Page 78 of A Slipper in the Smoke
Snowdrop scoffed. “You’ll be lucky.”
“Are we robbing a rich merchant again?” Clover asked, clapping his hands together. “Iloverobbing rich merchants! The richer, the better. Sign me up.”
“Just make sure he doesn’t take it out on his workers,” Elena mumbled.
The rest of the group fell quiet. Doubtless, they didn’t often pause to think about everyone their actions affected, or the fact that the rich always tended to find a way to blame the poor for their troubles.“Why didn’t you lock up last night/fight back/put the items in a more secure location?” She’d had a couple of break-ins herself over the years. Completely unavoidable. The Baroness had always found a way to blame her, and made her work extra hard to cover the deficit, often with rusty replacement tools not suitable for purpose.
Suddenly, no one seemed to be admiring her or the dress anymore.
Clover looked down at his feet. “We’ll do our best.”
Forthenextfewdays, everything in Elena’s life revolved around the rebellion and finishing the slippers. She experienced a minor setback when she accidentally set off the grenade in her prototype, undoing half a day’s hard work. Try as she might to remind herself that this accident was fortunate—that it had revealed a problem that would have been catastrophic in the final pair—her frustration was exacerbated by the knowledge that she was eating painfully into her time with Pip.
Tick, tick, tick.
Each slip, every failure, every time a cog needed to be adjusted, she was reminded how quickly their time together was coming to an end.
She had no time in the evenings. A short meeting at lunch was usually all they could manage, over far too quickly and leaving her with an empty, breathless feeling. She had not yet had enough of him.
She never would.
You’re clearly in love with this Pip chap.
She hadn’t told him. She wasn’t sure she could. They’d expressed similar sentiments before, the night of the midnight feast, but the precise words had escaped them. Would that make the parting worse, or easier?
What if he didn’t say it back?
He liked her. She knew that much. But ignorant though she was of romance, she knew that there were layers to love, that some people threw the word around, using it to describe fleeting crushes, pure attraction, lust—
Pip had been nothing but a perfect gentleman (except on the occasions where she asked him not to be, she thought with a smile) but he was also unfathomably kind. It was hard to tell what was just in his nature, and what was purely reserved for her.
You could ask him,said a voice inside her. And Elena knew that she could, but if she couldn’t handle the wrong response, why would she?
Finally, mercifully, the slippers were finished, with only two days to spare until the ball.
Snowdrop looked at them as Elena handed them to Buttercup to dress them up a bit, giving him careful instructions of how to handle them. She’d designed the mechanism to work by clapping the heels together. It was risky, as any bump of too much pressure could risk setting them off, but she thought it was better to do that than rely on setting them off with her hands.
Just in case she was caught.
Don’t think about that.
“Are you sure they’re ready?” Snowdrop asked.
“Do you doubt me?”
Snowdrop sighed. “Not you,” she said. “Come on, let’s go over the plan again.”
Elena nodded. “I won’t have to hurt anyone, right?”
“No. You won’t even be armed—not unless you want to be.”
“I do not.”
“Stand behind Buttercup at all times. Clover will take the rear.” She laid out a map of the subway tunnels, moving a small piece into place that was to represent Princess Sofia’s train. The plan was to force it to divert into an abandoned tunnel before it reached the station, take it over, replace the princess and her guards, and resume the route.
“We’ll have ten minutes to make the exchange,” Snowdrop reiterated. “Any longer, alarm bells will be ringing.”
“All right.”
