Little Thieves (Little Thieves, #1)

by Margaret Owen

Little thieves steal gold, and great ones steal kingdoms, but only one goes to the gallows.

In the world I knew, there were three reasons a person would be wanted: for profit, pleasure, or power. If you could satisfy only one, they used you. Two, they saw you. Three, they served you.

“You’re what happens when an encyclopedia wishes on a star to be a real boy, if that encyclopedia was also an absolute prick.”

think about the knife in my boot. And the bottle of arsenic in my vanity. And the golden chain she’s wearing around her neck—if you don’t have your

No matter how many cards I lay between myself and the rest of the world, no matter how many lies I tell, how many lives I steal, it will never be enough. I will never escape the ghost in the mirror. I will never escape her, because I am haunted by myself.

I am not going to smile at him. I refuse on principle. (The principle is: I’ve already met my emotional-availability quota for the day.)

I am not coming out of this night grudgingly liking the smug bastard. I refuse on yet another principle (which is: There’s only room in this town for one smug bastard. That smug bastard is me).

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.”

I will always be haunted by myself

There has to be more, it’s Emeric and he wouldn’t do less than a three-part proposal, with footnotes and a bibliography.

(This is where I have to admit I’m impressed he’s coming up with the rhymes on the fly. Not bad for, you know, a horse.)

For someone who seems allergic to sitting in a chair properly, she’s still figured out the right way to sit on Irmgard’s back to keep her from going anywhere.

“I’m almost certainly going back to a life of crime the second those rubies run out anyway.” “I really wish you wouldn’t say that when it is going to be my professional obligation to stop you.”

He remembered. And it’s not just a someday, not an after; it’s soon. It’s together.

And lastly, to all the terrible girls: It’s a lie. You deserve the world.