Steal the Light (Thieves) Read online

  Steal the Light

  Thieves, Book 1

  Lexi Blake

  Steal the Light

  Thieves, Book 1

  Lexi Blake

  Published by DLZ Entertainment, LLC

  Copyright 2013 DLZ Entertainment, LLC

  Edited by Chloe Vale and Kasi Alexander

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-937608-15-6

  Thank you for not sharing your copy of this book. This purchase allows you one legal copy for your own personal reading enjoyment on your personal computer or device. You do not have the right to resell, distribute, print, or transfer this book, in whole or in part, to anyone, in any format, via methods either currently known or yet to be invented, or upload to a file sharing peer to peer program. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you no longer want this book, you may not give your copy to someone else. Delete it from your computer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Excerpt from Lexi Blake’s Steal the Day, Thieves Book 2

  Excerpt from Lexi Blake's Love and Let Die, Masters and Mercenaries Book 5

  Excerpt from A Love Worth Biting For by Roxy Mews

  About Lexi Blake

  Also From Lexi Blake

  Author Forward

  In my career, this book will be denoted as my thirty-first book published (between Lexi and Sophie Oak), but I feel compelled to explain that in so many ways, Steal the Light was really the beginning. I need to tell the story of its existence because in so many ways, this book explains why Lexi and Sophie exist at all.

  In 2007 my husband completed his MBA. He was working and going to school at the same time, so I spent two and a half years keeping everything at home running. At the end, he hugged me and told me I could have anything I wanted. I think he expected me to ask for a trip or to go back to school. What I asked for was a baby.

  Flash forward to 2008. I was thirty-seven years old and healthy and never once thought that I would have a problem. The pregnancy itself was perfect. The delivery was not. My two older babies had been delivered via C-section, so this one was scheduled. I won’t bore you with medical details, but it went poorly. I was on the table for hours and nearly bled out. I remember listening to the doctor as he valiantly worked to save me. Once my daughter was delivered, the race was on to stitch me up. My husband witnessed this. He was forced to leave the room and to wait to discover my fate.

  We had two very different reactions to this moment in time. I call it “a moment” because it has defined every breath I have taken since. I came off that table a different human being than the one who had walked the earth for thirty-seven years before. For the first time I truly felt alive. I knew there was no time to waste. There is only the now. I discovered that love and hope live in the now. My husband had a different reaction. He drifted away from me, terrified not at the thought of death in general, but that he’d nearly witnessed mine. He went to a place where I couldn’t touch him.

  We are years past this now. My baby girl is a shining light of life. She’s as crazy and wild as the character I named after her. My husband and I just celebrated our twenty-year anniversary.

  But these are the books I wrote while I waited for him to come back to me. These five books are the books I wrote when I decided not to wait for life to find its way to me.

  These books are for my husband and my daughter. My husband who gave me a safe place to become myself. My daughter, whose birth spurred me to figure out just who I am.

  And these books are for you readers who choose to join me on this journey. You are more than welcome to come with me.

  Lexi Blake

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Chloe Vale. This has been a five year journey and I wouldn’t want to go through it with anyone else. Thanks to the original readers of this series, especially Britta Graham, Mindy Romero, and Jennifer Kubenka. It’s finally here! Thanks to my brilliant betas and editors, Riane Holt, Stormy Pate, and Kasi Alexander. As always thanks to my street team- the Doms and Dolls.

  And to Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, thank you for believing in me. I’m so glad we’re on this journey together.

  I have a deep and never-ending gratitude to Liz Berry, who has been a champion of this series from the beginning. I love you, my friend.

  Prologue

  Grief is a selfish beast.

  I stood in the lobby of the Denton County morgue, my father’s hand resting on my back. It didn’t bring me comfort, and I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want to receive comfort, and I sure as hell didn’t mean to give any. His eyes filled with tears. My father never cried, but it didn’t move me because Dad might have loved Daniel, but Daniel had been my whole world.

  My stomach turned at the thought. I said it in my head. Not Daniel my world. Daniel was my world. Had been. Wasn’t now. Wouldn’t be again. Had I really accepted Daniel’s death without even seeing his body?

  “Zoey Wharton?”

  I brought my head up. A bland-looking man in scrubs stood in the doorway, a clipboard in his hand. That clipboard held all the little notations and numbers that made up the end of Daniel’s life. Height, weight, core body temperature. Time of death.

  I should have known his time of death. Shouldn’t I? I should have felt the moment his soul departed the Earth. He’d been my first lover, the first friend I could really remember having. He’d been my partner in crime, and we’d made our escape together. If he’d died, shouldn’t the ground under my feet have moved?

  “Zoey Wharton?” He looked straight at me the second time, his eyebrows rising expectantly. There wasn’t anyone else around but me and my father, but this bureaucrat obviously required acknowledgement.

