Chapter Text
February 14, 2026
Snow had blown into New York City two days ago, blanketing skyscrapers and green parks alike with a deluge of glittering flakes, washing the city clean and new. Surface streets were only just navigable, and the gardens at the Cloisters, the ones Ben had visited as a boy, were buried under the weight of soft, fresh powder.
The last time Ben had visited the museum had been in late 2024, when he’d been searching for a little peace after the burglary at the American Museum of Natural History. It suddenly struck him, like a bat to the back of his knees, that it had been the first time.
The first time she’d left him a note.
The call this evening had interrupted his dinner, and he’d left the rest of his filet mignon cooling as he rushed out the front door. Jannah hadn’t known precisely what had been taken, but a tangle of nerves and curiosity pulsed in his belly as Ben approached the Unicorn Tapestries Room.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe she would have done it. It wasn’t her modus operandi. It never had been before.
Museum security had already cordoned off the area, from what Ben could see. As he started to wade through the snow toward the arched doorway, Poe stepped out of the room and hurried over to him, meeting him at the far end of the Cloisters’ garth.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, partner. Sorry about dinner.”
The man was still growing out his ridiculous beard. Worse, he was pulling it off.
“Worry about your own dinner—Finn might kill you if his chocolate soufflés fall before you make it home.”
Together they started to cut across the middle path, and despite the snow shrouding the garden, Ben could almost smell the apple blossoms. The bellflowers and the sweet peas. More memory than true fragrance, from years of sun-drenched summer strolls with his nonna.
“What did La Renarde take this time? Surely not the tapestries?”
With a shake of his curls, Poe let out a brief laugh. There was something frayed about it. Baffled or perhaps incredulous.
But all Ben could focus on was that he’d been right. He’d known she wouldn’t do such a thing. Even if she’d been inclined to expand her repertoire beyond priceless jewels, she never would have taken the tapestries. Not from this museum.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you—you’ll just have to see for yourself.”
Shrugging a shoulder in response, Ben turned toward the entrance. “Have it your way. She leave us her usual note?”
“You mean your usual note, buddy.”
The teasing note in Poe’s voice was, as usual, deeply obnoxious. A part of Ben worried that, the longer this never-ending series of investigations continued, that obnoxious would eventually shift to knowing.
“And of course she did, Ben. Got your love letter right here.”
Pulling an evidence bag out from under his arm, Poe waved it in his direction, and Ben took the crisp card encased in plastic with a steadiness he’d been rehearsing for months now. They were always most in danger here. This moment, when she did her damnedest to unbalance him.
There was nothing all that remarkable about the cards themselves that La Renarde—or The Fox—left at the scene of her crimes: they were simply repurposed blank business cards. One of their junior investigators, Rose, had found this exact model in stock at multiple office supply stores in the tri-state area.
Yet another dead end. La Renarde was full of them.
The front of the card was always filled with a few lines of poetry or a quote. A mere handful of words that literature professors from NYU and medievalists from Georgetown and Shakespeareans from Oxford would pore over for weeks and weeks after every heist—only to ultimately dismiss them all as meaningless to the case.
A waste of time, they’d say. Judged it a taunt from a criminal at the top of their most wanted list and, once upon a time, Ben had agreed with them.
He knew better now.
Today, he started with the back of the card. When La Renarde first started this little game, when she lifted the Patricia Emerald, she’d addressed it to Benjamin Solo. He had assumed she’d learned he was the lead investigator on all of her heists thus far, but she’d quickly displayed flashes of wry wit, always at his expense, that told a more complex story.
He might have been investigating her, but she was watching him right back. And she was becoming fluent.
To: The Hair
To: Chicken and Rice for Dinner—Groundbreaking
To: Call Your Mother Back
To: Cat 53076405 at the ASPCA Reminds Me of You; Have You Considered Parenthood
Cat 53076405 turned out to be a very large, very fussy Russian Blue named Inspector Gadget. Poe howled at the name, at the unflattering comparison, but Ben took one look at Gadget batting at his waxed shoelaces and couldn’t in good conscience leave him there. He quietly signed the paperwork, ignoring the incessant text notifications from Poe updating the entire office, and promptly drove the cat upstate.
Gadget had been living in luxury with his mother ever since.
After the Smithsonian, after Dulles, La Renarde switched to French—to match her own self-designated appellation. The designation she uses just for him.
To: Mon Chasseur
My Hunter.
In the beginning, her signature graced the center of the card, the tail of the e extending into a miniature sketch of a fox. She no longer included her name, content to extend the final r in her moniker for him into the same lithe, infuriating, beautiful creature she used to include for herself.
He lived on paper, as he did in the world, in perpetual chase. Always following her shadow.
Today’s salutation was no different, and Ben quickly scanned it before flipping it over to examine the three lines of poetry looping across the creamy white cardstock.
The wonder is that such an eye, that lets not
even the smallest sparrow fall from notice,
beholds me also.
