“Naked?” Green Eyes interrupted, hard.

“—because I fainted in the ladies’ room and didn’t wake up until the lights were out and everyone was gone, and in my state of panic at being alone in the dark I wandered around the museum trying to find a way out—”

“Naked,” he repeated, even harder.

She lifted a shoulder. “Some people cry when they get scared. I get—”

“Naked,” he finished, and now he sounded like he really wanted to break something.

She smiled at him, a cheerless curve of her lips. “Exactly. It’s a tic. As I was saying, maybe I was trying to find a way out of the big, dark, scary museum—it’s over seventy thousand square meters, you know, which is a lot, especially in the dark—and I wound up in front of the Degas and was distracted for a minute from my extreme fear and disorientation and just stood there admiring it.”

“With your hands on the frame,” interrupted Chubby in a high, disbelieving voice. “Trying to lift it from the wall!”

Eliana looked at him. “I never touched that painting.”

He made a sound like he was choking on something and jerked his hand to indicate everyone else. “We saw you! You had your hands right on it—”

“It was very shadowy in there. Maybe your eyes tricked you. Have you dusted it for prints?”

No one said anything. One of the standing officers shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“No? Well, don’t bother. Because unfortunately you’re not going to find any.”

They wouldn’t because they couldn’t. Intangibility in shadow allowed her to sneak around undetected, leaving no fingerprints…she was as invisible as air.

In the shadows, that is. When pinned in the highly focused beams of flashlights—like the one Chubby and company had wielded—she could be seen plain as day.

She’d heard of this only once before. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was also a Shadow Walker and had also been an accomplished thief. That was where their similarities ended, however; to hear the story told, her great-grandmother stuck to jewels and absolutely loved thieving. It was said she wore so much of her pilfered booty she jangled when she walked.

Green Eyes addressed her directly. “You like to play games, don’t you.”

It was a statement, not a question. Beneath the soft tone of his voice, she felt the challenge and also sensed a dark, growing undercurrent of excitement.

Holding his gaze, she leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. The shirt rode up even higher on her bare thighs, and that searing gaze flickered down to her legs. When his gaze traveled back to her face, it was bright and burning hot.

It did something to her, that look. An old memory flickered in her mind, beautiful dark eyes that looked at her with that same, fevered hunger. She quashed it as quickly as it surfaced.

The memory of those eyes and who they belonged to was even more dangerous than capture by humans.

“I like to do all kinds of things,” she answered, staring unsmiling at him. “What did you have in mind?”

He stiffened. His nostrils flared. Judging by the sour tang that suddenly permeated the air, she’d really pissed him off. In one swift motion, he shoved away from the wall. “Everyone out,” he snapped. He crossed his arms over his chest and stood staring at her, his face now hard as a slab of granite.

“Édoard,” Chubby protested, turning to him with knitted brows, but Green Eyes cut him a glare so vicious he snapped his mouth shut and rose stiffly from the chair.

“Vous l’avez entendu,” Chubby snapped to the other four standing officers, and one by one they filed out the door. Chubby slammed it shut behind him, leaving her alone with the unpredictable, agitated Édoard.

They stared at each other for what felt like an hour. The only sound was the whisper of air through a ceiling vent. A muscle in her bicep began to cramp and twitch, and she longed to stretch her arms overhead and massage it. But of course, the handcuffs prevented it.

Then into the tense silence he abruptly said, “What are you?”

Not who, but what. Startled, she blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said, unmoving. He looked at her—really looked at her—as if trying to slip inside her body using only his eyes. It was unnerving. She knew it wasn’t the chill in the room that made her skin prickle.

“What I am is hungry, hurt, and not in the mood for word games,” she said flatly, trying to keep the sharp pang of worry she suddenly felt out of her voice. What are you?

He just stared at her.

Her gaze skipped away from his and fell on the small camera above the door. There were no shadows in this harshly lit room; they’d have her on video now for sure.

Seeing the direction of her stare, Édoard turned, walked over to the door, reached up, and flipped a switch on the side of the lens. A tiny red light beneath the camera faded to black.

Her brows shot up.

He turned back to her with that intense green gaze and leaned over the back of the chair his chubby companion had just vacated, his knuckles white as they gripped the curved metal. Beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights, his brown hair shone a beautiful shade of burnished bronze.

“You’re different,” he accused, startling her again. “Everything about you is different,” he went on, his terse voice softened by the lilting French accent. His gaze scoured her. “Your face, your voice, the way you move. Even the way you’re sitting in that chair looking at me is different than anyone else who’s ever sat in that chair looking at me before. I’ve been around a very long time, belle fille, and I’ve never seen anything like you.”

Belle fille. Beautiful girl. It gave her a pang in the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be. It had been a long, long time since someone had called her beautiful.

“Is this an interrogation, or are you trying to ask me out on a date?” she said coldly.

His face hardened. He straightened and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Interview,” he said, looking down his nose at her. “It’s called an interview. If this was an interrogation, there would be pain involved.”

“There is pain involved.” She leaned sideways and stuck her bandaged leg out, then bent her arms to give him a good view of the handcuffs behind her back, her wrists red and chafed inside them. Just to provoke him, she added, “And my bare behind is frozen to this chair.”

Again, he didn’t take the bait. His mouth just puckered as if he’d been sucking on a lemon. “You’re lucky Jean-Luc gave you his shirt. I’d have hauled you in as naked as we found you, and your bare behind would have been on public display for all those reporters. Your bare behind would have made the cover of Le Monde.”

Eliana flushed. “Charming,” she muttered. She sat upright and adjusted herself in the chair so her tailbone wasn’t flush against the cold seat. Her entire rear end was numb. And her leg throbbed. When she saw Caesar again, she was going to kill him.

“You’re the one who likes being naked so much. And I may be rude, but I’m not stupid,” he rejoined. Something odd had crept into his voice, and she glanced up to find him still staring.

“I know who you are, belle fille,” he said, eyes glittering. “I know how you think. I’ve been studying La Chatte for years. I’ll admit you became something of an obsession for me. A thief who evaded all security systems, who never triggered a single alarm, who drifted in and out of locked buildings and rooms and vaults like…a ghost? Impossible. You made us look like a bunch of incompetent fools. You made me look like a fool. All those rich, important people screaming for your head, and not a trace of you to be found. So I studied your pattern, the things you took, the specific times and dates and places of the crimes. And I discovered something.”