied her ring to a part inside the tank that didn’t seem to move and was farthest away from the water valve. To be sure, she flushed once, watching closely. The ring did not knock against the tank sides. Excellent.
Those threads wouldn’t last too long in water, as flimsy as they were. At a guess, it would take her a week to plan and a week or two to prepare. This would work that long, right? Then the Immortality Stone would be hers, and she’d retrieve her ring.
Now for the magic.
What had her father said? “Close your eyes and simply tell the ring what to do.” His deep, scratchy voice echoed inside her head, and an ache centered in her heart. Centuries later, and she still felt like a powerless little girl without him at her side.
She took a deep cleansing breath, willing away the sting of the tears that battered at the back of her eyes.
“Magic ring . . . ” Damn, she sounded like a silly duffer. She cleared her throat and continued anyway. “Use Derek’s security to protect the Immortality Stone from all magical ills.” She paused. “Oh! And prevent those systems from detecting me.”
That should cover it. She hoped.
With one final glance at the only object still connecting her to the past, she lifted the porcelain lid and covered the water tank.