  “I’m Zoey.” Daniel’s Zoey. That was who I was. I was Daniel’s friend and then his girl and then his fiancée. I was still wearing the craptastic, barely-there diamond he’d put on my finger not three months before. We’d spent a whole six hundred dollars on that ring. Everything we had.

  God, don’t let this be happening. Wake up. Wake the fuck up, Zoey. I tried so hard to convince myself this wasn’t reality.

  “I’m sorry, but we need an ID. We couldn’t find his wallet.” The man in the scrubs pointed toward a door. It was an ordinary door, stainless steel, swinging both directions. But I knew the truth. Those doors might open both ways, but they only took a person to one place. There was only one destination through those doors, and once I went through them, I would never come back. I would never be the Zoey Wharton I had been before.

  And still my feet moved. I shuffled toward it.

  “Darlin’, please.” My father looked down at me. He’d aged ten years in the hour we’d been there. The lines ar
ound his face were already deeper, as though grief had tunneled into his body in record time. “You don’t have to do this.”

  I pulled away. I knew I could take a seat in the waiting room and my father would do this for me. He’d been the one to identify Daniel’s father’s body all those long years ago in a city far away while Daniel and I sat together, our feet not quite touching the ground. I remembered how blank his face had been and how he’d reached for my hand.

  “I have to see him.” My mouth felt numb, like someone had shot me up with Novocain and now I had to try to speak. I needed to see him or it wouldn’t be real.

  “Daniel wouldn’t want this.” My father’s Irish accent was so much worse when he was emotional. Sometimes I could barely understand him, but this time I could.

  “What Daniel wants doesn’t matter now.” I walked into the room, unable to stand there a second longer.

  It’s a little like ripping off a bandage, I think. After many years of considering it, I think we all fall into one of two categories. We either pull it off, slowly, trying to process each moment, terrified of the agony but drawing it out in the process. Or we rip it off because we can no longer stand the idea of the pain and think the sooner we get through it, the better.

  But in the end, the pain is all the same. Aching. Never-ending.

  “Are you ready?” The coroner—or his lackey, or whoever held the sheet at two in the morning around there—asked. His gloved hands clasped the edge of the sheet. There was no question what was under that rectangle of off-white cotton. A body was there.

  I wasn’t ready. I would never be ready. I would be stuck in this place for the rest of my life. I could stand there and be content because until he pulled the sheet back, Daniel could still be alive.

  Please wake up.

  He didn’t wait for me to be ready. A good thing, really, because we both might have grown old there. He pulled the sheet back revealing a body that looked nothing like my Daniel.

  Oh, it was him. I knew that right away. Daniel lay there, unmoving. He wouldn’t smile at me again, his face crinkling and his dimples making me sigh. His blue eyes wouldn’t widen in laughter or roll when I did something stupid. He wouldn’t do anything again.

  I nodded. I wasn’t struck by a need to hold him. He wasn’t there. What was left behind was just stupid flesh and bones, and they meant nothing now without his soul to animate him.

  And I was nothing without his soul to lift mine up.

  I walked out of the morgue, a different human being.

  I thought death was the worst thing that could happen to me and Daniel. I was very young then.

  Chapter One

  Dallas, TX

  Five years later

  “I have to say I’m surprised,” the gentleman across the table from me said. “I honestly expected someone of your reputation to be, well, a bit older.”

  I looked up from the menu I was pretending to study. There was no actual need to read it. I had it memorized, but it gave me time to make assessments concerning my potential client.

  Lucas Halfer made a memorable first impression. By all appearances, he was a man in his prime, perhaps forty or forty-five. The world I dealt in was rife with secrets and things that were not what they seemed to be, so I took nothing for granted. If he’d come to see me, he likely had something to hide.

  Lucas Halfer glowed with the suave inner confidence of a man who knew he looked good in his tailored Armani suit and what had to be thousand dollar Italian shoes. He was well groomed, but there was nothing metro about him. If I had to guess, I would say he had not always been so wealthy. He’d probably fought his way to any power he accumulated. There was a certain roughness to his features that no amount of polishing could eliminate. It was his obvious wealth that put my guard up the minute he’d walked into Canelli’s for our meeting.

  Why would a man who always bought the best be looking to hire me?

  “Looks can be deceiving, Mr. Halfer,” I replied with what I like to think of as my sassy smile. Perhaps I could make up for my lack of designer labels with youthful flirting.

  He studied me for a moment, assessing me with a singular purpose. Those dark eyes pinned me. Black as night, they seemed to have a power all their own.

  And then the moment was gone. He smiled, a smooth expression that spoke of social ease. “A truer thing has never been said, Ms. Wharton. There is a reason we should never judge a book by its cover. Even when the cover is so very lovely. Now, what’s good here?”

  I breathed a little sigh of relief, the odd moment behind us. It was easier to talk about the menu. But suspicion was playing at the back of my mind.

