Capturing the Silken Thief. Jeannie Lin

the book?” she demanded.

      The flute player held a bloodstained cloth to his nose. “Your lover hits hard.”

      “He is not—” Jia exhaled slowly. They only did this because she always rewarded them by getting angry. “He is not my lover. The book. Now.”

      The men nudged each other, grinning and remarking cheerfully about women scorned. The lot of them still insisted she’d paid to have the scholar robbed as an act of revenge. Let them spin their less than imaginative tales. She was getting out of here and would never have to look at their ugly faces again.

      A fellow pipa player pulled out a bag from under his feet. “Here,” he said, dangling the sack before her. “And don’t forget, you owe us cash.”

      She counted out the coins from her purse and slapped them into his outstretched hand. In the same movement, she grabbed the pack.

      Before she reached her door, she was already working at the knots. She’d missed out on a night’s wages by passing up the chance to entertain at a court official’s banquet. Another fifty in cash she’d given to the dogs in the courtyard for waylaying Cheng, but the journal was worth a hundred times that.

      She slipped into her room and closed the door before loosening the last knot. Her hands shook with excitement as she lit the oil candle. There were several bound books in the pack. She flipped through the first one, searching for the precious lines of poetry that would signal her freedom.

      It was a treatise on the history of the later Han dynasty. She cast the book aside and flipped through the smaller notebook. The cover was plain, with none of the adornment she’d expected.

      She scanned through the pages, her chest growing tighter with each column of neat black characters. Page after page, backwards then forwards, the characters didn’t change. There was no poetry there. No words of wit and genius worth thousands in cash. She could feel the coins slipping through her fingers like desert sand.

      This was going to be the death of her. She was already headed to the afterlife. How had this gone so wrong?

      She could storm back to the courtyard and demand her money back, but that would only get her ridiculed. Somehow this was the scholar’s doing. Luo Cheng had what she wanted, and she was going to get it even if she had to search heaven above and earth below.