Hey everyone! I'm back! I think... School has been hectic and before that work was hectic and on top of that I never could write something I was happy with this summer. I had a prologue and a first chapter to this written and I hated them both so I revised them and what little information was contained in them both is now in this new and improved prologue. Anyway, I have to admit that for a while there I lost my muse, but I'd like to thank everyone who helped me get it back by giving such awesome reviews, favoriting the story, myself as an author and following. I'm keeping a list of you now as inspiration.

That being said, I don't have a ton of time for a lot of individual thanks, but I'd like to say thanks to those who favorited my first story, Steal My Heart. Thank you: nightmaster000, LandSlide96, The Manga Goddess, raptor123, Fictional writer 14, Spartan10007, KittyGems, brokenXangel15, AriesTanotage, Artur Paendrag Taneall, Eve Kagamine, pure1ruby, The Sly Cooper, Andilite, kitsunlover, ShadowYashi, DalaneyP12, Wrayth-Pariah, keller75863548274483, Digi-Tiger, unfledgedd, WaunderingFlyer23, rob-job, Aim1107, Cherry Hitachiin, Terra-Fair, JPR8686, KaiaUchiha1, Nakirali, antaurilover685, Shad360, WhiteWolf125, M3GHAN08, Lady Fon Slytherin, Destiny Xavier16, taciturnTherapist, Wolf Boy 95, Princesslostsoul, and ThisIsHope.

I would also like to take a moment to thank those who followed the prequel to this story. I hope that you will all be back to follow this story as well. Thanks to: LandSlide96, Blue Wolf29, Isillis, KurokamiHaruhi, Spartan10007, Undertaker's Hattress, brokenXangel15, Artur Paendrag Taneall, KateAlexandraH, pure1ruby, Andilite, ShadowYashi, MeowBearsPanda29, Wrayth-Pariah, keller75863548274483, unfledgedd, M3GHAN08, Terra-Fair, KaiaUchiha1, Gordon1Freeman3, taciturnTherapist, Wolf Boy 95, and Princesslostsoul.

Last but not least, I would like to send out a personal thanks to my reviewers from Steal My Heart. I hope that with your input this story can be so much better. Thanks: nightmaster000, KurokamiHaruhi, Shiningheart of Thunderclan, The Sly Cooper (no, no sappy endings... not yet), Spiced Enchilada, DonTheHero, and Luontoiti for your support and kind words.

A special thanks:

Spartan10007: Thanks for your continued support and understanding during the undertaking of Steak My Heart. I hope that this sequel is what you were hoping for and more.

Andilite: Not only were you supportive but you were also a critic. Every now and again I need to be told what to do better, so thank you. I'll try to do better in this story not putting so much detail into the scenes straight from the game. When I do that it drives me crazy, too.

keller75863548274483: Hopefully when this is all over I won't have to constantly look back to type your whole username... lol. Here is the much awaited sequel. I hope you like it and thanks for reviewing.

Foxes Are Us: That was definitely an intended cliffhanger, and I'm probably going to end this story in a cliffhanger of some sort as well because (spoiler alert) there will be a third story yet to come. Thank you for reviewing and please enjoy.

ThisIsHope: You're the one I have to thank for me getting back up and writing again. I have to say that while the others asking me about a sequel got me in motion to write one, your final request for a sequel was the straw that broke the camel's back and I decided that it had been long enough since I last wrote. Thank you for reading my last story and for booting me back into writing mode. I do plan for their relationship to get complicated from here on out. I promise there will be something done about the sexual tension.

If anyone feels missed, if you didn't see your name on my list of people following or favoriting the last story, please message me. I don't want to miss anyone. I was using my email archive as a record and list of past favorites and follows. I have actually kept every email this site has sent me since the day I joined. Thank you again, everyone, and now on with the story.

As I stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle the indecipherable buzz of French and the smell of the city of Paris reminded me quickly that it was here in this city, just a year ago, that my life had taken a turn I'd never expected. A year ago, love was just a fantasy to me. It was something that fairy tale princesses and princes had, not something real, and definitely not something that I expected to find. Anything other than the heiress of a spice empire was not something I could ever be. Power was something I didn't have, not in my life, not in my life's choices, and definitely not like I'd gained since I'd last stepped foot in this very airport.

Just a year ago, I was convinced that my path lay with the Klaww Gang and that no other path would ever suit me. It was as my father wanted, I was going to be the perfect heiress to his empire and he would find me the perfect suitor to carry on his legacy. The only men I'd ever known were my father, the Klaww Gang and a slew of suitors from far and wide all vying for my hand in marriage. They didn't love me… they loved the idea of marrying into all of that money and power. Back then I knew that eventually I would be forced to marry for the sake of the spice and love would have nothing to do with the pairing. It was hard to believe, now, that my life had once been like that.

