Chloe always liked to throw herself into her work after a bad breakup. She wasn't sure if anything that had happened with either Harry or Nate strictly qualified as a breakup, but it was all pretty definitively bad, so she was willing to claim it in this case. She spent less than two weeks this time relaxing at home before she began to get restless.
It took a while to find something that suited her, but she eventually settled on a decently lucrative job hiring out of London. It was a simple enough gig, stealing some priceless artifact from one wealthy collector and putting it into the hands of another. Nothing so easy that it would bore her, but a pleasantly straightforward task after the chaos of Shambhala. Chloe was done with lost cities and cursed treasures for a while.
She talked with the client a few times over phone and e-mail to iron out the details of the arrangement, then agreed to meet in the backroom of a rather filthy London pub for a final briefing.
And, to Chloe's surprise and initial displeasure, to meet the additional person he'd apparently decided to hire for the job.
The client was the typical wealthy collector type, skinny and superior and entirely overdressed for the environment. The other man at the table appeared to be little more than a paid thug, tall and well-muscled with a shaved head and a scowl and an accent so local she wondered if her employer hadn't just hired the biggest guy in the room five minutes before she walked in.
The client was lucky the money was too good for Chloe to just walk out immediately. She wasn't typically against the idea of having a little extra muscle, but she'd been looking forward to a solo job, particularly given her recent luck with partners. She swallowed her irritation and sat down, willing to at least listen to the plan before she decided whether or not this would be a deal breaker.
The briefing was long and rambling, and Chloe began to tune it out once it became clear the job was just as straightforward as it had sounded over the phone. Even the most unprofessional of thieves would have trouble messing this one up for her. She instead turned her attention to her soon-to-be partner – Charlie Cutter, as he'd been introduced – and tried to gauge just where he fell on that professionalism scale.
Despite her efforts to be subtle, he noticed her looking immediately. He caught her gaze over the client's head, nodded toward the man still droning on, and very clearly rolled his eyes.
Chloe picked up her drink to hide her smile. At least he was a paid thug with a sense of humor.
The job, of course, did not wind up being quite as simple as advertised.
"It's not here."
Charlie looked up from the locked desk drawer he was attempting to break into, using what appeared to be a letter opener. "What?"
"I've checked every damn display case in the house," Chloe told him, hopping up to sit on the corner of the desk. "Either he's not very proud of it, or it's worth more than our client let on and he doesn't want to risk showing it off."
"Could be that," he muttered distractedly. He let out a cry of triumph as the lock finally gave, followed by a curse as the drawer apparently failed to yield anything worthwhile. He shut it again with a sigh.
Chloe tilted her head. "Did you really think it would be in there?"
"Worth a try," he said with a shrug. "Did you find any of his files? Guy sets his house up like a museum, he's got to have some sort of catalogue to keep it all straight."
She nodded. "I did, and it all matched up neat and pretty except for this." She grabbed the notebook she had recently tucked into her jacket and dropped it on the desk. "Everything else is written in English, but this is in some nonsense that almost looks like Latin. Languages aren't my area of expertise, but I know enough to know this is all wrong. I just don't know why."
"Hang on, let me see that." Charlie pulled the notebook closer and began to flip through it, forehead crinkled in concentration. "You're right," he said after a few moments. "It's not Latin at all; it's a code. Give me a minute, here…"
Chloe watched as he pulled a little leather-bound journal from his pocket and placed it open next to the notebook. Mumbling to himself, he began to go back and forth between the two, scanning through the writing in the notebook and then scribbling things down in his own journal.
Chloe was reminded, suddenly and sharply, of Nate, and she shook her head quickly to banish that thought.
"Huh," she said instead, after a moment of watching him fill the page with his translation. "You're actually some kind of smart guy, aren't you?"
Charlie paused to grin up at her. It was more charming than she would have expected. "Just don't go spreading it around too much," he said with a laugh. "You'd be amazed what people will talk about in front of the dumb muscle."
The corner of her mouth twitched. "I might have an idea."
"Except in your case, it's 'you'd be amazed what people will talk about in front of the pretty girl pretending she's not a thief,' I bet." He gave her a wink. "We've all got to play to our strengths."
She couldn't help but smile, even as she rolled her eyes. "Do you have a location on our hidden treasure yet, or what?"
"Just about." He looked down again to jot down a few more words, then read through what he had written. "We're in luck. Looks like this guy stashes the really valuable stuff pretty close by. It's maybe an hour or so away. Less, if you know a good driver."
Chloe grinned. "I know just the girl for that."
The secret storage facility was underground, and Charlie was not all pleased about that.
"Always bloody tunnels," he muttered as they wound their way through the narrow corridors. "No one ever hides their valuables in a nice, big cavern."
"Rich weirdos do like their mysterious mazes," Chloe agreed. Charlie groaned in response, and she glanced over her shoulder at him, eyebrow raised. "You all right back there?"
"I don't… like tight spaces…" he answered through gritted teeth.
She laughed. "Seriously?"
"Do I look like I'm joking?" he snapped.
