To be completely honest, it should have been easier to stop himself from snagging things at this point. But up until this point, he'd been so good about it. He'd desperately tried to keep himself from falling back into his bad habits and that one incident with Dorian, when he hadn't gotten caught and wasn't being fed to the zombies had picked at the scab that was covering his temptation. He missed the rush. The rush of fighting zombies just wasn't the same.
Naturally, when he found himself at Grand Central Station, a place full of people who didn't really know him from a hole in the ground, he couldn't stop himself. Most people guarded their stuff like super serious trolls… he suspected it was because there were looters all over the place; he most certainly wasn't the only one anymore, after all. But there, sitting completely unobtrusively, almost as though it was just waiting for him to rummage through it, was a backpack. It was very obviously a woman's backpack… and because of this, the temptation to rifle through it for some kind of gift for Allie was almost all-consuming.
So he did.
He got a few strange looks for peeking through a backpack that was so obviously not his. Passersby sort of arched eyebrows and mumbled to themselves or to whomever they were walking with that it looked suspicious, but Ollie didn't care. He just needed one successful heist, even if it was out of some random girl's backpack.
As a rule, he never stole anything important-looking. No medications or things that looked blatantly necessary for day-to-day survival. Fortunately, there was nothing like that here.
There was, however, a nice little necklace in an obscure front pocket. One that, unless she looked for it, the woman wouldn't even notice missing. Ollie toyed with the idea for a couple of seconds, but the already-forming rush won out in the end and he snatched the piece of jewelry, pausing to look at it dangling from his fingers for a second.