Read Online Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke - Free Book Online Page A

would be at work. Specifically, she figured Sala would be at work, hunched over his fancy atomic-powered robots. And she needed his house empty.
    Breaking and entering wasn’t much of a crime for a girl who had grown up in the smokestack district, even though she knew it could get her license revoked and land her in jail for a few months. And normally she would have waited, just like Mr. Vasquez had taught her, biding her time and asking questions. But Lady Luna was paying her for speed as well as discretion, and so Eliana slipped back into her favorite secondary-school hobby.
    Sala’s house looked like all the other houses, only his yard didn’t have any trees in it, just some patchy grass and a couple of empty flowerpots. Eliana walked around to the side of the house as if she lived there. A metal gate led into the back garden. It wasn’t locked. She stepped through the gate, letting it click shut behind her. The back garden was small and cramped and overgrown. Still nicer than Eliana’s crappy tenement apartment.
    At the back door, Eliana slipped the metal file out of her purse. After a second or two of fumbling, the motions came back to her: insert, twist, flick your wrist. The lock snapped. Eliana pushed the door open and stepped inside, pocketing the file. At least she was wearing a pair of her mother’s cotton gloves. More than she’d ever remembered to do when she was younger.
    The house was darkened, the air still. Not a lot of clutter. Eliana scanned the narrow living room, the dining room, and the kitchen and didn’t find anything. She went upstairs. A bedroom, an office, a bathroom. She went through the office first, shuffling through thepapers stacked on the desk—mostly bank notices and check stubs from the city and a few memos about phone calls. Eliana looked at each memo closely. Juanita Villarreal, Hector Cabo. Phone numbers were scrawled across the bottom.
    Something caught her eye.
    Eliana tossed the memos aside. A matchbook lay on the desk, crammed up next to a cup of pens. Black background, a flame-colored flower twisting across the surface. It was the same design as the one on the sign at the Florencia, that popular bar on the edge of the docks.
    A bar owned by Ignacio Cabrera.
    Eliana flipped the matchbook over. Opened it. She didn’t find anything.
    She was numb. Christ, if Cabrera already had the documents, Eliana would never be able to get them back. Not unless she asked Diego, and she knew what he would say—
    Downstairs, a door slammed.
    Eliana froze. All the breath poured out of her body. Footsteps echoed across the bottom floor.
    Get out, she thought.
    She slipped out of the office. The footsteps were still downstairs. She took a deep breath, trying to calm the rattle of her nerves. She’d done this before, been inside a house when the owner came home. A couple of times she’d even managed to escape.
    She crept down the stairs, pressing her feet against the baseboards so they wouldn’t squeak. She went a couple of steps and stopped to listen. Silence. She went two more and stopped again. This time she heard the murmur of a voice. One voice. The occasional pause. Maybe he was on the telephone.
    Eliana crept the rest of the way down. Nothing was waiting for her at the landing except a clear two-meter shot to the front door. She peered around the banister. Didn’t see anybody. But she could hear the voice more clearly now.
    “—on the list today? . . . Listen, it’s imperative I hand it over directly. . . . No, I won’t tell you what it says. It’s for his eyes only—”
    For a moment Eliana was torn. She knew she needed to get thefuck out of the house, but part of her wanted to linger, listen in on the conversation, see what she could learn.
    Somewhere off to the side, a floorboard creaked.
    Eliana’s whole body went cold. But the conversation hadn’t ended.
    “I did all the work! I want the credit!”
    Decision made. Eliana stepped off the last stair and walked quickly