By Hook or by Wolf

Whether we’re dealing with a human or a shifter thief, I don’t know. Either way, unless someone purposely knew about the alarms and was able to somehow control their stress and tension to the point of having a resting heartrate while robbing an art gallery, they couldn’t have gotten down here without somehow disabling the alarms.

I just don’t know how they did it.

It’s going to bother me for days, I realize. It’s going to be like a little itch in the back of my throat that I just can’t seem to scratch, no matter how hard I try. It’s a pity, really, because I was really hoping to relax a little bit this week. Now I know that no matter what I do, I’m going to be worried about the gallery and thinking about the little thief who did this.

There are no lights down here, but it doesn’t matter. We’re wolf shifters, for dragon’s sake. We’re all able to see perfectly in the dark and what we see is not what we were expecting. We make our way down the twists and turns of the hallway. By the time we reach the bottom, my own heartrate is pounding out of control.

How could this thief have come down here?

How could she have found the room?

Even if she located it, though, there’s no way she could get inside the jewel room. The lock was designed by none other than my father and he didn’t make mistakes. He never made mistakes. He ran this gallery for twenty years and he never had a single problem with it being robbed or with thieves breaking in.

Apparently, that luck has run out.

We turn the corner and there’s a collective gasp as we see the door to the jewel room is open.

“Fuck,” Lee says. He darts forward and into the room. Trevor is close behind him and I bring up the rear. I don’t run, though. There’s no point in that. If this woman cleared out the family jewels, there’s no stopping her. Someone so intelligent that she could break into the room, take our shit, and escape without detection is obviously a genius.

I enter the room and sure enough, it’s her.

There’s so much of her filling the room that I can’t quite handle it.

My inner-wolf is going nuts. He’s just begging to come out and play, but I think my wolf has the wrong idea about this woman. He thinks she could be our mate. What the actual hell?

I don’t want a mate.

I don’t need one.

He thinks that she’s someone we would like, though, and I don’t know that he’s entirely wrong about that. Would it really be so bad to date someone who was able to pull off a heist at a place like this? Someone brave, clever, and smart? Someone who smells incredible? Sounds exactly like the woman I’ve been waiting for.

But I’m not going to date a thief.

I’m certainly not going to take one as my mate.

“What did she get?” I ask, looking around. The diamonds that were gifted to my father by the dragon clan of Fablestone are still in place. The ruby necklace my mom got at Dragon Isle is still there. Hell, even the Gem of Malice is still in place. It’s my parents’ prize possession. They claim they got it from another world, another planet.

I’ve never bothered to question them about it because it’s always seemed so impossible, but my mother swears up and down it’s the most important thing she has.

“Nothing,” Lee says, obviously confused. “She got nothing. It’s all here.” He scratches his neck as he looks around, visibly confused. He looks the way I feel. None of this is making any sort of sense at all and it’s driving me crazy.

“So, you’re telling me that we’re dealing with a thief who broke into our building, disarmed our tech, got through the locks on the door to the jewel room, and took...nothing?”

“Not exactly,” Trevor says. He points to the wall where our family portraits are hanging.

Or were.

Now my mother and father’s pictures are still there, but there are three empty spaces on the wall where our own pictures used to be.

“What the hell?” Lee says, scratching his head now. So apparently, anxiety goes right to my brother’s skin. Watching him scratching himself makes me want to do the same thing, but I refuse. I’m going to stay totally in control until we sort this whole thing out.

Lee’s looking at the wall like there’s something none of us are quite getting and I know that he’s right. Why would someone break in only to steal our pictures? Footprints in the dust show that our little thief was definitely the one who took them. She wandered all over this place.

But why the pictures?

Why nothing else?

If I was going to rob an art gallery, especially an abandoned one, I would take my time choosing only the best and most wonderful items. I would choose one of the paintings of dragons flying over Dragon Isle. The artist, Olivia, was a dragon shifter herself. Then I’d choose diamonds that had been intricately placed in pieces of jewelry by shifters in Beeswax, Colorado. The women who designed the delicate diamond designs were absolutely unbeatable. There was nothing quite as