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  For Cindy—I seriously doubt this book would have been finished without your support and unwavering help.

  1

  WE GET WHAT WE DESERVE

  St. Albinus of Angers Prison, Peru.

  Time? Beats me. I haven’t seen the sun in a week.

  I swore—loudly—and sat up with a start as ice water drenched me, shocking me out of whatever semblance of sleep my brain had managed to achieve, huddling against the stone wall in the corner I’d eked out to the left of the cell door. I’d reasoned the guards would be less likely to single me out if I was absent from their line of sight.

  So much for that idea.

  I bit down on the sides of my mouth to hold back the tirade of curses threatening to unleash at the guard standing over me, his features vague in the dim torchlight. Still, I caught the flash of gold teeth. I’d wondered more than once whether they were trophies from inmates—the mismatched sizes indicated as much.

  He hissed and I cast my eyes down, focusing on the flashlight glow reflecting off his black boots. Fear. That was something they expected from us—and if you didn’t deliver . . .

  Besides, this wasn’t the first or last time a guard would drench me with a bucket of frozen water. That was one of the first things I’d learned in this Peruvian hellhole. The second? Keep your mouth shut. Letting the guards see you sweat is like tossing a bucket of entrails at a pack of jackals. They don’t care if you’re already dead; they still move in for the kill.

  I blinked as he passed the flashlight over me, willing my eyes to adjust to the light faster as I kept them on the dirt floor. For the most part we were left in darkness, no lamps, no candles—no electricity either. Didn’t want anyone with an engineering bent getting any ideas.

  “Levántate. ¡Ahora!” the guard barked in Spanish, adding a hard kick to my leg just to be clear the message carried across the language barrier. Get up. Now!

  Again I bit my tongue as I used the wall to balance, pushing myself to stand on underused leg muscles as quickly as possible, the memories of the last few weeks coming back in an unwelcome rush.

  How long had it been since one of them had stopped by? A day? Two? I guessed it had been almost a full day since we’d seen the light pass by underneath the door—the anonymous deaf and mute Peruvian woman who walked the halls with her cart, sliding something reminiscent of food under the bolted and iron-reinforced door.

  Another brand of torture they’d cooked up—not the food but the latch: large enough to fit your arm through, small enough that your shoulder inevitably got caught. I should know—I’d gotten stuck twice, each time earning me a kick from the guard who’d found me.

  “¡Ahora!” Now!

  “Yeah, yeah, Kujo.” My nickname for our gold-toothed guard since he seemed to be more interested in using his mouth to growl than speak. “Getting up.” Not wanting to elicit another kick, I pushed myself off the wall, wincing at the resulting aches and pains. The guards didn’t strike me as particularly concerned with whether or not we were dead or maimed, and Albinus hadn’t been designed with long-term inmate survival in mind. More along the lines of “We stuck you here to rot away and die a horrible death, so get on with it already.”

  The prison I was in wasn’t Virgen de Fátima, the notorious Peruvian women’s prison, nor was I stuck in the desert in Ancón. No, this place was much worse. No virgins or scavengers circling overhead with a permanent offer of relief.

  This was the Albino Prison—St. Albinus of Angers, to be precise. The patron saint against pirates. The prison had been built in the 1600s to house the pirates that preyed upon the Spanish along the Peruvian coast. It was repurposed in the early 1900s by the International Archaeology Association and promptly scrubbed from the history books. Ancient pirate jail? What pirate jail? They used it to get rid of the odd thief who was stupid enough or unlucky enough to get caught pilfering goods out of the more . . . exotic South American sites, shall we say—the ones where the supernaturals hang out. Occasionally they just wanted their goods back, but mostly they just wanted us forgotten.

  Which begged the question, to what did I owe today’s honor? I tried again to calculate in my head how long I’d been down here. Without the sun or anything resembling a routine, day and night melded together, taking all sense of time with them. A week? Maybe.

