Painted Devils (Little Thieves, #2)

by Margaret Owen

To the wicked girls, The hard truth about shooting for the moon is, when you miss, you don’t always land among the stars. Sometimes all that slows the fall are the thorns. The good news is: The sun won’t see you coming.

A child’s eye fears the painted devil, but an elder wields the brush. —Almanic proverb

“Red-handed maid, red-blooded maaaaid, red was the maid o’ the river,” the horrible girl sang, like a cat in a territory dispute.

I haven’t bedded anyone yet because I haven’t desired it, and for much of the world, that means there must be something wrong with me. That the older I get, the more it becomes something to get over with instead of something to want for myself.

Both of us jump nearly out of our skins. “Saints and martyrs,” I gasp. “Present,” Willehalm says with the air of someone who has been saving the joke for a special occasion.

Lady Ambroszia

Emeric swiftly plants his hands on the desk, blocking Madame’s view of me. I can’t see the look on his face, but I can hear the sudden switchblade edge in his voice, see the flicker of uncertainty in Madame. “I promise you,” he says, with his deadly kind of calm, “for the rest of your life, you will look back on this moment and know that was the worst mistake you’ll ever make.”

Emeric straightens up and offers me his arm. “I have a code of conduct,” he says mildly. “So the worst mistake of your life wasn’t upsetting me. It was starting a fight with her.”

“Vanja!” I hear Vikram call. “My favorite criminal mastermind!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I think I would like to first acknowledge a nap, honestly. And I fully support you acknowledging one as well. Painted Devils is my first book drafted, edited, and released during a global pandemic, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from that, it’s that we all really need a nap. The thing they don’t tell you about your fourth book is that you have to keep coming up with new material for acknowledgments without cannibalizing the previous three, and by this time, the list of names you owe a firstborn to is getting extremely long. (Which means if I ever slip up and have a kid, we’d all better buckle in for a wild remake of the Judgment of Solomon.) I don’t think it would be possible to list everyone without pulping an acre of the Amazon, but I’ve assembled a sampling of the wonderful folks who made this book possible. And because I am an incurable Virgo, it’s coming to you as a bullet list: