That wasn’t confidence. That was arrogant stupidity or naivete. Neither one was good on a resume for what she needed.
Fuck me. I’ll chase after a hitman because I’m curious, and I’ll swim under falling logs, but force me to trust someone for a few minutes, and suddenly I’m ready to throw up.
Then again, I’ve had friends try to kill me on more than one occasion.
Shay looked at the financial records on her computer screen. This is the larger problem right now. The tomb raider business wasn’t building like she wanted.
When she’d come up with the idea, she was convinced it’d make her a pile of money that would leave her hit contracts looking like the pay of a shitty job that involved wearing your name on your shirt.
That wasn’t how things were working out. She broke even on her first job and after expenses and the fence’s cut for the diamonds, only made a small profit on the lake raid.
If only I’d got my hands on that damned pin.
Maintaining five different warehouses and all her equipment wasn’t cheap. The various casual bribes she had to throw around for everything from keeping her warehouses secure from local scum to ensuring certain powerful people didn’t look her way, even accidentally were eating into the profits, too.
Life was expensive when you were already supposed to be dead. Funny how that worked.
Running out of money wasn’t an immediate concern, but that didn’t mean Shay could continue to ignore the issue either. For now, her previous career had left her with a generous savings. Some of it was hidden in various accounts throughout the world, while enough to start all over again was in a vault in the most secure warehouse. The way the world was unwinding, though, left her wondering how much of it could really be secure anywhere.
Huh… Maybe I should look into some of that Trollcoin after all.
Shay wasn’t overly fond of her finances being dependent on technologies or governments she didn’t have personal control over. But the balance between safety and accessibility was a constant magic trick of its own kind.
In the end, if it wasn’t her own vault, the tomb raider preferred a bank she could enter, even if it might be in a different country. A physical bank meant there would be a physical banker, and she could always threaten to kill him for better service. It was a lot harder to intimidate an algorithm or blockchain.
Shay narrowed her eyes, leaning toward the screen as she clicked around on her spreadsheet, reviewing the expenses and revenue from the most recent job one more time. The sale of the diamonds covered the costs of her lake raid, but her profit margin was pathetic. She wasn’t supposed to be depending on savings at all. “There is nothing lucrative about this if I don’t change things up.”
Her great list of seven items could turn out to be artifacts she didn’t recover for decades into the future, if at all. The more she considered them, the less she believed they would be a reliable method for building her reputation.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Shay sighed and leaned back in her chair, thinking about her last conversation with Natalie. Retirement for a 27-year-old woman technically on the run wasn’t a possibility. She still had her whole life ahead of her and at this rate would run out of money eventually. Sooner if she kept buying equipment. She lacked contacts to back her up in the event of trouble. “No couch surfing for me.” Peyton was the closest thing she had to an actual friend in Los Angeles. “That is pathetic.”
Shay shot to her feet and started pacing, trying to get out her nervous energy.
More than the money, Shay’s modest success grated on her ego. She had no delusions about that and felt no shame over the realization. She didn’t just want to be a tomb raider; she wanted to be the tomb raider, the one spoken of in quiet, hushed voices when people thought about asking for artifact recovery help. Can’t get Shay, settle for sloppy seconds.
Shay had been at the top of her game as a professional killer. People who weren’t the best didn’t last very long in a vocation where death was the desired outcome for someone. But in her new career, she had only a few modest successes under her belt and no reputation, yet.
Not only was she not the best, but she was barely better than a novice, no matter what she told Peyton. Field archaeologist or tomb raider, it didn’t matter what she called herself if she couldn’t bring home the artifacts.
The ex-killer gritted her teeth.
Fuck. I’m stumbling as a tomb raider. What am I missing? Is there some way to make this business better? I need to clear my head.
It took an hour for Shay to drive the Spider to Warehouse Four, her personal favorite. She chuckled to herself as she ran her hands along the spines of the books filling one of the many bookshelves lining the twenty-foot walls of the warehouse. Peyton would probably be shocked that her personal library rated more concern than her weapons and specialty equipment. Only Warehouse Five, where she stored extremely high-value goods, her personal money vault, and the occasional magical artifact was more important.
Wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled the main warehouse space, along with several rolling library ladders. The collection ran into the thousands of volumes and represented a multi-million-dollar investment.
The vast majority of the books concerned history and the occult, with a smaller number focused on related subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and even a few newer books on extra-dimensional engineering, the fancy university term for magic.
Scientists kept trying to make it catch on with the public, but almost everyone preferred to use the simpler and more familiar term.
There were even two books on magic bionics