  I stumbled as Kujo shoved me towards the door, my aching back protesting. That was another thing about the Albino, after a day or so you drifted off into a state between waking and sleep. It was a dark place, the one that waited in the back of your mind, a low pit of despair and boredom where the only things that seemed to play out were all the wrong choices that had landed you here.

  And if your mistakes were the sound track, your regrets were the script playing out in Technicolor, burning a permanent hole in your retinas.

  I wondered if that was on purpose—part of the Albino’s plan to keep the pirates imprisoned by stone and deep despair.

  Despite the iron shackles around my ankles and my wrists, I straightened and did my best to walk upright, back straight. I still had some standards to maintain.

  Funny thing was, irrespective of the prison, the questionable company, and the even more questionable guards, I didn’t need St. Albino’s help to wallow in the deep dark pit I’d sunken into of late—I’d found that place all on my own.

  “Pssst.” The sound, little more than a high-pitched, forceful hiss, came from the corner nearest the door.

  Kujo barked a command in Spanish—something in the local dialect that I didn’t quite catch—and kicked the lavatory bucket towards the disturbance.

  The cell I’d been locked up in was nine by nine feet, carved out of the cliffs with no seams to speak of; I’d checked every inch of it. Four of us shared it at the moment—and usually we had the sense to keep to ourselves.

  Out of the corner of my eye I glanced at the woman who’d risked drawing the ire of Kujo. It was Mathilda, a French archaeology graduate student who’d been on an IAA excavation of Písac—Incan ruins that weren’t Machu Picchu. She’d been caught lifting diagrams from one of the burial chambers, using rice paper and charcoal, and selling them online to discerning collectors.

  Mathilda was the youngest and most inexperienced of the four of us when it came to IAA’s extreme crackdowns. She I actually felt bad for. She really didn’t deserve to be here.

  The rest of us? Grave robbers of some stripe, every last one of us.

  The light from Kujo’s flashlight barely reached her; still, I could make out her face and the direction in which she jerked her chin—the slightest nod. Towards the cell door, now open.

  But it wasn’t escape she was hinting at. Faint footsteps echoed down the hall. One long, the second short, jarring, and uneven—as if one leg were shorter than the other or, as in this case, the knee were unable to bend.

  Shit. Miguelito.

  I hazarded a second sideways glance at my other two cellmates, Cora and Lucinda, but they kept their heads down, not wanting to have anything to do with whatever was about to come. I offered Mathilda a silent nod of thanks as Kujo shoved me out of the cell onto the jail’s slippery stone hallway just as our warden extraordinaire turned the corner.

  Miguelito was a small
man, and not just in stature; he was the kind of small man who is so threatened by his size that he hones himself into a particular kind of bully, one that’s driven solely by his need to make everyone around him feel inferior. His features were pinched, as if he were permanently angry, and there was an involuntary twitch to his lip that reached all the way to his nose. His features were otherwise unremarkable: dark hair shaved to disguise a receding hairline and failing, a rounded face, long ears, and disproportionate long front teeth—a mangy, lop-eared rabbit comes to mind, though the comparison was unkind to sick bunnies.

  As for the leg? According to Miguelito, his right knee had picked up shrapnel during a local eruption of Peru’s ongoing civil war. He struck me as too much of a coward, and my cellmates agreed. Mathilda figured he’d fallen drunk down a flight of stairs, and the two other women, Cora and Lucinda, guessed he’d been caught sleeping with someone’s wife and subsequently been beaten with a baseball bat.

  My money was on a disgruntled partner shooting it off in a dispute.

  As Kujo shoved me into the light, I noted that Miguelito’s nose was red and swollen and set off at a slight angle. I’d slammed him in the face with an old wood beam on my last escape attempt.

  He hadn’t liked that.

  “Miguelito,” I said, wary. Our warden had a couple of faces—or, well, two: volatile and semireasonable. The second only occasionally reared its head.

