A Game of Hearts and Heists: A Steamy Lesbian Fantasy Romance (Girl Games Book 1)

It’s ball-breakingly early when we meet the team at the edge of the city. I can’t bring myself to actually check my watch, but the morning birds haven’t started singing, and I know it wasn’t even five when Stirling crawled into my room and poked me awake, grunting about a hangover.

I mixed up a set of herbs Quinn gave me and force fed Stirling, who perked up immediately. I guess The Poisoner is a dab hand with potions after all.

Jacob arrives first, a giant rucksack on his back. Remy next, a slimmer pack on hers, with a wire water tube running from the pack clipped up to the strap.

We’re all dressed in a combination of black combat trousers, sweat-proof tops and hiking boots. Finally, Morrigan and Quinn arrive. Quinn has pinned her hair up into a quiff. The sides look freshly shaved, her neck exposed. I want to run my lips down her skin, along her collarbone, listen to her moan.

“Scarlett?” Stirling says, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“What?”

“Stop gawking, and pull the map,” Stirling says, wrenching me around and pulling the map out of my rucksack pouch. “Let’s run the plan one more time, Scarlett?”

“Okay, Stirling is scout with the map. We’re going in through the derelict mansion in the south quarter of the city and then through the Never Woods. We get in and out of the woods today. We do not camp there. The pace today will be hard and fast. Understood?”

Everyone murmurs agreement.

“We’ll enter the city here,” I point to the southern end of the Border map. “From there, it’s a two-day walk across the city and we expect to camp in this area.” I slide to another section.

“Quinn and Morrigan agree the best approach to the actual palace is through the escape tunnels. Quinn says they’re unguarded, though she suspects there will be runic security. That’s where you come in, Remy.”

Remy nods.

“It’s here we split. Stirling and Jacob, you’ll head off to find bikes or carriages. And you’ll have how long to get them up and running?”

“Three hours, tops,” Jacob says.

“Excellent. Then we enter the palace through the basement. Quinn, you take it from here.”

She squeezes into the middle of the group. “We’re going to use the wall cavities. There’s one section between floors where we’ll have to pass an open corridor. That’s the riskiest part in terms of exposure. We’ll make our way through to the east wing of the palace and then head to the observatory. That’s when Remy and Morrigan will take over to locate the hidden room. From there, you two will need to override the security systems to reveal the room and get us in. We take the map and get out via the nearest exit. We’ll likely trip security taking the map, meaning a dog fight out of the palace gardens. This will be the most dangerous part. And we’re regrouping where?” Quinn glances at Jacob.

“We’ll meet you at the end of the west gardens. Hopefully, we’ll have bikes ready and we can follow the tracks out of the city and through the Border.”

“Great, everyone ready?” Scarlett says.

There’s a mumbled nod of agreement.

“Alright, let’s head out. We’re taking the sub to the city limits and then we’re on foot,” Jacob says.

Half an hour later, we’re climbing off the subway and heading down a deserted track. The air is crisp and sharp, the dawn warmth not quite ready to tickle the horizon. It’s coming. But we need to be inside the mansion tunnels before the light rises or we’ll be too easily caught.

Stirling sets a relentless pace marching down the track at speed. Twenty minutes of keeping up with her and there’s a line of sweat running down my spine. Quinn has a sheen over her forehead, and even Remy and Jacob are pink on the cheeks.

Stirling stops, waves her hands at us. We scoot into the trees and hustle up next to her.

“That’s the mansion,” she says, pointing about half a click across the field. There’s a decrepit building that looks more like a demolition hazard than a previous mansion.

“We’re going in there?” I whisper.

“You bet,” Remy says, crawling forward to the threshold of the trees.

“Can you reach security this far out?” Quinn asks.

“No, but I can assess whether there’s any outer perimeter we need to watch for,” Remy says.

She adjusts herself till she’s kneeling and takes her backpack off. I hold it for her, and she inches towards the edge. She takes a deep breath, runs her hand through her white spiked hair, and settles herself. She holds her hands out, palms flat towards the direction of the derelict mansion.

“If you want to see what I see, touch my arms,” she says.

The rest of us glance at each other and then scramble to get to Remy first. Stirling, Morrigan and I touch one arm, and Quinn and Jacob lay their fingers on her other one.

Remy’s hands shudder, moving faster and faster until the vibrations are so rapid there’s a hazy halo all the way around her palms, and then my vision blurs.

When it clears, the view is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

“Cool, huh?” Remy whispers.

