beautiful thieves | ✓

twenty-eight

Blake leads me up to the library. I haven't been here much but it's one of my favourite rooms in the mansion, with the shelves upon shelves of books and a spiral staircase that leads to a second floor of yet more books. While Blake searches for whatever he's looking for, I spin the huge, golden globe ornament in the middle of the room before brushing a hand over the spines of the books, all speckled with dust from decades of abandonment.

Blake calls me over as he pulls out a book from a shelf. It's huge and made with a very pretty material, the deckled edges of the pages painted gold.

"Old-fashioned, I know," Blake says, moving to place it onto a nearby mahogany table. "But Danielle's a sucker for tradition."

"What is it?" I ask, running my fingers over the cover. There's no title, no author, just beautiful, intricate patterns painted onto the leather.

"Have a look."

I smile. "You're being very mysterious."

"Just setting the atmosphere," Blake shrugs.

I shake my head in amusement before opening the book. I still don't understand what it is, but as I flick through the pages, I see hundreds of pictures. The first of them are in black and white, showing groups of gorgeous people smiling for the camera. Then there's photos of individual people, all of them looking like they belong in a modelling magazine, and each of them have a name beside them.

"Who are they?" I ask.

"The thieves before us."

My head swivels to look at him with wide eyes. "How long has this been going on for?"

"Well, our thieves have been around for about a hundred years, but nobody knows when the first group were created."

"Our thieves?" I ask, eyebrows raised. "There's others?"

He smirks at my curiosity, glancing down at the book. "Keep going."

There's a lot more photos, stunning girls around my age dressed in extravagant dresses and hairstyles and men in suits with some wearing top hats. There's so much diversity, too, with all different ethnicities and backgrounds. It's like racism has never been a part of this world, as even in the fifties when racism was so disgustingly bad, I'm seeing all the skin colours there are to see. I smile along with the people in the images and chuckle at how crazy the outfits get when I reach the thieves of the eighties and nineties, all neon clothes and flared denim and crimped hair. They all look so happy, so powerful, and I'm in disbelief that I ended up being a part of this. I keep flipping through until I see a group of all too familiar people.

"Puberty hit you hard," I chuckle, pointing at a smiling Blake in the photograph. He laughs at it from beside me, looking at the photo with a fond smile on his face. I don't think I've seen anything like it.

"I was fifteen then," he tells me. "One of the youngest they've had."

I scan through the smiling faces, seeing a younger Zavier stood beside Danielle, who is as stunning as ever with a youthful face, then beside her is the only person who isn't smiling; an intimidating woman with a stern face. She's beautiful, but her face is etched with lines and her eyes show barely any life.

"That was Danielle's mother," Blake tells me, but I had guessed as much. "She was probably the one person in the world that terrified me."

I nod my head, my smile turning to a frown. "Danielle's told me about her. About what she did and... how she died."

He sighs. "I know. I was one of the lucky people who had to drag her body out of the river."

I glance at him, feeling a little nauseous at the reminder of the story. "Was it really bad?"