Lost Destinies

↳ 04: The Drawbacks Of Being Attractive

"I'll try to be back by noon, but if I run into anything it could take longer."

She stared at him for a moment, her expression unmoving. Something told him she expected him to run into something, but she didn't say it.

"Noon it is."

Lindsay spun Minerva into the heart of the town square, instructing her to be on the lookout for targets to con. Minerva herself was more concerned with watching her back, taking note of the flashes of cloaks sweeping past and narrowed eyes of fellow criminals—they were easy to recognize once you'd been around enough of them. Takes one to know one, I guess. She knew better than to underestimate anyone in impoverished areas where stealing was probably the nicest thing people resorted to doing to survive. But while she was constantly on alert, she didn't have to focus much to steal anymore. It came as second nature after all this time, whirling past someone as her fingers slipped easily into pockets, bags—and then she was gone before they even noticed her face. Claude had watched Minerva again and again and he still said that half the time he had no idea when she pickpocketed someone, or how in some cases. She could maneuver her way into front pockets just as easily as back pockets, and had a knack for finding valuables in... other places as well. It was easy, when you were a pretty girl, to make nearly any situation bend to your advantage.

Pretty girls probably made the best villains, she decided.

They walked leisurely about the square and came to rest against one of the large supporting beams of a pavilion underneath which a few trading carts had set up shop. "Ready for this?" Lindsay asked, sparing Minerva a brief glance that, if she squinted, might have had traces of concern laced through it. Although perhaps she was imagining it, as concern and Lindsay didn't really go together.

Minerva traced the black ribbon that crisscrossed up her arm from where it was tied to her thumb on her left hand. "Sure I am," she managed, but it might not have been all that convincing. Every time she did this she kept thinking of the village men back home. The way they'd looked at her, the way they'd smiled, everything like a sinister shadow that never stopped following her, digging in its claws at the worst times...

"Well," Lindsay smirked, adjusting her top to hike up her breasts a bit and ensuring the collar of her jacket was straight, "the easiest way to a man's wallet is through his heart, you know."

"You mean his eyes," Minerva replied emotionlessly, side-eyeing her and noting that neither of them could pass as native Snow citizens in a million years, not the way they were dressed. Lindsay was always decked head-to-toe in various shades of green, jewels at her throat and dangling from her ears, and never covered more than half of her exposed skin regardless of the weather, insisting that beauty and discomfort often went hand-in-hand. She'd said once before that she refused to wear a few specific colors—pink, blue, white—as they had belonged to others in her life. Minerva, too, had heard the sentiment that beauty was pain, and all throughout her childhood, in fact. Being half-succubus in a place like Villagetown that only breeded the most generic of humanity was already bad enough, but life became infinitely worse when you were adopted into a family with a perfectly ordinary daughter named Beauty who was somehow perceived as more attractive than you.

Minerva hadn't been Minerva then. She'd been Laurette Minerva Lynon, biological younger sister to Claudette and Paulette Lynon, all daughters of an incubus who had left their human mother long before she died of the stardust plague on the outskirts of Hill Village. There wasn't anything wrong with him per se, as incubi and succubi were not of the committal type, but she resented him all the same. He'd made her this way. He'd made her less than human—or more. Whatever she was, the girls in Hill Village had hated it and the boys had lusted after it, ever since she'd turned about thirteen. Laurette and her sisters, when they were only small children, had been taken in by a rosy-cheeked and kindhearted merchant by the name of Sylvester Henderson, who gifted them with a roof to live under and an education that most in their village would never have been able to afford. He also happened to have three children already, two sons and a daughter, and their daughter was called Beauty for good reason.