The Thief and the Traitor Bride

Book 2: The Hand and the Heart

by V. L. Bovalino

Genres: Fantasy Romance; Medieval Romance

Synopsis

The second standalone romantic fantasy set in the world of the USA Today bestselling novel The Second Death of Locke.

A ruthless spy. A deadly mission. A thief who could ruin it all.

Nore Gordon is a woman of many talents: she can speak a variety of languages, disguise herself in plain sight, and has made a name for herself as a successful wine merchant. But unbeknownst to those closest to her, it is all a front for Nore's true role as the favoured spy of the Lindle crown.

Tasked with infiltrating enemy lands in search of a powerful relic, Nore is forced to engage the services of a great thief. Unfortunately, the only person for the job is her estranged husband Caspian. Both Nore and Caspian bear the scars of the disastrous end of their marriage, but if they are to survive their deadly new assignment, they must pose as a happily married couple to avoid detection.

As danger closes in, Nore finds herself tangled in a web of lies and deceit-and though Caspian is at the centre of it all, she may not hate him as much as she once did. But Caspian has betrayed her before, and trust can be far more deadly than deception.

Release date: September 29, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

THE CITY WAS ALIGHT with a familiar coldness as Nore slipped through the streets toward the harbor. Dawn was tipping over the horizon, casting the streets in an ethereal gray fog. It was one of the few times when Nettlepool didn’t look like a cesspit.

She moved easily, avoiding the notice of the patrolling guards. Perhaps they would stop her if she were a lone woman in her expensive cloak, maybe even offer an escort home; but with the ragged elbows of her coat and her hair tucked up into a cap, they didn’t spare her a second glance.

She was nearly done with her work for the night: she had passed a message to a sailor drinking in one of the inland pubs; then retrieved a notebook from a nook on Carver Street, to be secreted away in her office the next morning; and then, dressed as a storehouse runner, flirted with a cook in the kitchens of a house belonging to a textile merchant who was supposedly having a rather secretive dinner party this evening. She had one task left, and though she was thinking of her bed and the hours she was not spending in it, this had to be resolved.

In the harbor, there was the usual clamor of morning so early it could barely be labeled as such: the first of the shipping vessels were coming in, clearing the port guard and declaring wares to the overnight clerks—with captains cutting whatever deals they needed to to avoid the worst of the Lindle import taxes. The air was thick with the scent of fish and brine, the harbor overloud with the clapping of waves against docks and the early cry of gulls, all the machinations of a new day. Nore kept her head down to avoid detection and tucked her hands in her pockets until she reached the Gleaming Swine, one of the quayside pubs. It served strong, dark coffee alongside ale in the hours when night bled into morning. She made her way across the worn boards, keeping her head ducked as she swerved against the knots of laughing sailors and brawling merchants, moving around the long bar—there, on the other side, was a door that opened to a deck that hovered perilously over the water. Someday, Nore was certain, the wood would finally fail and it would splinter away into the sea.

She looked up, scanning the tables in the gap between the high rise of her scarf and the low brim of her hat. At the farthest table from the door, she found an old man in a worn oilskin coat. His left eye was milky and sightless and his fingers curved with arthritis, possibly beyond the point of feeling the cold.

“I have a job for you,” she said, dropping into the chair across from him without a greeting.

The old man looked up at her, nose wrinkled, then spit over the banister of the deck. His saliva landed, filmy and white, on the dirty water below. “Bah.”

“I’ll pay.”

“I know,” the man said. His fingertips were dark with lead as he sketched—to Nore’s upside-down perspective, it looked like a caricaturized impression of one of the meaner port guards. It was, Nore had to admit, an illustration that captured the sense of the man, if not his exact likeness. “You always do. And I say bah.”

“So you’ll do it?”

He raised his gaze to her face. Nore didn’t know the man’s real name, just as he did not know hers. She’d heard him called many things, both names and random nouns: Alba, Owen, Jager, Kitten, Anchor. None of them seemed to fit. Some other regulars simply called him Hands, which almost made sense—the man’s lead-lined hands were the most distinctive thing about him, his palms burned from some long-ago fire on a ship that no longer visited Lindan’s waters.

What she did know was that he was reliable enough, and she had used him for more than one task in the past. Over the years, he had become something of a trusted supplier for her.