  I was twenty-five years old and liked to consider myself quite the up-and-comer in the world of procurement. That’s a fancy way of saying I was a thief. I was a good thief, on her way to being a great thief, but as Mr. Halfer pointed out, I was young. There were more experienced thieves out there with more ferocious reputations. Since striking out on my own, I’d run a solid ten jobs with an excellent rate of return and a very small mortality rate.

  Still, the jobs had been smallish up until now, and there was that incident in San Francisco. I didn’t blame myself for that screw up. Normal people use alarms and high tech lasers to protect their valuables. Civilized people don’t set bear traps. It was a rookie mistake I didn’t plan on making again, God rest Morty O’Brien’s poor soul.

  Given my youth and relative inexperience, I wondered what had sent Mr. Halfer to my small, out of the way part of the world. I could think of half a dozen other crews I would pick if I needed an object procured and possessed sufficient funds. So what did Mr. Moneybags want with me? The waiter chose that moment to take our order. I was gratified to see that he pretended not to know me. Discretion was why I usually held my client meetings at Canelli’s. It was dumpy and trapped in the fifties, with its retro booths and tables with red and white checkered linens. The walls were covered in wood paneling that had seen better days, and the bar had a solid, well-used feel to it. It was the kind of bar where you ordered a martini—not some fruity apple or peartini, but a solid gin martini, just like Dino liked ‘em. Canelli’s had no windows, so there was a perpetual gloom to the dining area. Because there were no windows, there were also no prying eyes to look inside from the safety of the street. If you wanted to know what went on in Canelli’s, you had to take a chance and enter the den. It looked like the set of a Martin Scorsese crime drama, and with good reason. It really was run by the mob, and they trained their staff well. They also made a kickass chicken piccata.

  Orders taken and waiter dispersed, Mr. Halfer studied me over his expensive glass of Chianti. “Usually I prefer to handle these situations over the phone. I’m afraid I rarely get to leave the office these days, but I wanted to meet you in person. I never would have thought the daughter of Harry Wharton would turn out so lovely.”

  It took everything I had not to grimace at the mere mention of my father’s name. It’s not that I didn’t love my dad. I did and I do. But liking him can be a much more difficult thing to accomplish.

  “Mr. Halfer, if you’re trying to get to my father through me, I can assure you it won’t work,” I said through a tight-lipped smile. It wasn’t the first time some client tried to use me to get the great Harry Wharton to take their call. Dad was a legend in the business and rarely took on new clients. “He books his own jobs and doesn’t listen to my counsel. You should really call his assistant. I can give you her number, though the last time I talked to Christine, she was pushing twenty-three. He’s probably traded her in for a younger model, but he always makes sure the phone number doesn’t change.”

  Mr. Halfer laughed, a deep, rich sound that I found somewhat unsettling. “Let me set your mind at ease, Miss Wharton. I’m only interested in hiring you. This is important to me. You’re the one for the job. I like the makeup of your crew. It’s solid. I think your father works with too many contractors.”

  I wasn’t buying the flattery, but smile
d anyway. There was no reason to play the tough girl, not yet anyway. “I’m glad to hear that. I assure you, Mr. Halfer, my work is impeccable, and my crew is discreet. You’ll find us more than capable of handling the job. What exactly is the job?”

  With an elegant aplomb, he reached for the bottle of wine and filled my empty glass halfway. “Now, now, Miss Wharton, there’s no need to rush things. I like to take my time and sample the pleasures this world has to offer. Please enjoy the wine. It’s truly a joy to taste. There is nothing quite like it where I come from.”

  Now my radar was beeping. “And where do you come from Mr. Halfer?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know the answer.

  In the low light of the restaurant, his eyes were like dark mirrors and his smile a slightly sinister thing. “All in good time, Miss Wharton. But if you really want to get down to business, I suggest you invite your vampire to join us.”

  I kept my smile in place, but he’d thrown me for a loop. “What are you talking about?”

  “I assume he’s yours,” Mr. Halfer continued, not skipping a beat. “I’m talking about the sandy-haired lad who’s trying hard to look like he’s enjoying a martini he can’t actually drink. Or is it mere coincidence?”

  Yep, that was my vampire. I sighed and gestured for Daniel to come over. His cover was blown. He slid off the barstool with a preternatural grace that set my heart racing. The ease of his movement was only one of the blessings death had brought Daniel.

  “He’s not human,” Daniel accused flatly as he eased into an empty chair.

  I somehow managed not to retort with a childish “duh,” but the look in Daniel’s blue eyes told me he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  A human would most likely have ignored Daniel completely. Their unknowing eyes tended to slide off of his form until he wanted a person to see him. By that time, it was usually far too late to avoid becoming a late-night snack. There were humans who knew about vampires and the other members of the underworld, myself included, but I thought it unlikely that Lucas Halfer was anything so mundane as a human.