It was now about a year ago that a certain stubborn raccoon waltzed into my life – both figuratively and literally – and flipped everything I knew on its head. He was unlike any man that I'd known up to that point. At first he had been an obnoxious flirt who I wanted nothing more than to wipe off the face of the planet, but it didn't take him long to see right through me and bring out every insecurity I never knew I had. He broke me and when I was ready he helped build me back up. Being with him was nothing like being with a suitor. He won my heart naturally just by being who he was. It was through his insistence that I finally was able to make choices for myself again, as my mother would have wanted. He destroyed the Klaww Gang and then offered me a place to call home and of course I went with him.

Joining the Cooper Gang had been easy. I hadn't really thought about it at the time, but ever since we'd met in Paris at Dimitri's club, I had been building the trust of the other two members, Benltey and Murray. Murray was a bit more open to my joining the gang, while Bentley was still suspicious of me for a long time. Over time, I came to earn their trust and friendship and I found two more companions that I wouldn't trade for the world. Being a member of the Cooper Gang was as natural as breathing. I didn't feel forced by them to be something or do something I didn't want, and they were quick to take care of me when I was hurt. It was the first time in a long time that I felt as if I had a family again. That's what made it harder when our little family practically fell apart at the seams.

None of us really expected the kind of tragedy that befell that last heist in Arpeggio's airship over Paris. Arpeggio, the man who had been my best friend for a long time, died before the fighting even started. All the plans we'd made became useless when Neyla became one with the Clockwerk frame. She was crazy and evil in ways that I would never understand. When Sly finally made his move to take her out, she tried to take all of us with her. In the end, it was only casualties and pain, not victory, which we faced. Bentley was severely injured and Sly was taken into custody. It would have been an understatement to say that we felt the situation was hopeless. All of us wondered what would become of us.

I knew a doctor and we got Bentley patched up, but he would never walk again. The pain of the situation drove Murray to leave us to find his spiritual center. It was more painful than anything to see the devastation that the final battle had caused within this small group of friends. I, too, eventually left. After confronting my father in prison I'd discovered that the powers over lightning that I'd exhibited on the airship were hereditary. It hurt to leave the gang, but just as Murray I needed a spiritual teacher to help me gain control over these powers. Perhaps if I was stronger, this kind of tragedy would never befall us again.

Before seeing me off, Bentley built a special phone for me that only they could call so that they could keep in touch with me. It became a monthly thing later in my journey to get a call from Sly. He usually was checking in with me and at first he would make sure I knew how much he missed me but then he seemed to mellow out after I'd been gone for about half a year. I thought that he'd finally gotten used to the idea of me being in a different country and I knew that he had supported my choice to go even if he didn't want us to be separated.

With that sentiment in mind, I left for the country of India. There wasn't much that I needed to take with me aside from a few changes of clothes because I had discovered that my teacher to be was a renunciant who lived in a remote location on the shore of the Yamuna River. While my father thought she lived in Delhi, she had moved since he'd last heard of her and no one had gotten much word of her since. Even with the tip that I'd been given about her location, it took me a week of following the river north before I found her, and it took me another week of persistence to get her to accept me as her student. She didn't live in a normal home. There was a cave upstream of where I'd found her that she used as her shelter when she needed it.

The best way to describe her was beautiful but terrifying. She was a rather tall Water Monitor with a sleek, strong build and claws and teeth that should have scared anyone with a little common sense away. Her skin consisted of sleek grey-green scales with occasional light yellow scales mixed in. What was even more beautiful was the way she painted her body. She used white and bright yellow paint and had a stripe of each color on each part of her body. Over all of this, she wore a simple brown halter top and a skirt that came just to her mid-thigh. Both of her pieces of clothing looked as if they'd been made from rags, and they probably were. The entire time I was there, I never saw her with any other clothing.

While I was there I also discovered that she had a quick, but hard to aggravate, temper. Most of the time she was very laid back, though her physical exercises were harsh on the body. She spent more of her time doing yoga and meditating than anything else, and that was the first thing she taught me. If I had control over my body, my mind was the next easiest thing to conquer and then after that my spirit and power. I often spent hours in meditation with her each day. At times I believed that she was dead because she was barely breathing. After a few months, though, I stopped being bothered by her lack of breathing and was able to focus enough on my own breathing to control it considerably better but not as well as her. I learned that, to her, physical fitness was as important as mental and spiritual fitness.

