Chapter 9: Brazen Little Hussy

“Wanna know a fun fact?”

Paige blinked in surprise as she mentally scrambled to keep her internal checklist in order.

What the hell, Sophia?

Her brain was moving a mile a minute, keeping track of the nearly imperceptible ticks of the state-of-the-art vault door’s multiple tumblers clicking into place as she spun its dial. This particular door had over a hundred million possible combinations, and Paige had only been given less than ten minutes to crack it open.

“Right now? Not particularly,” snapped beneath her breath, only just loudly enough for Sofia to pick up in her earpiece without disturbing any of the vault’s hairpin alarm triggers.

“The egg is a decorative toiletry box,” her sister laughed. “The world’s most expensive fucking tampon holder.”

Paige rolled her eyes and continued running the dial. “Did they even have tampons in the eighteen-hundreds?”

“Menstrual belts, actually. Little suspenders that held up your pads and pantyhose, cause we love a multifunctional queen,” Sofia clarified because, of course, she knew the entire historical breakdown of feminine hygiene products.

That’s why her twin was the one safe in the van parked a good half-mile away while Paige was the one risking her neck and everything else trying to break into a very dangerous man’s multimillion-dollar safe that housed a treasure trove worth a hell of a lot more than that.

Paige was the brawn of their little operation, while Sofia was the brain.

She smirked indulgently as she felt the final tumbler fall into place.

Just over five minutes. Had to be a personal best, but their boss, Duncan, had recently put a very definitive – and loud – end to the twins timing their jobs. He said it was ‘unprofessional’ and ‘a good way to get yourself a maximum-security stay, and good luck breaking your way out of that one, Paige.’

Whatever. She and her sister were solid. It was the rest of Duncan’s merry band of troglodytes that he should be worried about.

Corey had a habit of producing the kind of intel that reeded a second opinion more often than not. And Mary-Elizabeth’s forgeries had gotten better over the year and a half since she’d come on board, but there was no way they held up under a microscope.

Which only put more pressure on Paige to cover not just her tracks but everyone else’s. The fake egg would be noticed eventually, so it was up to her to make sure that there wasn’t so much as an eyelash left behind to put investigators on their tail.

The vault door swung open without so much as a squeak, but Paige didn’t move to enter.

“What am I looking at, Sof?”

Her eyes flitted across the perimeter of the room, looking for the telltale uniform holes of an invisible laser grid, but she didn’t see any. That was good. Those were a bitch. Especially since they tended to be a nearly impenetrable solid wall of laser tripwires instead of the conveniently navigable field of crisscrossing red lines that movies liked to portray.

“Heat sensor,” Sofia supplied. “Anything over seventy-five degrees will spike the alarm.”

“Got it.”

Paige pulled down her oxygen mask and activated the mechanism to activate the cryothermal coils woven throughout her wetsuit. Originally engineered for firefighters, her suit rapidly reduced her core body temperature. Since it was designed to be used in extremely high temperatures, Paige didn’t have long until the suit began to freeze her body to the point of hypothermia.

She checked her temperature and stepped into the vault. Inside was even more astonishing than she’d heard tell of. Pure, unadulterated, hedonism. Priceless paintings, pottery that was thousands of years old – Paige was pretty fucking certain that was the crumpled remains of Little Bastard in the corner, James Dean’s cursed Porsche that had gone missing in the sixties.

The contents of this vault were enough to curate the world’s most impressive museum…except for the fact that not a single item had been obtained through legitimate means.

Paige didn’t really have room to judge, given her own purpose for being here, but damn. How exactly did one even find a fully articulated velociraptor skeleton?

“Do you have eyes on the Necessaire, Paige?”

“Among other things.”

Tucked away in the back on an inset display shelf, almost like an afterthought, was one of the lost crown jewels of the Romanov Dynasty. It wasn’t the most intricate or flashy of the Imperial Eggs Paige had seen pictures of, but it was beautiful, nonetheless. It was silver, inlaid with sapphires, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and pearls.