“How much?”

“Fifty silvers, if you find what I need, for your time. Plus market rate for your findings.”

His mouth was already poised to protest, but he stopped to consider this. It was more than double what she usually paid—because it was her money this time, and her own reputation on the line. “No matter the outcome?”

“I trust you’ll find me what I need.”

The man sighed, leaned back in his chair, and sighed again. He idly tapped his pencil against the paper, looking out at sea. She had thought, more than once, to ask him why he didn’t sail anymore when he so clearly loved the sea—but not every secret was her business. He left her alone to do her bidding, didn’t care about her name or background or purposes. He only cared about her coin. She respected him enough to do the same.

“Tell me what you’re looking for, then.”

Nore chewed her lip. She was fully aware of the stickiness in what she was about to say. “I need something that will disable magic.”

Hands studied her with his good eye. “Use a protection spell,” he said.

“It’s not enough.”

“What about that repellent paste I found for you last autumn? That should be enough to protect you from—”

“That only works,” Nore said through gritted teeth, “on spellwork produced by an instructive system. And there are no shields I know of, spells or physical, that disable magic from all systems.”

The man looked at her shrewdly. “If you narrow the magic, it’ll be a much easier fix—and cheaper.”

But she couldn’t narrow the system. What Nore needed was breadth. She’d already tried the repellent paste, which worked for instructive systems—systems where magic could be learned by anyone in the system, like in Lindan, without natural-born ability—and it had done nothing. She’d also tried a shielding spell, which usually worked on magic made in a constructive system, where artifacts were created and imbued with power, like spellstones; that hadn’t worked, either. Nore had nothing that would work on consumptive magic—in which the magical potion was consumed—nor could she protect herself from an inherent mage, gifted power through one’s blood (though inherent magic was often tied to geographical borders, so the possibilities were limited).

She had tried everything she could think of to solve her current problem, and clearly, the mage she was dealing with was not using Lindle magic. Or maybe worse: they weren’t only using Lindle magic.

She needed something strong. Something that worked for everything.

“I don’t care how much it costs,” Nore said. She was not often reckless with her money, but she would spare as much as was needed to rid herself of this nuisance.

Hands raised an eyebrow. “For that to work, it’ll need to be—”

“Amalgamate made or carried,” Nore said, holding her ground. Nore, who was terrible even within her native system of magic, always found herself a little jealous of (and awed by) amalgamates, who had control over more than one system of magic. “Safely transported to a new system.”

Hands regarded her. She needed to prove her knowledge so she wouldn’t get scammed—even though Hands was someone she worked with regularly, she was well aware of how easily that relationship could sour. If he thought she would be an easy mark to pull a game on, to con her out of her money… Well. Could she blame him for taking that opportunity?

“You want something that dispels all magic,” Hands said again, as if waiting for her to tell him it was a joke. “So if someone walks in with spellstones—”

“They would crack,” Nore said.

“Or potions?”

“Wear off, or be rendered unusable.”

“I won’t find one,” Hands said, but Nore already knew he was cataloging in his brain, thinking of every possibility. She had not yet posed Hands a challenge he couldn’t best. “If it exists, it would have to be old. Old enough to predate most of the systems we have now, and to somehow still be intact and functional…”

Nore shrugged. Magical artifacts were not her trade, just like magic was not her calling, but she had made the study of them a pet project over the years—possibly out of spite. “It’s possible,” she said.

Hands looked out to sea, grumbling under his breath. “If such an artifact existed, everyone would have one.”

Nore doubted that. Most people didn’t care enough about systems outside their own to protect against them, or engage with magic they hadn’t grown up with—and amalgamates were rare enough that it barely mattered.

She knocked twice on the table. “I have faith in you,” she said. She slipped the man a purse of coins. “A deposit for your time. Leave word with Joana at the bar when you find it.”

“Go home,” the man said gruffly. “And get yourself a better job, for gods’ sake.”

Nore smiled and inclined her head. Once, on one of her earlier meetings with Hands, he had told her that this wasn’t a place for nice girls like her. She hadn’t corrected him—but after the third or fourth time doing her bidding, he had mostly stopped with such platitudes.

