his head. The ski mask covered most of his gorgeous features and silky brown hair. In the sun, it looked like rich, warm soil, the kind you’d find in a desert, with sparks of reddish-brown I longed to run my fingers through.
The train curved on the track, heading for the Margaret Bridge. End to end, it was two minutes and twenty seconds. We had to be off before it reached the other side.
The fae side.
My heart rapped against my ribs, telling me in code I was an idiot. I was good, remarkable even, but if something happened and we were caught by the fae? Tossing out the thought, I primed my legs, seeing the last few cars coming up the track.
“Now!” Keeping low, I scurried for the back of the train, my legs kicking back, picking up speed. The traveling coaches were the first ones, leaving the back ones holding cargo. Easier to unhook in Prague while the front carriages continued on their journey.
Leaping for the step, I landed soundlessly and skipped up, leaving the stair clear for Caden to jump on.
His boots clanked against the metal, his hands gripping the handles as sweat dripped from under his mask. My concentration faltered as I pulled out my favorite fae device—a very high-tech lock pick, which I pinched from our impound room at headquarters. The magic easily unlatched any kind of locks, which made it illegal and only found on the black market.
Caden climbed up, all six feet of him moving beside me as I stood, stuffing the device back in my pocket. He pulled at the door handle, opening the entrance to the carriage.
This was the fifth time we had raided a train. Caden tried to hide the fact that my kind of fun terrified the hell out of him. He never backed down or tried to dissuade me, but his taut expression when I brought it up told me he did not enjoy it at all. But Caden Markos would be the last person to admit fear, to ever back down from a challenge.
His father did not allow weakness.
He peered down at his wrist, tapping his watch. “You have a minute forty. Clock is on. Go.”
I nodded, slipping into the car, knowing exactly where to head. The laborers loading the carts weren’t creative and probably didn’t care what happened to the cargo once it left the warehouses. They would never see a quarter of the money these products earned.
Blood rushed into my ears as I beelined for the crates most likely loaded with magic-infused pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. Hard drugs were illegal in most of the Western world—the Unified Nations it was now called—the countries under the rule of Lars, the Unseelie King, and Kennedy, the Seelie Queen. But here, if it could make money, it was fair game. This shit sold on the black market for millions, and the richest, most powerful people here were profiting off it.
My connection at HDF—Human Defense Forces—helped me put a nugget of it back in the hands of the individuals who worked in labor shops. Let them sell it on the streets and earn extra money to get the medicine for their child’s illness or pay rent for their run-down homes. Some thought the mysterious hero who robbed the trains, giving back to the poor, was some kind of vigilante—one of them.
I wasn’t.
I was one of the elite, one of those humans who lived within the protected walls of the area called Leopold, a twelve-block section between the bridges going out to the old Bajcsy-Zsilinszky road, where HDF had taken up residence in the old parliament building on the Pest side. Stuffed with military and the rich, the HDF’s main goal was to gain power over the fae, which was a daily struggle against their magic and supremacy, fueling an impending war between the two sides.
Neither side cared about the place where the poor, thieves, murderers, druggies, and mixed-species dwelled. Both sides ignored the lawless land, the terrain where the “savages” lived, which consumed most of the Pest side like the black plague.
My fingers dug into a crate and ripped off the top, finding huge uncut blocks of fairy dust, cocaine laced with fae magic, which got fae high but had humans so addicted and desperate for it that it contributed to most of the murder and suicide rates.
Outside the window, HDF headquarters flashed by, the gorgeous, gothic-revival, white stone building stretching sharply up to the sky, all but glowing with the