  “Charity,” he said.

  I flinched at the spittle that landed on my face but didn’t dare wipe it off. Miguelito offered me a forced smile that would have been right at home on a loan shark or pimp. “We have much to discuss today.”

  I returned the forced smile, showing my own teeth. “As long as it doesn’t involve any misplaced treasure. I’ve really bought into the IAA rehabilitation program, hook, line, and sink—oomph!” I doubled over with the shot to my kidneys, then glared over my shoulder at Kujo, who was grinning and hitting the palm of his hand with the billy stick.

  I did my best not to puke or pass out. “I guess that’s a no for talking to my IAA student representative?” I managed.

  Miguelito snickered.

  Now . . . that was out of the norm. Miguelito didn’t have much patience for my particular brand of contempt. Normally I’d be thrown back in the cell by now.

  “¡Vamos!” Miguelito barked, clapping his hands and setting off at a clipped pace down the corridor. Like a good guard dog, Kujo shoved me in the back with his stick, sending me stumbling over the slick stones after the warden.

  Did I mention these assholes were corrupt? A jail for thieves and pirates who are a thorn in the IAA’s side was a great idea on paper, but in practice, sticking the best—or worst—archaeology thieves on the South American continent into a single jail and paying the staff a minimum wage breeds an entirely different relationship. One that most definitely didn’t involve containing the problem.

  Being the entrepreneurial sort, Miguelito had figured out that right here, under his dictatorial thumb, were the locations to restricted digs, little-known tombs, secret temples—a gold mine of treasure all over South America and the channels to off-load it. The kind of information network that takes a lot of time, sweat, blood, and tears to build. Only Miguelito hadn’t been the one doing the shedding.

  Oh, mark my words, Miguelito would get his reckoning from the IAA one of these days. When they caught him. Despite being a greedy waste of otherwise vacant human space, he had a talent for institutional thieving and a good system—a rat warren of a system, but a good one.

  Why was it that the IAA always left the fat sewer rats in charge?

  A question for another day—once I got the hell out of here.

  Speaking of warrens . . . I counted the stones off silently as I followed Miguelito down the ever-branching cell-lined corridors. I had it memorized now: ten unevenly sized stones to the left, then a right turn, then another twenty stones until we reached his office door. Kujo’s breath was warm and rancid on my neck as he followed close behind, ready to prod me with the end of his baton should I slow. He’d learned to stay close right after escape attempt number two.

  “Para,” Kujo hissed. Stop. The command was followed by a sharp jab in the small of my back that had me stumbling in my shackles.

  Eyes still down, I heard Miguelito’s iron keys jingling against their key chain before the correct one was inserted into the old door lock. Again, electric and computer-derived locking systems might look high-tech and work in a regular prison system, but not when you were housing world-class thieves—and I wasn’t including myself in that estimation. I barely rated a petty thug.

  The door creaked open, the hinges shrieking, protesting the sorely lacking oil. Another shove in the center of my back sent me into the office. I swore as my bare feet scraped into the wood floor, picking up a splinter or two. Out of all the Albino’s cold stone interior, this was the one room where wood floors had been laid. I’d wondered at that—why bother when the stone served so well?—but then I had seen the blood and various other bodily fluids that had seeped into the cracks, years’ worth of stains concentrated around the plain wooden chair placed in the center of the room, a few feet away from an oak desk—an assortment of books and papers scattered across its surface in a haphazard order—or lack thereof.

  “Póngala en la silla,” Miguelito said, nodding at me as he maneuvered himself into his own comfortable seat. Get her in the chair.

  Did I mention Miguelito’s office smelled? Of people—the kind of lingering scent beaten into the very wood itself. Cramming a few centuries’ worth of human misery into a confined space. Not unlike when I had taken Captain to the vet’s and the very scent of the room had warned him that other cats had not had a good time there.

