Page 3 of I Regret Nothing
I
t was time. I didn’t have any family to teach me this. Hauser and I had to figure it out on our own. It took ages, but I learned how to open portals. That was Hauser’s rule number six. Plan your transportation in a way that can’t be tied back to you. No public transit and don’t use your own vehicle. Cameras were everywhere now, and they could track license plates and cars. Hauser got to the mark by his wolf. If we needed to go to another country to steal, well, we both had safes with fake passports for that.
The Museum of the Profane had the best security probably in the entire world. It had never been successfully robbed before, and there was a ton of good shit in there that the supernatural community would have wanted to get their hands on. With all the goodies in here, I was shocked it didn’t get broken into more. I couldn’t be the only one who wanted something from here, and it wasn’t like the Library of the Profane where they would let me use it if they granted me a library card. All these fantastic relics were behind glass cases, and no one could use them anymore. Honestly, some of them were dangerous, and I got why they were on display now, but some of them should have been back with their people.
My portal opened into an air vent above the central security office. It was super cramped, but Hauser didn’t sometimes call me runt for no reason. It was a tight fit, but I could do what I needed here. Hauser opened up an entire world for me when he told me I wasn’t just a fox shifter. Some shit that always seemed to happen around me started making sense.
Five monitors were watching the museum, and two guards were watching. We weren’t totally sure, but Ihadto be a Kitsune after Hauser put me through some intense training. I couldn’t just open portals like a demon. I had some pretty fierce magic too. I hadn’t even scratched the surface of it either.
Both guards had coffee cups in front of them. I didn’t have to spy on them before tonight to know anyone working the night shift staring at screens all night would have coffee or tea at their desks. Trickery was my specialty. I twirled my finger and dropped a little sleeping magic in their coffee. One sip and they’d be out.
It was just a waiting game. Hauser taught me well. No evidence and don’t get caught. My visage could not get captured on those cameras. Those computer science classes that bored me to death before I dropped out of college to apprentice with Hauser continued to pay off when it came to security cameras.
Luckily, both guards reached for their coffee at the same time, so shit didn’t get awkward when just one of them fell asleep. They both went night-night, and I snuck out of my hiding place. Hauser’s little network was vast, and he didn’t just teach me himself. He had a Vampire hacker in his employ because sometimes stealing things involved hacking. And I learned more about getting into security systems.
I hopped into the security room to put my next plan in place. I needed to run the cameras on a loop and disable the alarms on the amulet's glass. Easy peasy. Something caught my eye—movement on one camera. No one was supposed to be here. The armed guards didn’t patrol the museum unless someone up here pushed a silent alarm. They didn’t want their shit getting broken unless it was in danger.
A woman in all black was making a beeline formyamulet. I knew that walk. Venus was here stealing my shit, and I was doing all the work for her. Fucking bitch. I was getting that amulet, and Venus was going down for it. I owed her for what she did to Hauser. Let the cameras capture her stealing it. I’d get it from her on the way out.
I hopped back into the air vent and closed the grate. I had to ease myself into the portal I made and ungracefully fall behind some bushes in the parking lot. I felt my body tingle and shrink as I turned into my silver fox. My vision and hearing were always amplified like this, and so was my sense of smell. There was only one exit Venus could take if she didn’t want to get caught since she couldn’t portal like me, and she was too careless to disable any security. I had a brief window to steal my amulet from her before the armed guards in the museum came spilling into the parking lot, even if the men watching the cameras were now sleeping. The Museum of the Profane took security seriously, which was why no one had successfully stolen from them before.
The alarms were all silent. It didn’t matter what they placed it on. The museum didn’t want you to know you’d tripped one until security was there with a gun in your face. Venus had to know that. She would have long ended up in jail by now if she was that inept at stealing things. I was dying to know how she intended to pull this off disabling nothing in the control room. I wanted to sneak in there and watch what she was doing, but I also enjoyed my freedom enough not to go down with her if she got caught.
I hoped she had a plan because if she never made it out of the museum with the amulet for me to steal it from her, they were going to up security on it or move it somewhere out of the public eye. It would be a nightmare trying to steal it again after that.
Venus came streaking out of the museum right where I thought she would. My fox was fast. I darted out of the bushes and latched my teeth on her ankle. She tried to kick me off, but I just bit her harder.
“Shit, you’re going to get me arrested!”
I just needed her to drop her loot, and that was my plan. Venus would end up in jail for what she did to Hauser and trying to bitch her way into my heist.
“Go away. I got here first!”
I’d made so many mistakes. I’d broken several of Hauser’s rules when I realized Venus was here. I felt a pinch in my hindquarters right as Venus went down, and I realized I also broke rule three—always watch your six. As my vision started going black, I heard the pounding of boots and saw men standing over me.
“Are they still offering that reward for the Silver Fox? I think we got a two for one special here, boys.”
Shit. If they could tie every single heist to me, I was never getting out of prison. I couldn’t even fight because of the dart they hit me with.
I blacked out.
Chapter 3
Rei
J
ail sucked, and they wanted to put me on trial as fast as possible. That boded well for me. The more they rushed to have some circus of a trial because they finally caught me, the less time they had to gather evidence. They saw me at the scene biting Venus, but they found the amulet in her pocket. I already knew they would have clipped my fur at the scene to compare it to the hair I left behind on accident. At most, they could tie me to a five-million-dollar theft and being at the scene of another. I was still going to prison, and there was no avoiding that, but maybe I wouldn’t die in there.
They’d pin me with grand theft, and they might even charge me for assaulting Venus, but if they could only pin me at two scenes of crimes, I’d spend a few years in jail and have a release date. I’d do my time, rebuild my reputation, and make sure no one could pin a crime on me again. I could have pulled this off if Venus hadn’t ruined everything.
They were holding me in a magical prison before my trial. I probably could have escaped from a human prison if given enough time, but I wasn’t even going to try here—too many variables and too many things that could go wrong. Slipping out with human guards would have been hard, but I could have managed. Sneaking out with a supernatural staff that had so many ways of tracking me? I wasn’t stupid. They would kill me.
They had frozen all my assets that they knew about, and I wasn’t about to let them know about my offshore accounts. The only reason I had a talented lawyer instead of a public defender was because of Hauser. They wouldn’t let him visit, and they weren’t allowing me to use the phones to call him.
They had me isolated from the rest of the prison population, and it was driving me insane. I had no one to talk to. The guards were grumpy fucks and wouldn’t chat with me. My lawyer didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her much either, but I was desperate for her visits just to talk with someone.
She sat across from me, looking down at me through her glasses.