Nettlepool was back to its filthy worst by the time Nore was at her front door. It was always worse in the first glimmer of dawn, she thought, when the lavender glow of a new day illuminated the filth on the streets and the cloudy skies churned gray and malicious above. It could rain at any moment on any day from any direction, turning the filth into sludge, making the streets iridescent with oil and grime. She checked over her shoulder twice before opening the door and immediately secured the trio of locks behind her the second she was inside. There had been too many close calls over the years to forgo this process.

It was only when she reached her rooms on the fifth floor (three more locks, opened and re-bolted) that she allowed herself to relax. Her cat, Grimsby, wound through her legs, meowing with familiar annoyance. She gathered him up in her arms as she crossed the room—he didn’t mind her filth if it meant he received scritches behind his ears, and she ignored the way he bit her hand—and kicked off her boots. It was long past time for sleeping, long past time when her work should’ve been done, but a consistent schedule was not something Nore’s work allowed for. She made her way through the room in the dark, finding a book of matches where she’d left it on the sideboard. She struck one, careful not to ignite Grimsby’s fur, and lit a candle.

The candle flared to life, revealing a person sitting in her armchair next to the bookcase, waiting.

It was only due to her careful training that Nore didn’t even startle, didn’t suck in a quick breath, didn’t change expression. In less than a second, her knife was in her hand, a reflex she always practiced but never had to use—but she aborted the motion halfway through, recognizing the figure in the chair. Their broad, expressive features were now schooled into placid disinterest.

“Well met, Finch.”

“Sparrow,” she said, setting Grimsby down and sheathing her knife, trying to urge her heart to stop racing. She looked over the crown’s messenger—they looked as tired as she felt. It was likely Sparrow had been waiting here awhile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Dove requests you,” Sparrow said. “Leave your office at seventeen past eleven. There will be a coach waiting.”

Nore did not look at the clock; she knew it was only just past five in the morning, and she’d need to be clean and appropriately attired at ten to get in and go through her papers without looking suspicious before taking a meeting.

“Thank you for the update,” Nore said.

Sparrow nodded, stood, and slipped past Nore, out the door, and into the hallway. Nore locked the door behind them.

Alone in earnest, Nore let herself sag against the sideboard. She pressed a hand to her eyes. She was so tired—she couldn’t remember a time in which she hadn’t been tired. At thirty-one, no longer a girl, barely even a young woman, she felt every hour of her sleeplessness settling into her bones. Her adoptive aunt had always warned her that it would get worse as she grew older, but Nore, fool that she was at twenty, thought exhaustion was something that happened to other people.

She pushed away from the sideboard and shuffled into her bathing room. She would have to wash before going to her office, and her hair could dry while she slept.

Too few hours later, Nore was applying rouge to her cheeks and kohl to her eyes and pinning her two red braids up around her head. Usually she put more effort in when her employer requested a meeting, but the duchess had to know how late Nore had come home that morning, and she was far more valuable for her talent than for her beauty. She dressed quickly in a black day gown, cut low, with long flowing sleeves and buttoned embroidered cuffs at the wrist. Once she was appropriate, she fed Grimsby and scratched him under the chin, secured her heavy black cloak, triple-locked her door, and went on a long and roundabout walk to the harbor’s front.

Nettlepool had never grown on her. She crossed one of the markets, lifting her skirts to avoid the worst of the puddles, keeping her eyes straight to avoid the calls of the wares. The whole city smelled of rancid fish and waste, the docks were dirty, and the nearby smithing quarter spit black, greasy smoke that seemed to cling to everything. The only place she truly liked in Nettlepool was her own tiny apartment. It was safe. It made her feel safe.

And it felt better when she didn’t examine all the possible reasons that was the case.

Safety was a rarity that Nore valued as much as she feared it: to feel safe was to get complacent, and she could not allow that to happen. But she also needed to sleep, and at least in her apartment, she could. She kept a second set of rooms in a far nicer area of town, and had once even tried to stay there… but sleep had been impossible, and Grimsby spent the entire two-week period hissing at her from under the bed. Now, Nore used that apartment for hosting guests, a decoy from her true safe place, and little else.

She only diverted twice from her path: once to drop a rolled piece of parchment inside a small gap in the mortar of a wall near the flower district, and a second time to change the flag color on one of the postboxes in the garment district from black to red. She did not check to see if these communications were seen and interpreted; that was what made a good spy into a caught spy.