He really didn't. His eyes were wide, his jaw was clenched, and his face was beginning to look pale and sweaty. She still thought it was a little funny, a big guy like Charlie afraid of a narrow hallway, but she did her best to hide her amusement. "Come on," she said, trying for gentle and encouraging. "I think it opens up again a little farther on."
That was a complete guess on her part, but it fortunately turned out to be true. The next twist in the tunnels found them walking out into a wider room with a few different paths branching off of it. Thankfully for Charlie's sake, those paths all appeared to be more spacious than the one they'd been travelling.
She turned around to look at Charlie. He already seemed much better for being in the bigger room, most of the tension in his body fading away. "Did that code tell you where we go from here?" she asked.
He shook his head. "We can figure it out, though," he said. He walked over to one of the middle pathways and put his hand on the wall beside it. "There're some markings on the archways," he added in a mumble. The little journal came out of his pocket again, and he was soon deep in concentration.
Chloe shook her head and moved over to the rightmost path. The symbols meant nothing to her and she had no journal to compare them to, so she tried peering down the corridor instead. This was made a little difficult by the darkness. Although the path had been well-lit up to this point, all of these tunnels were pitch black beyond the reach of the big room's lighting. Chloe took out her phone and shined its light down the tunnel, trying to see a little farther, and took a step forward.
She noticed the tripwire a second too late to avoid triggering it, but she had just enough time to throw herself sideways and avoid the large metal object that came careening out of the darkness toward her head. It smacked into the wall behind her with an unsettlingly loud crunch just as she hit the ground.
She landed hard, her arms scraping across the rough floor, and her heart was hammering, but at least her skull wasn't caved in. She heard Charlie swear and come running over as she pushed herself to her knees, and she muttered her own string of curses as she began to wipe the dirt and grit from her skinned palms.
Charlie knelt down beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," she said, grimacing as she flicked away pieces of gravel. "Just tore my hands open a bit."
Charlie pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. Chloe took it gratefully, soaking it with water from her canteen and using it to better clean the scrapes. "Who rigs their treasure rooms with a goddamned catapult?" she muttered as she worked.
"Rich weirdos," Charlie replied with a shrug. He stood up slowly and peered over her head down the darkened corridor. "Solves our problem, though. I'd say the smart money's on following the tunnel with the trap in it."
"Sounds right to me," Chloe said with a sigh. She pocketed the handkerchief and started to get to her feet, then felt a sudden sense of dismay as she remembered she'd been holding her phone when the trap went off. She looked around and quickly spied it lying near the wall a few feet away. With growing dread, she reached out to pick it up.
The screen was black and completely shattered, and no amount of tapping, shaking, or button-pressing could convince it to come to life again. She groaned. This was already her second phone of the year, and it was only April.
With another sigh, Chloe stood up and tucked the useless phone away. She hoped Charlie had a torch on him, because she wasn't looking forward to stumbling through the rest of that tunnel without any light. "This bloody thing better be worth it."
The small medieval siege weapon seemed to be the extent of this particular rich weirdo's trap-making skills, as they didn't encounter anything else for the rest of the slow walk through the tunnel. It soon opened up onto another large, well-lit room that had, similar to the main house, a museum-like set up of shelves and display cases, all filled up with gleaming bits of treasure.
"What an asshole," Chloe muttered, shaking her head at the excess.
Charlie chuckled softly and moved to walk along the display cases, peering carefully into each one. He stopped abruptly halfway through his circle of the room. "Ah, here you are, you pretty thing," he said, dropping to a crouch in front of one of the cases.
"Found it?" Chloe asked, walking over to join him.
He nodded and tapped the glass, and Chloe bent to look. That was their target, all right. They got the flimsy lock picked in short order, and Charlie carefully lifted the object and held it up to the light for inspection.
It really didn't look like something worth so much effort to hide to Chloe's eyes. It was some sort of ceremonial chalice, silver and old with some elaborate and intricate etchings along the rim and the base. Worth a few bucks, certainly, more if you found the right collector, but not enough to justify stashing it in a secret underground vault. Just about everything else in here Chloe pegged as being much more valuable. This just didn't seem to earn its place.
"Hang on…" Charlie's look of triumph had shifted into a puzzled frown. He brought the chalice closer to his face. "Well, well," he said after a moment, in a delighted tone. "Either our client is a very lucky man, or – and I suspect this is more the case – he's been lying to us."
"Lying how?" Chloe asked warily.
Charlie lowered the chalice with a grin. "You know much about this piece?" he asked. When Chloe shook her head, his grin got wider. "Story goes this was part of a pair, two fancy goblets unearthed back at the turn of the twentieth century. The first one did the museum circuit for a while, then dropped into the hands of private collectors, eventually winding up here, or so we've been told. But the second one just vanished. Rumors have it popping up at auctions now and then, but it's never been the real deal."
"And you're telling me…"
Another grin. "This is the second goblet, not the first. Doesn't have any of the damage the first one is supposed to have. Could be a replica, I suppose, but I don't know why our rich weirdo would bother with the tunnels and the traps then. And he could damn sure afford to have had it authenticated." He held the chalice up. "This is worth way more than our client let on."
