The seconds seemed an eternity to the thief, her body only slightly tensioned but every nerve of her straining for sound and smell, some whisper of warning if betrayal were to come; she found none, but that did not mean her vivid imagination could not concoct awful things, things that might give even a battle-hardened Templar pause. But eventually he was ready to reveal whatever grand secret he had to her, and she opened her eyes and -
- and stared into the eyes of a laughing vixen, carved elegantly into a brooch, her lupine companion clearly unamused by her raucous antics.
Aurin may as well have blindsided Azabeth with a knife to the ribs, from the pure shock on her firelit face. The bet, the final outcome of their last meeting, had been all but forgotten, relegated to a distant corner of her mind. Now to find that Aurin, practically a stranger, had gone so far out of his way to commission something so perfect for a woman who had robbed him of the shirt off his back.... and kept it with him, all this time, on chance they might run across one another again! How long had the fox-and-wolf brooch been sitting in his pocket, a hidden treasure awaiting the light of day?
Both palms came up to clasp the brooch, her jaw sagging, caught completely off her guard, both by the gesture and the workmanship of the piece. She brushed the pad of one thumb across the vixen, then her black-coated companion - and glanced up, summoning a smile that was too pretty to be a smirk, though there were hinted of guarded caution as her walls came back up in mild suspicion. "You are the strangest Templar I have ever met."