1 Rhian Daniels

Rhian

"Where is that little girl? If I get her, I will make her pay. She's not getting it easy today." An angry voice said.

It seemed like they were having a rough day, not that she was scared of them.  The girl they were looking for wasn't even scared for her life. She was a few steps ahead of them, hiding behind a trashcan that did her justice by covering her, including her shadow.

Today, she had gotten the best catch for the day. She managed to steal an apple watch from her victims. The watch was more expensive than her life, but then she was Rhian, and nothing would scare her.

"Wow, we have been bested by a little girl. She looks fifteen or sixteen. She couldn't have gone far; let's split up; that way, it will be easier to catch the little brat."

The girl in question wanted to snort at that comment, but doing that would give up her position. She knew they would never get here because she would never let herself get caught.

She was, after all, a survivor, and this, this was child play.

***

Born in a world that she would forever curse her dead parents for bringing her into, Rhian had to learn how to survive at age four. She had been a little girl then, but that never meant that she was going to give up, just like that. If she was going to survive, she needed to grow up and fast.

When her parents had died of unknown circumstances, she was dumped at st. Martha's children's home. The safest place for a girl her age, but she had proven to them that they needed to be wary of her instead of the other way around.

There wasn't even a funeral for them. No one even cared to look into the why or how they died, or maybe that's what she thought because she was alone. All she was told was that her parents had died, and the next thing she knew, she was being taken to a home for lonely kids like her.

Maybe they thought this was going to make her feel better.

It should have.

However, she was a wild girl, one who never knew what rules meant.

She was troublesome, something that always landed her in the chamber room, the punishment hall for the orphanage. Most of the kids dreaded that room, but she was Rhian, and she was never scared of anything.

She was the girl who could do daring things without thinking of how harsh the punishment would be. She would spend a whole day there and promise the nuns that she would do better the next time, but each time, she did worse.

She hated being confined to one particular place. The matron told her she was an adventurous soul, but what the matron didn't realize was the fact that she was going to use those words as an excuse for everything she would be doing.

Every foster home that the system had placed her into did return her in a span of a week. They said she was more trouble than she ever was worth.

The orphanage administrators had given up suggesting her adoption to the foster system. Eventually, they got her out of the system, and that's how Rhian Daniels ended up staying at the orphanage.

Being unwanted at her age got mixed reactions from her peers. They bullied her and called her names even though they were in a similar situation. They mocked her for not taking advantage of the adoption system and becoming the ultimate golden child that the foster parents wanted.

She was so beautiful, a trait that she knew would get many parents to like her. Everyone wanted a beautiful girl, but beautiful and troublesome was never part of the deal. That's why she was brought back.

At the age of ten, she was tired of being bullied for being an outcast, so she ran away during one of the church masses that were held at the orphanage.

She hated the fact that people would come and pray with them to a God who seemingly never cared about her.

She blamed everyone for the death of her parents.

She blamed them for not giving her the chance to say goodbye.

She said they were cruel, and maybe they were, but she decided to be the goddess from hell.

She hated the fact that these very people subjected her to different kinds of treatments.

She hated the fact that she prayed, and her prayers were unanswered.

She had hopes and dreams that seemed valid. She wanted a family that understood her, that cared for her, one that would treat her just like her parents did. She wanted to tell them she was stealing to get out of the orphanage, but no one would ever understand her.

No one would ever know the horrors she was going through. No one would ever understand the hurt she was experiencing, the nightmares on things she never would understand. She was scared of the voices in her head, but then no one would ever understand.

No one would ever know why she was doing what she did. So instead of understanding her in the way she wanted to be, she was thrown out of the houses that had taken her. But then again, who would want to take in a thief in their house?

Maybe she was cursed, and that's why she had run away from the orphanage. She considered herself the beautiful but unlucky child, and she hated herself for it.

Running away was her only solution for all this, and as time went by, she understood how different the world was from her world. From her haunted dreams. At least now, she didn't have to worry about the wolves in her head.

Two years after running away, she was done pitying herself. She realized the streets were way harsher than the nuns at the darn orphanage.

The number of times she had eaten good food in the past years was countable. She survived on leftovers and made pit stops at the trash bins outside the fancy restaurants. She would go during the night because that way, no one would take pity on the beautiful thief.

In the two years she had been on the outside, she had learned a lot about the world, one of them being the fact that no one ever gave a damn about anyone else. Everyone minded their businesses, and that's why she decided to put her fancy fingers to use. She would pickpocket regularly, but that only got her so far.

She knew she would never be able to get enough money to rent an apartment, and even if she did, no one would ever let a twelve-year-old life alone. It was illegal, and that was something that no one would ever accept.

Not one to follow the order of the world, she got better at her stealing. She would never call that stealing, though.

At first, she considered it her means of survival, but when she turned seventeen, she forced her uncultured self to get a job as a mechanic. The car shop owner she worked in was kind enough to let her sleep in the garage. Something for which she had no objections.

As a way of thanking the car shop owner, she swore she would never steal from the hand that fed her.

Her boss rewarded her with an old minivan that seemed out of order for being a good worker. For the first time, Rhian used her fancy fingers for something useful. She worked on the van day and night until it was ready to hit the road again. The moment it did, she quit her job and resumed her job as the girl with fancy fingers.

She resumed her souvenir collection.

She would steal from anyone and everyone that had something she considered valuable. She was the good thief.

She never killed her victims, just left them unconscious.

She had sworn to herself she would never leave a child parentless like she was left, and maybe that's why leaving her con victims unconscious was more justifiable for her than killing them.

On some occasions, she would steal money from them, but that was rare that the van ran out of fuel or that she was hungry, and her snacks had run out. The valuables that she "borrowed" from her victims could have gotten her a lavish lifestyle, but for her, she was okay with being rich on the streets than being a beggar on the flats.

She considered the things she supposedly borrowed from the people around her to be the very gifts her useless parents had left her. She knew she would never be able to get everything she wanted, so she would borrow them because that was the only way she would be considered normal.

The city knew of her so well, the beautiful thief, but no one had ever been really able to see her face. They knew she was the best at what she did. Stealthily without even giving anyone a hint that she was the con.

She did her work with professionalism. It almost felt like she was a trained con. She had trained herself to survive, and if the streets wanted to survive, they would be a tad bit nicer to her.

Once again, that was just her illusion.

Her victims always described her as a good thief because she only took and never killed. Others referred to her as the masked beauty, maybe because she was more beautiful when she stole. Those were the words of her victims.

Everyone had always wanted to find what had been stolen from them on the markets and even the dark web, but they never appeared. Instead, the valuables were in the trunk of an overused old minivan that no one would ever be able to suspect.

The minivan that was always hidden in plain sight.

The owner was, after all, the good thief.