“Beyond,” Quinn says.

I hear her words, but I can no longer see her. My chest tightens. I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. It’s fine, we’re all fine, miles away from anything.

I turn back to the mansion, and the copper mesh of cogs decorated with runes surrounding it. It’s vast, stretching the entire way around the mansion grounds, and at least fifty feet in the air. Then, much closer to us, there’s another mesh fence made of the same rune covered cogs. Each of them connected to the other, a network of spinning russet moving in a hypnotic pattern.

“I knew it,” Remy says. “If we’d gone ahead, we’d have tripped the mansion’s outer security system.”

“How do you disarm it?” Morrigan says, the excitement for new knowledge, a new skill she can collect, evident.

“Like this.”

I can’t see her hands, but I can sense the movement beneath my fingers. The cogs in the closest security fence move, twisting this way and that. Sometimes halting. Occasionally, one turns blue or deepens from copper to fiery red.

“Shit,” Remy says. Her arms shake under the pressure of magic threading through her veins. Warmth from the muscle strain crests through her top.

She backs up the series of rune movements she just made and the cogs drop from red to a burnished brass.

“Little fuckers had a secondary runic subsystem buried in the interlocking threads.”

She shunts her body forward. A cog vibrates in the centre of the fence and then poof, the whole mesh of cogs and runes dissolves, evaporating into the rapidly vanishing night.

My vision returns to normal. The forest, the team and all our kit reappears.

“Nice one, Remy,” I say and give her a tap on the back.

“I’ve never seen that done before,” Quinn says.

We pick up our packs as the stars wink out and a flourish of molten orange and yellow stripe the horizon.

“Okay, let’s go. We need to get into the house before the sun rises, and we still have the mansion’s local security to get through,” Remy says.

“Follow me,” Stirling says and once again sets a gruelling pace.

We keep to the fence lines, and even though it takes a little longer, we go around the outside of the field rather than crossing it directly. Though there isn’t meant to be any security here, we can’t take any chances.

The closer we get to the mansion, the more my senses tingle. The wind is too still, too quiet. Bird song vanishes, noise mutes like the air in high winter after a snowfall. It sets my teeth on edge. When we’re close enough to the mansion, Remy can access the security. She signals for us to drop and wait. She steps toward the mansion and repeats a similar series of movements as she did in the forest. This time, none of us touch her but watch instead. Her eyes lighten, the pupils turning grey and then morphing into black as her magic flares to life and pearlescent light as white as her hair circles her fingers.

There’s a shift in the air, a loosening almost, and then she returns to us.

“Idiots,” Remy said. “Whoever set the security here is an amateur. They thought making the outer fence tighter would prevent anyone from getting in, but the building was practically an open door. We’re good to go.”

The six of us get up.

I take the mansion in properly for the first time. It’s old, so old the stone doesn’t look real. Decayed enough that it’s no longer brown, but not quite grey either. The exterior doesn’t seem to be solidly anything, rough in some places, smooth in others. Like the house is showing us whatever it thinks we want to see. There are half a dozen turrets dotted around the roof, this house taller than normal. Most are only one or two stories high, this one is four at least.

In the middle of the front facing wall, near the highest floor, is a circular hole. As if some carving or sculpture or maybe a clock lived there.

We don’t need to go up that high though, the tunnels that run under the Border and through to the Never Woods are in the basement.

The windows nestled in the brick are cracked and broken. Air should rush through, as there was a biting chill this morning, but there’s no sound, no movement save for a cluster of blackbirds sitting on the broken roof, half of the tiles caved in like a beaten face.

I shudder.

The birds don’t sing.

They just watch us.

Beady, judging.

The skin on the back of my neck hackles, ridges of goosebumps rising. I hate it when things are too easy. Nothing is ever easy. Not if it’s worth it, not if the prize is big enough.

I scan the area. Push my hearing, try to sense movement, anything unusual, bodies moving in the wind, feet crunching soil and gravel. There’s nothing. No movement. No motion. We’re clear.

I nod my approval, even though every ounce of training I’ve ever had is screaming at me that something is wrong, that I shouldn’t trust the ease by which we’re progressing.

“Wait…” I put my hand out, and everyone halts. “Keep your wits about you, okay? This place gives me the creeps.”

We approach the door as the sun peeks over the horizon, yellow rapidly filling the sky and the warmth of morning settling on our faces.

Stirling steps out and pushes the door an inch. No creak. No, nothing, just the same muted air.