By the time she reached the merchant district that fronted the harbor, it was nearing ten. Nore nodded to the guards at the door of her building and took the six flights of stairs to her office slowly, her knees aching.

When she exited onto her floor, she found Kota, her chief clerk, already waiting with a stack of orders. She perked up as soon as Nore entered. “Good morning, Ms. Gordon,” Kota said.

Nore nodded in greeting. There was a tizzy of activity as her clerks handled correspondence and orders and settled accounts. Some of her clerks had spellbooks out, making notes as they calculated magic into spells. She could taste the fizz of magic in the air, the clean, tidy accounting spells that wound around her.

“Your appointments have been confirmed for this afternoon,” Kota said, hurrying to follow Nore across the room, past the six desks of the lower clerks, and through the double doors that led to Nore’s office. “Two Nish distributors, that Ortissian shipping representative, and the captain you requested from Arkun. And the Millens wrote—they’d like to have you for dinner this week, if you’re free. They sent through requests.”

“What do they want, then?” Nore asked stiffly, doing her daily scan of the room. Her office was not as safe as her home, but it was familiar enough that she could tell instantly if anything was out of place. Besides, she had traps set, tells that would reveal if anyone had been in here or gone through her things. She let her eyes sweep the bookshelves, the dark carpet, the desk, the racks of wine against the far wall; all was as it should be.

“They’d like to taste some of the Maroushan vintage you spoke to them about last time,” Kota said.

Nore sighed, rubbing her eyes. It was technically good news—it was a trap she had laid, bait taken. Kota thought Audrick Millen, a third cousin to a well-favored duke, was only appealing to Nore because of the depth of their pockets. But the duke had land that was valuable to the crown, and had agreed to sell it on to their chosen buyer. The problem was, he had called off the sale mere days before the land was set to change hands—and only hours after hosting Audrick Millen for dinner. That sale had taken Nore’s colleagues nearly seven months to negotiate, all gone in an instant.

If she could just get to the bottom of what Audrick had said to the duke, if he suspected the value of the land, where their loyalties were falling, and who they were trying to support instead… She held the web of the Lindle nobility there in her brain, and she was eager to fill in this bit of information, to expand the edges of that map.

Kota did not know that Nore was investigating their loyalty to the crown as thoroughly as she was investigating their preferences for wine.

“Put it in my diary,” she said, already dreading the hours she’d need to spend complimenting Audrick Millen’s aggressively flashy tableware. He always tried to get her to drink too much and stay the night, which she had no interest in. Her brain was racing ahead of her work, trying to plan: few knew enough about other systems of magic to suspect them when things went awry. That Maroushan vintage she’d been selling them on, a deep red and syrupy port, would easily hide any traces of a mild Pzyetan serum she used sparingly to loosen the tongue. She’d need to run down to the market district to get more, but that was a problem for later.

She took the stack of orders from the girl and flipped through them, annoyed with her own tired brain. She couldn’t remember why she’d requested the captain, and it wasn’t safe to take notes when they related to her side ventures.

While Nore settled behind her desk, relaxing into the leather chair so old it practically molded to her body, Kota opened the window shades to let in the cold daylight. Nore winced, feeling every single hour she hadn’t slept.

“That’s all, then.” She wanted time to go through her list of upcoming imports before her meeting with the duchess, and she couldn’t focus with Kota looking at her like… that.

Kota hesitated by the door. Nore looked up to see her clerk there, waiting for her attention. Instinctively, she narrowed her eyes, sensing Kota was about to tell her something she wasn’t going to like. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s only, the delivery from Markesh. It was five cases short.”

Nore put down her papers. Five cases out of five hundred was not significant, but it was noticeable. Enough to catch her attention.

Enough to catch Kota’s attention.

Nore fought the magnificent surge of profanity that threatened to slip. She ran a calculation in her head, summoning an easy spell to deaden the sound within her office—this time, at least, it worked; she felt the lull creep over them as the sounds from the main room were dimmed. Whatever Kota was about to tell her, Nore didn’t want her other clerks hearing it.

“Did you check the delivery records from loading? Was the supplier short?”

“No…”

“And the sailors? Did they drop any bringing them down? Did the captain say if they were prone to drink?”

