The merchant's house sat dark against the evening sky. Derric had been right about the timing—owner gone for the week, staff given leave, nothing between them and the safe but wards and empty rooms.

  Derric moved along the garden wall, staying low, footsteps barely registering on the grass. Coin rode in his breast pocket, angled to catch the layout as they approached.

  AMATEUR HOUR: CONFIRMED.

  The back entrance had a lock that Derric handled before Coin could get bored watching. Good hands, steady nerves. He eased the door open, listened, then slipped inside.

  The house smelled like old wood and money, carpets thick enough to swallow footsteps. Derric navigated it all from memory, moving through the dark like he'd walked this route a hundred times already.

  The study was on the second floor. They took the servants' stairs, narrower and less likely to creak. Derric's breathing stayed even the whole way up.

  COMPOSURE: PROFESSIONAL.

  The study door wasn't locked. Why would it be? The safe was the security. Everything else was just rooms.

  Derric pulled out a small hooded lantern, cracking it just enough to see by. The light caught on bookshelves, a heavy desk, paintings of someone's ancestors looking disapproving.

  The safe sat in the corner, iron and substantial, covered in ward-marks that glowed faint blue in the darkness.

  Derric set Coin on the desk, angled toward the target.

  "That's it. Can you do it?"

  Coin studied the wards. Standard commercial work, catalogue wards that wealthy merchants bought by the package. Multiple layers, interlocking triggers, designed to punish brute force attempts. A mage would need an hour to unravel it safely. A thief without magical support wouldn't get it open at all.

  WARD COMPLEXITY: MODERATE.

  "Give me a minute."

  Coin rolled off the desk, dropped to the carpet with barely a sound, and crossed to the safe. The wards pulsed as Coin approached, sensing something, unable to categorize it. They'd been built to stop people. Coin wasn't people.

  The first layer was a trigger trap. Touch the door without the key, and it would scream loud enough to wake the whole street. Coin found the anchor point where the ward drew power and pinched it. Not broke. Pinched. The ward stayed intact but went quiet, confused, waiting for power that wasn't coming.

  LAYER ONE: NEUTRALIZED.

  The second layer was cleverer. A binding that would lock onto whatever touched the safe and hold it in place until the owner returned. Useful against thieves. Less useful against something that could leave and come back.

  Coin triggered it on purpose, felt it grab, felt it try to find something to hold onto. It found metal. It found old magic baked into that metal. It let go like it had grabbed a hot coal.

  LAYER TWO: REJECTED COIN.

  WISE CHOICE.

  Three more layers after that. A shock ward, a marking hex, something that might have been a slow poison delivery system. Coin dismantled them one by one, not rushing, taking the time to do it clean. No residue, no traces, nothing to suggest how the safe had been opened.

  The lock itself was mechanical and old-fashioned, which Coin appreciated. Listening to the tumblers, feeling them through the metal, letting the mechanism tell its own story until the door swung open.

  "Done."

  Derric was at Coin's side before the word finished landing. He reached into the safe and started pulling out contents—a lockbox heavy with coins, a velvet pouch that clinked with jewelry, papers that probably mattered to someone. He moved fast but not frantic, checking each item, keeping track.

  EFFICIENCY: HIGH.

  GREED: CONTROLLED.

  "There's more in the back."

  Derric paused. Reached deeper. His hand came out with a second pouch, smaller, heavier for its size. He weighed it in his palm, and his face said everything his mouth didn't need to.

  He tucked it away with the rest and jerked his head toward the door.

  Back through the study, down the servants' stairs, out the way they'd came. Behind them, the safe sat open and empty, wards still active but guarding nothing.

  MISSION: COMPLETE.

  COMPLICATIONS: ZERO.

  ***

  The tavern was a few streets over from Derric's usual territory. Neutral ground, he'd called it. A place where questions got you hurt.

  Derric had a table in the back corner, a bottle of something amber between them, and the look of a man who'd just gotten away with it. Coin sat on the table next to his cup, catching candlelight.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  "That was clean," Derric said. He poured himself a drink and downed half of it, then leaned back and let out a long breath. "I've worked with ward-breakers before, and it's never gone like that. The first one I hired spent so long preparing that the mark came home before we got inside. The second one panicked the moment something pushed back and I had to drag him out through a window." He shook his head, still grinning. "You walked up to that safe and the wards just... stopped. The binding one grabbed you and then let go like it had touched something it didn't want to touch. What was that?"

  "Old magic doesn't like older magic."

  ACTUAL ANSWER: PROBABILITY TILT.

  MYSTICAL DEFLECTION: MORE FUN.

  Derric considered that, turning it over like he was looking for the hidden meaning. He wouldn't find one. There wasn't one to find.

  "Fair enough." He poured another drink, slower this time, savoring the ritual of it. The tension of the job was bleeding out of him, replaced by something looser. He wanted to talk. Coin let him.

  "You know what gets me? You said you wanted to see where stolen things go. I figured you were just curious. Some old thing that got bored and wanted entertainment." He tilted his cup toward Coin. "Didn't expect you to be the best ward-breaker I've ever worked with. On your first job, no less."

  "Coin is full of surprises."

  "Yeah. Starting to see that."

  COMPLIMENT: ACCEPTED.

  CREDIT: MISATTRIBUTED.