Chloe's eyebrows shot up with interest. "Really…" she murmured. Charlie started to laugh, and she got the distinct impression it was at her expense. "What?" she demanded.
"The look on your face," he said, still laughing. "Your eyes just lit up like the stars at the idea of more money."
She rolled her eyes and punched him lightly in the arm, which did nothing to stop his laughter, but she found herself feeling a little flattered despite that. No one had ever compared her eyes to stars before, even in such a teasing context. "Oh, like you're not happy about it, too," she said with a shake of her head. "Just put that thing somewhere safe, and let's get out of here and see if we can't shake our client down for better pay."
A rumbling echo from down the dark tunnel froze Chloe in place and abruptly cut off Charlie's laughter. They both turned, slowly, to face the sound.
The rumbling turned to scuffling, then became a muffled voice. Then multiple voices.
Chloe and Charlie turned as one and dove behind the limited cover of the display cases. They were no longer alone down here.
It ended, as these things always seemed to lately, with gunfire.
"I hope the dumb muscle routine isn't all an act," Chloe called as she readied her pistol.
"I do all right," Charlie said with a chuckle. "What about you, Bright Eyes?"
She groaned. "You're really going to try to make that stick?"
"I might. I quite like it," he said, flashing her a grin. He leaned around the corner of the display case and shot the nearest guard in the leg. "All right, let's move!"
"Bloke was hoping to shoot my knees out, I think, but his hands were shaking and he couldn't aim worth a damn even if they weren't. The bullet barely grazed me, and before I could even knock his head in, guy passes goes unconscious and hits the ground right in front of me. One of those haemophobics, I guess. Don't think he had much of a career as an enforcer in front of him."
Charlie grinned as he finished the story and took a long swig from his beer, and Chloe chuckled into her own drink. They were back in the pub where they had started all this, toasting to a job well done. At first, she had wanted nothing more than to just check in to her hotel and sleep right through the next two days before her flight home, but since they'd managed to get through everything without any major threats to life or limb and had also convinced their client that the extra risk of the incredibly rare artifact deserved extra pay, Charlie had persuaded her that that was worth a drink or two to celebrate.
She was glad now that she had taken him up on the idea. Charlie had been good company on the job, and he was proving to be even more so in his down time. She found herself hoping their work would see them crossing paths again in the future and wondering how it hadn't happened before now. The field of illicit treasure hunting was a surprisingly small world, after all.
"So, how did you get into this business, anyway?" Chloe asked, running her thumb along the rim of her glass. "Drawn in by the exotic locations and the allure of early retirement?"
He laughed and shook his head. "No, I just like history," he said. "I like to hold it in my hands, see where we came from and where we're going. I used to work in a museum before I did this, but it wasn't hands-on enough for me. Everything labelled and stuck behind glass, no sense of the bigger picture." He paused to take a drink. "Of course, the pay's not too shabby, either. Helps to make the bullet wounds worth it."
Chloe smiled to herself. "History, huh?" she said. "That's adorable."
"I can live with adorable," he said with a shrug. "What about you? Is it all riches and glamour for Chloe Frazer?"
She considered him for a moment, then shook her head. "No, I don't think I want to tell you that, yet."
"Aw, come on. I didn't even hesitate to give you mine."
"That's on you, mate," she said, laughing. "Some of us like to have a few secrets."
He put his hands up in surrender. "Fine, fine. I'll just have to get it out of you some other way."
"You're welcome to try."
They passed a couple more hours and several more drinks in companionable conversation, and the pub slowly began to empty out around them. Chloe checked her watch and sighed. Her quiet, solitary hotel room, so appealing when the night began, was seeming much less so now. She gave Charlie a long look and said, "You're a local boy, right? You got a place to crash around here, or what?"
He grinned at her and raised an eyebrow. "Why, thinking of taking me home?"
"I might be."
That easy confidence faltered for a moment, and he stared at Chloe for several seconds like he was trying to work out if she was serious. When she showed no signs of joking, he nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I've got a place."
"You ready to get out of here, then?"
Charlie nodded again, then quickly knocked back the last of his beer and stood up. He held a hand out to Chloe, and she took it and let herself be pulled to her feet.
In the middle of the night, Chloe leaned in close and put her mouth to Charlie's ear. "I like the thrill of it," she confessed. "The adventure, the danger – it makes me feel alive like nothing else in the world."
Charlie let out a quiet laugh, rumbling from his body to hers. His hands tightened on her hips, and he drew her into a kiss. "You know, I think I could have guessed that about you."
Chloe got herself a new phone before leaving London, and she gave the number to Charlie as they stood outside the airport entrance.
"Be sure to call me if you hear of any interesting jobs in need of a good driver," she told him, shouldering her bag.
"I might also call you for other things," he said with a grin as he carefully punched the numbers into his own phone.
She shrugged, hiding a smile. "I might be okay with that."
"Make sure I put it in right?" he asked, holding his phone out for her to see.
Chloe glanced at the screen and immediately let out a resigned sigh.
He'd put her in his contacts as Bright Eyes.
Well, she supposed there were worse things to be called. "Yeah," she said, letting herself smile. "That looks right."