I edge closer to Quinn, instinct driving me to protect her.

“What was this place?” Jacob asks.

“Castle Clock House,” Morrigan says. “I can feel the tick, tick, tick of the mansion’s magic. But it seems… off somehow. The beat of the magic isn’t rhythmic, it’s skipping a beat.”

“Is it safe for us to go in there?” Remy says.

“I don’t see another way through to the Border, do you?” I say.

“Not without being seen. Not without alerting the Border Lord. Not without the Queen’s sanction, and definitely not in the time scale we have,” Quinn answers.

“Then we don’t have a choice,” Remy nods.

She shoves the door wide open and we creep in. Unlike castles and mansions still living and full of magic, this one doesn’t welcome us in the same way. Instead of intense pressure as we enter, it greets us with a silken touch, a featherlight caress that throbs against my skin. And then in a blink, it evaporates.

Jacob is the last one in and closes the door, plunging us into darkness. Morrigan opens her palm and a fist-sized flame fires to life. But no sooner is it roaring in her hand than she throws it up and away. It’s sucked into a lone lightbulb hanging from the hallway ceiling.

Spiders crawl under my skin. Everywhere I look are clocks. Tall ones, broken ones. Small wrist watches litter the floor in fractured pieces. Ornate antique ones stacked on rickety shelves. Smashed cogs, screws and tools smother the floor and furniture.

The walls beat. They warp and swell. Beat. Beat. Pause. Like the castle has arrhythmia.

“We need to move. Let’s get into the tunnels as quick as we can.”

I slide my hand into Quinn’s. It makes me relax knowing she’s close, that I can protect her if something happens.

Stirling leads us deeper into the house. Room after room, derelict, decaying, paper peeling off the walls, clocks smashed, abandoned. The unnerving click and tick on the edge of our hearing.

There and not there.

We reach the heart of the house, and Stirling pulls open a wooden door with a staircase that leads into darkness.

“Morrigan, light?” Stirling says.

She throws hovering flames down to the basement. Stirling moves to enter. But I pull her back.

“No. Me first.” I’m the most trained, I can react the fastest. I draw a blade from my hip and push in front of her. She nods and slides in behind me, taking her blade out too.

I step down, down, down.

Until the flames searing light against the fathomless blackness makes my eyes ache. The tunnel swallows everything: light, sound, thoughts, sanity.

The tunnel floor is dank. Shallow puddles of darkened water splash my boots. The walls are slick and wetter than expected. Mould is so thick in here, I can taste it clawing at my throat. When the first breeze whips in from the Never Wood, it brings the tang of iron, of blood. My muscles tighten, my body listening, straining for clues and warning sounds. But there’s nothing except the growing stench of coagulating blood.

We reach the end of the tunnel. Slow and steady, I push the door, and I know instantly something is wrong. The air when we entered the house was warm, the morning sun blooming and pouring heat over New Imperium. But as the entrance eases open, it’s a frigid chill that whips in. And while the light is the same dim orange, it’s not morning. I step out and glance at my watch.

“Fuck,” I growl as the rest of the team pours out of the tunnels.

“The castle fucked with us in there. It’s already 5pm.”

“5pm?” Stirling shouts.

“Keep your fucking voice down, Stir. We don’t want to alert anyone.”

Morrigan steps close. “I think it was the castle’s residual magic. It felt off when we went in. I didn’t feel any animosity from the house. I don’t think it meant to harm us. It’s just sick.”

“It’s put us a day behind,” I say.

“It’s worse than that,” Jacob says, staring at the map in Stirling’s hand.

“He’s right, we’re not going to get through the forest tonight,” Stirling answers.

“Fuck.” Jacob wipes his mouth. “Now what?”

“We’ll have to camp in the woods,” I say.

“They’re full of militia, though,” Quinn says, her voice quiet. Everyone turns to her.

“We don’t have much choice. If we walk through the night, we’ll be exhausted tomorrow.” I kick the ground with the toe of my boot, a flare of heat bubbling in my gut.

“I can set up a security field around our camp, and maybe Morrigan can juice me up so it holds for the night,” Remy says.

“Great idea,” Jacob says. “And we could rotate sentry duty, keeping an eye out for militia.”

“Fine. We move out now and walk for as long as possible. We’ll camp and sleep for six hours, and then we’ll get up early and make it as far through the city as we can.”

“Agreed. We can camp early tomorrow and recover in a safer area,” Stirling adds.

“Into the woods we go then,” Quinn says and pulls up her snoody.