  The tavern hummed around them. Low conversations, the clink of glasses, someone laughing too loud near the bar. Normal sounds. The sounds of people who weren't thinking about safes or wards or the merchant who was going to come home to a very bad surprise.

  Coin liked it. The aftermath. The sitting in the success without needing to do anything else.

  "So," Derric said, and his voice changed. Dropped lower. He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "I've got something else. Something I've been sitting on for months because I couldn't figure out how to do it alone."

  He glanced around, confirming no one was close enough to hear, then continued.

  "There's a collector on the north side. Old money, older paranoia. He's got a vault in his basement that makes tonight's safe look like a jewelry box. I've talked to people who've seen it, people who've tried to crack it. The wards on that thing aren't commercial catalogue work. They're custom. Layered. A setup that eats thieves and doesn't bother spitting out the bones."

  INTEREST: RISING.

  "Crews have gone at it over the years. The first one got caught inside, still frozen in place when the collector's people found them in the morning. The second made it out but couldn't remember their own names for a month. The third just vanished. Nobody knows if they're dead or if the vault did something worse than killing them."

  He paused. Let that land.

  "And you want to try anyway."

  "I want to try with you." Derric tapped a finger against Coin's edge. "Tonight was a test, and you passed it like the wards weren't even there. Whatever's guarding that vault, I think you can get us through."

  The smart play was to say no. Find another orange cart, another shopkeeper, another comfortable spot to exist without complications.

  But the smart play was boring. And Coin had been sitting on shelves for too long.

  "What's in the vault?"

  "Don't know exactly. He collects rare things, dangerous things—items other collectors won't touch because the provenance is too ugly or the magic is too unstable. Could be weapons. Could be bindings. Could be something nobody's seen in centuries." Derric's voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "Whatever it is, it's worth enough that he built a vault nobody can crack."

  "Nobody's cracked it yet."

  The grin came back. Full force.

  "Give me a week to scout the location and figure out the approach. Then we go."

  DIFFICULTY: UNKNOWN

  ***

  The rooftop was cold and Derric had been counting windows for over an hour.

  "Third floor, east wing," he muttered, more to himself than to Coin. "That's the family quarters. He sleeps there. Staff quarters are in the back, separate building. They don't come into the main house after dark unless he rings for them."

  Coin sat on the ledge next to Derric's elbow, angled toward the target. The collector's estate sprawled behind its walls like something built in stages by people who kept changing their minds. Old stone at the center, newer wings spreading out, a watchtower that served no purpose except to announce that the owner could afford one.

  STAKEOUT DURATION: ETERNAL.

  "See that light on the second floor? That's his study. He's in there most evenings until midnight." Derric pulled out a small notebook, made a mark. "Tonight he lit it at sundown. Hasn't moved since."

  "Fascinating."

  Derric didn't catch the tone. Or ignored it.

  "The vault entrance is in the basement. Service door on the west side leads down, but it's warded. Everything's warded." He squinted at the estate. "I've been watching for a while now, and the ward patterns pulse every few hours. Some kind of cycling system. If we can figure out the rhythm, we might find a gap."

  The night stretched on. Derric kept watching, kept counting, kept muttering observations into his notebook with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb.

  Coin watched him watch the house.

  DEVELOPMENTS: ZERO.

  "Guard rotation," Derric whispered. He pressed flatter against the rooftop, pulling Coin down with him into the shadow of a chimney.

  Two figures moved along the estate wall, lanterns bobbing. They walked with the loose gait of men who'd done this route a thousand times and never found anything worth finding. One said something. The other laughed. They turned the corner and disappeared.

  "Eighteen minutes to complete the circuit," Derric said. "That's our window for the west approach. Eighteen from the time they pass until they come back around."

  A cat crossed the street below. It paused under a lamp, licked its paw, and moved on.

  CAT STATUS: GONE.

  DESPAIR: MOUNTING.

  "Tomorrow I want to check the sewers," Derric said. "There might be an access point that bypasses the main wards. Old estates like this, they've got infrastructure nobody remembers. Hidden passages, abandoned tunnels, ways in that the current owner doesn't even know exist."

  The wind picked up. Coin was metal on stone, growing colder by the minute, watching a house do absolutely nothing.

  "It'll be tight down there," Derric continued. "Probably wet. But if there's a way under those wards instead of through them, that changes everything. We could bypass the whole cycling system, come up inside the perimeter, and—"

  The study light went out.

  "There," Derric breathed. "Midnight. Right on schedule." He made a final note, underlined something twice. "Same pattern every night. He's predictable. That's good."

  Derric settled back against the chimney, finally relaxing. But only a little. His eyes still swept the estate, still catalogued, still planned.

  "Few more nights of observation," he said. "Then the sewers. Then we map the ward cycles properly. Then we find our entry point. Then we plan the exit. Then we figure out what to do about the vault itself, because that's the real problem, the wards on the house are one thing but the vault wards are something else entirely, and we need to—"

  Coin rolled off the ledge.

  "Wait—"

  The rooftop dropped away. Coin caught a drainpipe, rode it down, hit the street with a soft clink that disappeared into the ambient noise of the city. Above, Derric's face appeared over the edge, mouth open, hand reaching for something that was already gone.

  STAKEOUT STATUS: ABANDONED.

  DERRIC'S EXPRESSION: PRICELESS.

  THE NOTHING.