  Kujo shoved me again and another guard, taller than Kujo and leaner, stepped out of a darkened corner. He jammed the butt of his gun into my chest and pushed me towards the chair, just in case I hadn’t understood.

  I did what any self-respecting thief would do in the same situation: I sat, doing my best not to stare at the bloodstains on the floor.

  “Tell me, Charity, how are you enjoying your stay at the Albino?”

  I lifted my head to stare at Miguelito, who was smiling and regarding me like the rat he was from behind his large desk.

  Shit. He knew—or knew something. I decided to gamble and see just how much. “I’m disappointed in the room service,” I said.

  Miguelito chuckled before repeating what I had said in Spanish, eliciting snickers from Kujo and the new guard. “Room service,” he said to me, still smiling amiably. “Funny. What was it last time? You wanted cable TV, no? And before that, you asked to see a lawyer, yes?” He dropped the feigned smile. “You think you are a comedian, Charity?”

  I jerked my chin at his chuckling goons. “Not really, but from the sounds of it, those two do,” I said.

  Miguelito barked a command in Spanish I didn’t quite catch.

  Crack.

  “Ow!” I shouted as a blinding pain spread across the back of my head. I was rewarded with a sharp kick to my calf. I glared at Miguelito, but kept silent.

  Miguelito casually pulled a folder he’d been worrying out of the pile and flipped the cover open before sliding it my way.

  It was a collection of photos. Of me, but not just from my stint in Peru as Charity. Shit. Still, I stayed silent and gave Miguelito a blank stare.

  The first chinks in Miguelito’s pleasant facade showed. “¡Míralo! ” Look at it! he bellowed, in Spanish, then English.

  My chair was dragged to the desk, and Kujo “helped” me look, forcing my face down until my nose was pressed against the cheaply printed matte photos. I flinched, though it wasn’t as though I had much to worry about from paper—except maybe death by gangrened paper cuts . . .

  “And here I thought we were coming to an understanding about the business I am running in this prison, Charity—or should I say Owl?” One of his sparse eyebrows shot up. “Oh, yes, I know who
you are. I am not the idiot you have mistaken me for. How did the notorious Owl end up in my prison?”

  That was the first intelligent question I’d heard Miguelito ask. My stomach churned. Well, this certainly changed things—and bumped up my timeline—

  I screamed as Kujo’s club met my shoulder blade in just the wrong spot.

  Miguelito smiled viciously down at me. “We continue in English, no?” he said.

  I hazarded a glance over my shoulder at Kujo and his shadow of a bookend. They both wore slightly confused expressions now, and even exchanged a glance. Not wanting the muscle listening in was never a good sign.

  Goddamn it, I hate it when my plans get rushed.

  Some might say that if there is a golden rule for thieves, it’s “Don’t get caught,” a close second might be “Know where the treasure is before breaking in,” and a third would be “Have an escape route planned out before you start.”

  As I’d had none of those when I’d set out three weeks ago, I’d decided to challenge accepted wisdom and wing it. I mean, I sort of had the second one . . . The treasure was in here somewhere, I didn’t know exactly where, but still . . .

  And as for the other two? I was working on them—Hello.

  Sitting on the edge of Miguelito’s desk, peeking out from underneath a pile of papers, was another set of keys. This one heavier, antique, old. This trip to the warden’s office was already looking up.

  “Well?” Miguelito prompted, voice rising as he leaned his small frame across the desk, using it to make himself appear bigger and meaner, wearing his insecure Napoleon complex for the world to see, let alone his prisoner. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Well, the gig was at least partly up. And this was going to get messy real fast if I couldn’t manage some damage control. I set my jaw, pulled my backbone out of hiding, and stared right back. “What do you really want, Miguelito?”

  That caught him off guard. “It’s the logical question,” I continued. “I mean, we’re left in here to rot. Who cares who I am? Well, the IAA does but you haven’t handed me over to them, so I’ll ask you again.” I nodded at the pictures scattered across the desk. “What is it you want?”