Mollie emerged on a catwalk that opened on a series of cheaply furnished bedrooms. She didn’t bother looting the hookers’ quarters; Baba Yaga wouldn’t have allowed them to keep anything of value. But Mollie wouldn’t have wanted to touch anything in those rooms without disinfecting it with a blowtorch first. The last thing she needed was to contract some mutant hybrid of gonorrhea and the Andromeda Strain while swiping paste gems from a call girl’s bedside table.

Mollie hadn’t always known how to tell the difference between real and fake jewelry. Thanks, Ffodor.

But if anybody in this shithole had real jewelry, it was the queen bitch herself. Mollie’d had an “audience” with the old witch; the memory was traumatic enough that she could still picture the scene. She opened a gateway into Baba Yaga’s quarters without trouble. A few minutes of watching and listening convinced her the coast was clear. It was hard to case the apartment without looking at the furniture, but she tried.

She swallowed her revulsion long enough to tear the bedding from Baba Yaga’s bed and, like the hookers she’d seen earlier, turn a pillowcase into a makeshift swag bag. Baba Yaga owned enough jewelry to fill the damn thing—Mollie had glimpsed diamonds, sapphires, pearls, rings, pendants, and more during her one and only visit. She’d cased the place even while Baba Yaga fulminated at them; she couldn’t help it. Ffodor had trained her too well. And then he—

Nope. Nope. Not my fault.

The earring stands on the vanity, where before they sparkled like little bonsai trees fruiting with gems, were bare. Mollie tiptoed across the room and peeked into the open drawers; they contained several velvet-covered jewelry cases. But these, too, were empty. She even knelt on the carpet and felt around the edges of the vanity, assuming something must have fallen free during the snatch. Not a crumb. Some gutsy SOB had already cleaned Baba Yaga out and did a thorough job of it.

“God damn it,” she muttered. It was never easy. Why was it never easy? Jewels are easy to carry, easy to hide, easy to fence. So of course there’d be none left for her. No, she had to deal with the hard stuff.

So she gave up on the small stuff and searched the rooms for lockboxes and safes. Ffodor had taught her how to look for what she’d come to think of as “rich people” hiding places. And, sure enough, she found one safe embedded in the back of the walk-in closet, and a second in the floor under the bed. Mollie called through the portal to Idaho to let her dad and brothers know she needed a hydraulic cutter to get the safe out of the wall. They’d have to run the lines through the portal, but she could do the work herself. She’d grown up on a farm; she could use tools.