She pretends she doesn’t hear the faint scrape of a bare foot on the loft floor, the rustle of loose hay being disturbed. Max smells nervous, something he’ll have to work on. The faintest brush against her side and then… bells tinkle and she spins, catching Max’s boney wrist in her hands. “You lose,” she says with a snort. “Maybe you aren’t cut out to be a thief.” “Uncle Darragh says we got Tinker blood,” Max says. His mouth puckers into a pout and freckles stand out on his cheeks like the dots on the exclamation points of his anger. Harper almost reminds him that he’s no blood of theirs at all, much less Uncle Darragh’s kin, but she swallows those words. They’ll just hurt him and anyway, because who cares where he came from? He’s hers now; Mom said so. Her responsibility. “Maybe,” she says with a quick shrug that sets the bells looped over her belt to chiming again.
