Extremely belated Cohost-era writing prompt: Thief who has an embarrassing calling card
“You’re unbelievable, Matty,” Irene drawls, holding up a slap-patch to the light to squint at it. “A real piece of work.”
Matty pouts, and runs her foot up Irene’s naked calf under the hotel suite’s silk sheet. “Listen,” she says, “nobody has a criminal calling card because they’re short on ego. I was young, I was — fine, I was a shithead, when I decided on it. It’s not terribly, you know, feminist. But if I change it, people won’t know it’s me.”
Matty’s modus operandi has always been to get to rich assholes’ art collections, and the way she does it is by fucking their wives. Oh, not necessarily as a straightforward or load-bearing part of the plan; she could do a lot of her jobs without, really. But, call her problematic, she really likes fucking rich neglected assholes’ wives as part of the job.
They like it, too, up until she vanishes with the art and something else appears: the slow-developing bloom of a permanent nanotech-constructed slap-patch-applied tattoo, adhesive pad temporarily applied during a well-fucked sleep. Somewhere it won’t show, clothed, she’s not a monster — the sweet curve of a buttock or breast. Her calling card, a little silhouette rearing horse: you’ve been hit by the Calabrese Stallion!
Does she have regrets, think now that putting a permanent mark on womens’ bodies is maybe not a great thing to do? She does. But if her targets were all that great as people, she’d have a bunch of qualms about doing what she does, wouldn’t she? And Irene clearly doesn’t have that many qualms, either, or she wouldn’t be a fence.
Matty sure wouldn’t mind a…long and fruitful working relationship with her. She stretches, grinning, pleasantly sore. “Anyway,” she purrs. “Round three?”
It hurts a little to wake up in the morning to find that Irene has vanished into thin air, along with all Matty’s money and the art from her latest heist, but Matty simmers down after a long shower and a bit of a cry and throwing last night’s empty champagne bottle and its crystal glasses at the wall. It’s probably not personal; they’re all criminals, after all.
She thinks she’ll be able to laugh about it in a few days, probably. By the time they run into each other again, it’ll practically be a meet-cute story!
And then the itching starts, just above her bikini line, and she’s starting to have worried thoughts about antibiotics until she notices the pigment starting to coalesce beneath her skin.
“Aw no,” she whines, and miserably flushes the rest of her calling cards down the hotel’s toilet, feeling like she’s been indelibly livestock branded ‘IDIOT.’