Kota winced. “It appears, Ms. Gordon, that the cases were accounted for both when the ship left the port, and also when it went through the harbor checks. The… disappearance happened between arrival and unloading, somehow.”

“I see,” Nore said, working to contain her annoyance. Nore sat back in her chair and looked out the window. Her office looked out over the harbor below. There was a great ship docking now, eager dockworkers ready and waiting to unload it. “And the workers who unloaded…?”

“All our people, miss.” Now she sensed the edge of tears in Kota’s voice.

Nore’s frown darkened. “I’m sensing you have more bad news.”

Kota shifted her weight. She was only a few years younger than Nore—even though Nore felt ancient, she had to remind herself, often, that she truthfully was not—and had been one of the best in her class at the university when Nore snapped her up right after graduation. She was a talented actuarial magician, able to commit numbers to memory with barely a glance, able to solve complex figures without hesitation. A mind like hers would’ve been irreplaceable if Kota had chosen to work in the Lindle treasury office, or for another merchant. It was only luck that Nore had found her before anyone else had.

Nore should’ve known better: she would not have simply missed the discrepancy. The only problem was Kota’s too-soft heart, but at least that, Nore could use to her advantage.

Unless Kota was involved and was stealing the cases herself. Nore had investigated her when she was hired, and again when the thefts had begun, but she’d found no trace of double-crossing on Kota’s part. But Nore had been wrong about such betrayals before.

“It’s only… this is the fourth shipment this month that has been short in such a way,” Kota said. Her tone was apologetic, if anything. “Most of the cases were samples, marked for you, so I thought—”

“Why was I not told?” Nore asked, looking at the other woman shrewdly as the anger curled in her stomach. She was unsurprised that Kota had picked up the latest shipment, but for her to see all four and not say a word of it to Nore?

“The first two were missed, at first,” Kota said, avoiding Nore’s gaze. “But when the third theft occurred, Marek—your new sixth clerk—flagged it, and we discovered the previous thefts.”

Nore pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. It was already a quarter past ten; she didn’t have time for this.

“And you didn’t tell me,” she said, forcing herself to breathe through the anger, “because you were protecting the sixth clerk, because he should not have missed the previous discrepancies. Unless you were involved?”

“Ms. Gordon, I swear to you I had nothing to do with it. I was trying to get to the bottom of it.”

She wished Kota had come straight to her instead of hiding it. Nore took one breath, then let it out and counted to five, then took another. “And now you’re going to tell me why I shouldn’t fire him,” she said once she was certain she wouldn’t say anything ridiculous.

“It’s only, the bandits in the harbor—”

“I don’t care about the bandits in the harbor,” Nore said, anxiety rising up familiar in her chest. She stood from her chair and stalked toward the bookshelf, turned, doubled back. She paced with her hands tightly clasped behind her back. The bandits in the harbor didn’t matter, because in most cases, they weren’t bandits at all: half of them were spies or in the duchess’s pay, and the other half knew better than to steal from her. Even if no one knew Nore’s official position, they knew that theft within Miller & Sons Trading was quickly found and harshly punished. That was what happened when one had a finger in everything: they tended to know, immediately, when they’d been burned.

“What did I tell you on the day I promoted you?” Nore said, turning to face Kota.

Her chief clerk had gone a pale shade of green. “That you have no patience for thieves or lies.”

“Precisely,” Nore said. “I cannot tolerate dishonesty from you, and that includes deception and withholding.”

“Ms. Gordon, I didn’t mean—”

“Let this be,” Nore said through her teeth, cursing her own too-soft heart, “the only time I need to repeat myself.”

“Yes, Ms. Gordon.” A pause. “I am sorry.”

“I’m sure you are,” Nore said, forcing herself to sit back down. She still had so much to do before the coach was meant to arrive. Nore brought a paperweight closer under her grasp, a heavy arrangement of marble in the shape of grapes, and ran her fingers over the smooth, rounded surface. “And you will spend the afternoon cross-checking the purchase orders to determine exactly what was stolen.” It would not actually give Nore the answers she was looking for, but it would buy her time—and she could not have Kota sniffing any closer to this. The girl was too smart for her own good. And if samples for Nore were missing…

Kota nodded.