“What’s it from?” His foolish heart started to gallop in his chest.
“Love Poem, With Birds. Barbara Kingsolver.” Poe’s baritone had gone sly. “A poem for her husband.”
Ben shot him his middle finger, as he knew Poe expected him to do, but in truth, the few lines had left him feeling off-kilter. Not because it was the mocking gibe Poe and the rest of his department and several literary experts had deemed these snippets to be.
But because it wasn’t a gibe at all. Or anything else they wanted to title it.
Only two people in the whole of the wide world knew it for what it really was: a conversation. An ongoing one.
The two of them cleared the doorway as well as the scattered clusters of NYPD detectives and museum security—including a nervous wreck of a bespectacled man Ben nominated most likely to be the Cloisters’ director—and then he stopped dead in his tracks. He’d spotted it. The scene of La Renarde’s latest crime.
“So then… nothing’s missing,” he breathed out in disbelief.
“No,” Poe agreed. “Nothing at all.”
There, littered across an inky blue blanket spangled with stars, lay a king’s ransom in jewels. All of them were green.
April 2024
“It appears to be a very clean job. A very clean job.”
Poe met him at the edge of the sloping courtyard that served as the entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Blearily eyeing his partner’s sharp appearance, Ben ran his hand through his own hair, hoping to tempt the wavy locks into a shape that would belie the last eight hours he’d spent pretzelled in a middle seat with a broken recline function.
“How the hell did you beat me here? Last thing I heard, Jannah hadn’t been able to find you.”
“Well—”
Ben watched, bemused, as a dull flush reddened his partner’s cheeks. Poe was not typically a man prone to fluster.
“As it turns out, I was already here. I’ve… well, it’s a holiday weekend, and I thought I might…”
The flush on Poe’s handsome face deepened even further.
“I’ve been trying to convince Finn to move to New York. I asked him to marry me.”
In theory—and in practice, he supposed—Ben was genuinely happy for his partner. Poe and Finn had been navigating a long-distance relationship for well over a year now, and Ben liked Finn. A pâtissier for one of the best bakeries on Portobello Road, Finn was focused and kind and very good for Poe. And selfishly, Ben was grateful that a resolution was in sight that didn’t entail him losing his partner.
But having fucked his own fist more often than not in the past several years since his relationship with Tai had fizzled out, Ben found himself a bit jealous of other people’s happy love stories—just a tiny bit, mind you—regardless of how happy he was for the couple in question. However, he wouldn’t be confiding that in Poe any time soon. He didn’t need to reactivate the man’s dormant matchmaking tendencies; he’d already suffered more than his fair share of Poe’s meddling in the past four years.
As Ben pushed open the glass doors, he cocked a dubious eyebrow in his partner’s direction instead.
“Why on earth would he want to do something like that?”
“Oh, fuck you, buddy. That man adores me.”
The corners of Ben’s mouth tilted up, pleased at provoking a reaction. He laid a hand on Poe’s shoulder as the other man started to brush by him.
“Poe. Then he won’t let an ocean stop him.”
“Exactly how many pieces did Cartier loan to the museum for this exhibit?”
The exhibit’s curator, a young woman named Kaydel, was anxiously eyeing the museum director hovering at her shoulder, as if she would be graded on the precision of her response. She shifted restlessly on her feet, her cobalt loafers tapping softly on the gleaming mosaic tiles underfoot.
“Over 350 objects, Mr. Solo, including historic gemstones, watches, and clocks. But these thieves only took the one item.”
Ben paused at that, rocking back on his heels to sweep his gaze over the vast exhibit hall.
“You’re very sure of that?”
The museum director at her side sniffed at the question. The kind of person, Ben mused, that took credit and placed blame without any consideration for the fallout. He looked to Kaydel instead, with a smile aimed at disarming her. He wanted her calm and willing to talk; jittery employees forgot details and hid mistakes. Prolonged his investigation and delayed the nap his jetlag desperately needed.
Rotating her tablet to face him, Kaydel showed him a color-coded database. “We’ve been taking inventory since the moment we discovered the theft. Using a protocol I developed for collection intake last year, we had teams of two do inventory in rounds so we could compare numbers across multiple people. Three teams have now confirmed the same result. We have every single item Cartier loaned us except for one: the Hutton-Mdivani necklace.”
She tapped at a line emblazoned in bright red, and the database disappeared in favor of a picture. Ben knew it well. The necklace on the screen was lovely: graduated translucent jadeite beads with a ruby and diamond clasp. Sotheby’s had sold it at auction for more than $27.4 million in 2014. Cartier had retained possession of it ever since. Until now.
“Do we know the entry and exit points yet, Poe?”
“Not yet. Matter of fact, there’s not a whole lot of evidence to examine at all.” A grin, incongruous with his prior statement, lit up Poe’s face. “But there’s a note. Our thief has an artistic side. They like foxes.”
“Show me.”
