Mollie wondered if mountain climbers ever felt like this after topping Everest.

She’d stolen an entire country’s gold reserves. On her very first foray as a professional thief. Granted, there was a team involved … her thoughts skittered around Ffodor again … but she had personally handled millions upon millions of dollars in gold. (And, like anybody would have done, she’d seized the opportunity to widen her cut. Which would have worked out just fine and wouldn’t have hurt anybody, fuck you very much Noel Matthews.) After that, almost nothing seemed worth the effort.

Which is why she’d pushed Ffodor for something fun, something challenging, something worthy of two kickass aces on a tear. She’d worked so hard to convince him she wasn’t the clueless, immature naïf he’d first met. And it worked. Soon after that, word had come through the grapevine about a casino somewhere in Bumfuckistan, which led to—

No. She shook her head again.

She set the alarm for oh-dark-thirty before crawling under the sheets. At first she tried sleeping on her stomach, like she usually did, but the residual tingle in her chest made that impossible. Nearly an hour passed before the irritation with herself for being so careless as to let the gendarmes take her by surprise, coupled with the shame of acting like Ffodor hadn’t taught her a goddamned thing, subsided to the point where she could fall asleep.

The alarm woke her. Mollie didn’t bother to get out of bed. She created an opening at the bottom of the toilet bowl and twinned it to another about two feet over the head of Brent’s bed. She held the fold in space long enough to hear a splatter, a shout, and disgusted sputtering echo from within the ceramic bowl in the next room.

“OH MY GOD you are SO DEAD you UNBELIEVABLE CU—”

She closed the twinned portals, unplugged the alarm, shut her eyes, yawned, and nestled back into her pillows. Only to find herself wide awake a moment later. Wide awake and cursing herself.

The casino.

The empty, unguarded casino.

The empty, unguarded casino that, last time Mollie had seen it, was filled with seven metric shit-tons of money. Cash money. Fucking snowdrifts of currency.

God damn it. Maybe she was just a stupid hick from potato country after all.

“You liked Cesar okay?” Michelle asked. She and Adesina were flopped on the sofa. Episode 13 of the All Ocelots TV show was cued up on the DVR and ready to go. Adesina had Misty Mouse clutched in her claw.

“I think he’s very nice. And not just because he brought me the toy.”

“But that didn’t hurt,” Michelle laughed.

“Well, no. But he really listened to us and he helped with the dishes.”

“Yeah,” Michelle said, turning on the show. “He is nice. And gets big points for helping clean up.” On the TV, the Cherry Witch was pursuing some nefarious plan to take over the Ocelot 9 forest. Every week there was a nefarious plan. It was kind of comforting.