A Crown for the Thief

Della Harrow reads locks, marks and pockets for a living, the only trade the burial-club quarter ever taught a girl filed small on purpose. When the woman who raised her dies quietly, accounts current, nothing owed, Della takes the one job she swore she never would: rob her own dead mistress's fortune out from under the auction house guarding it.

Reuben Vane builds locks he has already tried, and failed, to beat himself, which is the only kind of promise his trade lets him sell. His vault has never once been cracked. Then a job walks through his door wearing a thief's patience and hands he cannot read back.

He was hired to guard the fortune against her.

Nobody warned him what else was inside it.

When the proving turns Della's own hands into the evidence, the thief who came to steal a dead woman's vault discovers what an entire conspiracy was built to make of her. To survive it, she and the one man who can finally read her have to stop working the job from opposite sides of his iron and build something neither of their trades has a name for.

She has spent her whole life banking favors and never once asking for anything. Now she has to learn the one word her entire trade forbids.