Nore took another measured breath and rubbed her brow. She couldn’t afford to lose Kota. Even though she was too kind, Nore saw the value she added—and having Kota here allowed Nore to travel more extensively, to expand her reach, to hear more whispers and pour them back into Lindle intelligence. Nore needed Kota here if the duchess’s demands on her time continued to increase.

“Right. The next time a theft occurs, I am to hear immediately. Is that understood?”

Kota barely winced, her eyes on the floor. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. Another pause. Nore looked down at her own hands—she had the sense that Kota was going to cry, and it was her fault.

“The samples,” Kota said, regaining her composure, “from the last shipment, the ones marked for you. They’re under your desk.”

“Good,” Nore said. “Thank you.” Nore went back to rubbing her face, as if that would chase the headache away. “Now, please leave me. I wish to remain undisturbed. And I will be meeting a vendor at half past eleven, if you could update my diary.”

“Yes, Ms. Gordon,” Kota said, even quieter. She shut the door behind her. Nore got up and locked it—she was not strong enough with her own magic to use it flippantly.

Alone and protected, she swallowed down the lump of anxiety in her throat, the exhaustion, and glanced at the clock. Thirty-seven minutes, and they would pass far too quickly.

Nore pushed her chair back and lowered herself to the floor. The cases she’d requested were there, under her desk, subtly marked to denote they were to be set aside for her, to come straight to Miller & Sons and its proprietor. She pulled a pry bar from her lower drawer and went to work on the nails.

Inside the cases were, unsurprisingly, bottles of wine. Nore pulled one out and felt along the bottom, her finger catching on the latch—the middle slid out, revealing rolled documents and a softcover notebook, wrapped in waterproof covering just in case the inner glass wall of the bottle shattered. Nore took one notebook from the case and slipped it into her bag to take to the duchess later. She turned and pulled one of the wine bottles from the display case behind her desk, which shifted the entire section to reveal a square space for storage below. Nore put the rest of the documents there for Sparrow to collect at some later point.

Sometimes, it was actually wine that waited for Nore in the red-marked cases. Mostly, it was this: reports from other spies from abroad, documents stolen from other nations’ spies, or armies, or politicians. Any manner of information was collected and returned to Lindan like this, ushered in inconspicuously on one of Nore’s ships.

Once she was finished sorting, she sat back on her heels. It wasn’t just the theft, or the unknowing. She could not be certain what exactly what was taken from her shipments: whispers or wine. And unlike the city’s other merchants, Miller & Sons’ best-selling ware was not wine. It was secrets.

She’d noticed the first theft weeks ago: only two crates missing, but both of them samples marked for her. At first, it had raised only a dull thrum of panic—these things could be misplaced, and sometimes an overzealous dockhand wanted to deliver the crates to her personally. But when the full day passed without sign of them, even though the crates were listed on the manifest, she went straight to her employer.

Nore’s instructions from there were simple: set traps. See if the thief struck again. And then, easy as anything, catch them and bring them for questioning.

Except. For the first time in years, not a single one of Nore’s traps worked.

It was as if someone invisible was boarding her ship and making away with her cargo. There was no other explanation—and though Nore did not know of any Lindle spells for invisibility, other magics made it impossible to rule out entirely.

And if someone was robbing her… if someone was targeting the samples specifically… it appeared that Nore’s hand had been revealed.

AT EXACTLY SEVENTEEN PAST the hour, the carriage rolled up in front of the offices on Mead Street. Nore stepped out from the shadowed overhang, crossed the walk in the rain, and slipped inside. It had plush, dark velvet inside, tasteful and black, with the windows darkened and the shades drawn. The carriage was otherwise empty.

Nore leaned back and closed her eyes, letting the rocking of the carriage soothe her thoughts, which kept returning to the missing cases. Removed from Kota’s influence (and her beseeching, guilty gaze) Nore was again considering firing the sixth clerk, but that would do nothing to solve her problems.

Someone knew there was more than just wine coming in Nore’s shipments. At first, it had been nothing more than a gut feeling—but in her experience, a gut feeling was merely an understanding that had not yet been quantified.

Why else would they be targeting only her samples?

Nore had few enemies—there was professional jealousy among the other merchants in Nettlepool, perhaps, but she did her best to keep her business unimpeachable and out of public scrutiny. She maintained her relationships with her suppliers and clients with pe