Little Thieves (Little Thieves, #1)

by Margaret Owen

The little thief steals gold, but the great one steals kingdoms; and only one goes to the gallows. —Almanic proverb

“I think there are lives that make it easy to be good. Or what most people call good. When you have wealth, status, family, it’s easy to be a saint, it costs you nothing. I can’t say if you’re a good person or not. But the more I know of you, the more I understand that the world keeps making you choose between survival and martyrdom. No one should fault you for wanting to live.”

You’re a walking morality lecture with something to prove, and I’m a scoundrel with an unflinching sense of entitlement to other people’s property.”

It’s not a challenge; it’s a quiet, immovable fact. For all my schemes and façades and artifice, I am not prepared in the slightest for the simple, devastating intimacy of being believed.

“The secret isn’t to try to watch the cards. That’s what you want me to do. But right before you stop moving them, you look at the mark.” He leans forward and flips the card on the right. The Queen of Roses stares up at me. He … he knew where she was all along. “The secret,” Emeric says, “is to watch you.”

I don’t know what’s worse: that he’s slipped into my heart like a knife, or that I like the feel of him there.

“I cannot tell you how many principles of knife safety you are violating right now.” “Where’s your sense of adventure?” “When it comes to stab wounds? On indefinite sabbatical.”