She reached into her pouch and pulled out Mary-Elizabeth’s replica. They’d splurged for Swarovski knock-off stones, making the fake a decently pricey tchotchke itself, but it failed in comparison to the original.

Whatever. It didn’t need to be a pristine copy – it just needed to weigh the same. They couldn’t know for certain if the egg was sat on a pressure plate, but just in case, Mary-Elizabeth had spent days running the numbers to ensure that her replica was weighty enough to avoid setting one off.

Paige held her breath and steadied herself as she prepared to make the switch. In one fluid motion, she slid the real Necessaire off its podium as she slid the fake one on.

Her stomach sank as she watched the fake settle…only to pop up a millimeter as the pressure plate rose.

It hadn’t been heavy enough.

Fuck.

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She ran.

The dogs on her heels ran faster.

Paige had nowhere to hide as she raced across nearly a mile of open Nevada desert to the safety of their van. The streams of light zipping through the dark from the security guards’ flashlights didn’t faze her – she’d yet to meet a man she couldn’t outrun.

But dogs…they weren’t men. They were gnashing teeth and eldritch growls.

Eyes that glowed in the dim, moonless night.

Claws that could rip her to shreds before she’d even had a chance to scream, much less fight.

And he – it – Sebastian – was coming straight for her, knocking aside the bolted-down chair between them as if it hadn’t been there at all. He grabbed her by the throat and whisked her off her feet, slamming her back into the far wall.

Paige gasped for air as Sebastian’s menaced eyes glared down at her, inch-long fangs bared so close to her face, the faint pressure of claws digging into the soft tissue of her throat. She stared up at him in terror and awe because she had no other choice.

Even if she did, though, he was impossible to look away from.

Power in its purest form – the thing generations of nightmares were made of.

His head darted forward. Paige squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the end. Instead, she felt the cold wet of his snout pressed against her hair, her neck, her clothing. Almost instantly, the grip on her throat loosened as Sebastian pulled back – the craze in his eyes dulled.

Pain twisted his lupine features as he reverted back to the man she’d come to know. They stared at each other as if neither could believe what had just taken place.

For Paige, there was no shortage of confusion as she battled her mind for supremacy – her brain telling her that there was no way that she’d just witnessed what she thought she had.

For Sebastian, there was a tenderness in his features that she couldn’t place.

And a heat that she could.

He grabbed her face, and when he pulled her to him, she let him, parting her lips to receive his kiss. She went soft and pliant as he ravaged her, pressing her against the wall and pillaging her mouth as if searching for a lifeline.

Her body began to melt, awe turning into an aching need. This was more than a man, and in this moment, she was more than a woman. Something unrecognizable within her called to something inside of him, urging her body closer to his. Coaxing her to tilt her head back to grant him the access he needed to make her his.

“Enough of this. Kill the experiment. We got what we need for now.”

A hiss sounded from the vents as a thick smog began to fill the room around them. In a flash of motion, Sebastian was gone again, replaced by the wolfman once more.

With a vicious snarl, he threw himself at the two-way mirror separating them from the observing doctors. He threw his entire body weight into punch after punch, startling them all when the reinforced glass began to crack – a hairline fracture that quickly spider-webbed outward.

The gas increased, flooding the observation room.

It overtook Paige first, sending her to her knees as the world grew hazy.

“Sebastian! Please…,”

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Paige woke with a start of confusion that quickly turned to panic as she realized that she couldn’t move her hands or legs.

She turned her head only to find that she was on a medical cot, much like Sebastian’s.

Sebastian.

“Hey! Can anybody hear me? What the hell is going on?”

Paige began to swoon, confusion, and whatever sedative she’d been under was making her hallucinate. It had to be the drugs.

Impatient tutting came from just out of her periphery as Director Wen walked into focus.

“Dr. Torres, please compose yourself,” the severe woman chastised her. “We have much to discuss now that Phase 2 has begun, and I’m eager to get started.”