While other renunciants were vegetarian, she was still a carnivore as her species didn't do well on vegetable diets. She caught all her food from the river and every day she went swimming. I was excited to find out that she loved swimming as much as I did and oftentimes we would swim for several hours without realizing the passage of time. Catching my own food also wasn't a problem but I wasn't as good at swimming or hunting as she was. It didn't take me long to understand that until then I had lived a life of privilege compared to the life she had chosen. In many ways, my life had made me soft and when I understood that her harsh physical training was trying to harden me to the rigors of life I was more ready to accept what she had to teach me and I faced each challenge she presented with a new outlook and hardened resolve.

It's needless to say that I felt that there was nothing she couldn't teach me. She seemed to know everything and anything I wanted to know about just about anything including my power. In the time that I spent with her I learned a lot, but I also knew that when the time came for me to leave her I still wouldn't know nearly as much as I wanted to. Near the end of my time with her, she was teaching me about powers that I didn't even know my family had. I had a knack for clairvoyance, as it turned out, and a very basic understanding of telekinesis. On top of those two things she taught me to sense auras not just in people but in my surroundings. For some reason she started to teach me the tools I needed to continue my training on my own. At first it confused me but then I got a phone call from Sly asking me to come home.

Sly explained that he had talked to some man named McSweeny who used to run with his father in their heyday. This man had told him about something called the Cooper Vault. It was a huge vault on a secret island that only a Cooper could open and it was brimming with treasure from as far back as his family line went. He sounded passionate about it. It was a deep kind of passion that made it impossible for me to decline when he asked me to come home and help them get to it. Before I could ask why he couldn't get to it, he explained to me someone else known only as Dr. M. Apparently this man had gotten to the island first, probably decades before, and turned it into a stronghold while he tried to break into the vault. Sly was convinced that without a team of world-class thieves he wasn't going to get into that vault and I was honored that he wanted me on that team.

My teacher accepted my request to leave with ease. She told me that she knew all along that I was going to leave long before she could teach me all the things that she wanted me to learn, but then she added that now I had the tools to continue my learning for myself. I told her that one day I would come back to continue my training and then I departed for Paris to join Sly and Bentley as they prepared to travel the world in search of these thieves that were going to make up their team.

The plane ride home was almost too slow for me to stand. There was a lot on my mind. Again I was reminded of the distance I'd started to feel from Sly about half way through my time away. I wondered if things would be the same when I came back or if they would have changed while I was gone. There was never any word about Bentley's condition or about whether it improved or got worse. My worst nightmare sometimes was coming home to find out that Bents suffered from some kind of complication and was left completely disabled. I couldn't imagine that poor turtle being stuck inside of a body that couldn't function. My other worst nightmare was often coming home to Sly with another woman that he told me nothing about. I sincerely hoped within myself that both of those nightmares would never become reality.

Once the plane landed I took a breath to calm myself. Sly and Bentley were going to meet me at the waiting area and then take me back to the safe house. I exited the plane and listened as individuals spoke excited French around me. Sly had tried to tutor me in the language but I hadn't been around long enough to learn it very well and I couldn't understand it at all. It took a good fifteen minutes to make my way through the crowds and back to the waiting area. I didn't see them at first but then it was like the sea of people parted and there they were. They looked just like I remembered, except for Bent's wheelchair. It seemed like he'd made a lot of modifications to it. They were both standing there smiling at me like dorks, Sly was holding my luggage, and the sight of it made me smile, too.

Sly waved at me and I couldn't help but wave back like an idiot. He gave it another couple of seconds before he gestured for me to come to him and I obeyed without question. If I hadn't been in public, I would have run. As I approached him he set down my luggage and opened his arms to embrace me. I felt kind of stupid thinking that it was like a scene from a romance movie, but it was kind of how it felt as I walked up to him and accepted his embrace. He held me tightly and I buried my head in his chest.

"Welcome home" he whispered to me and it was the impact of those words that caused my shell to break. I admitted to myself that all my worries had been stupid and there was nothing I should have been worrying about and I felt all my anxiety melt away.

"I missed you guys" I whispered back to him and I felt him squeeze me a bit harder before he let me go. Immediately I felt the need to hug Bentley, too. It was then that I got a good up-close look at his new wheelchair and all of the fantastic gadgets that he had attached to it. It thrilled me in so many ways to see that all my worrying had been for nothing.

We stood there smiling at each other until Bentley cleared his throat and said "We should get back to the safe house."

"Right" I said with a smile and a nod at Sly. He nodded back and then an idea came to me. "I get to push Bentley!" I said excitedly.

"That's really not necessary" Bentley began to say, but I cut him off.

"I don't care what's necessary. It's something I want to do" I said as I walked around behind him and took the handles of his wheelchair in my hands.

"I know I can't argue with you" he replied as I began to push him.

Sly led us out to a nice black van with a wheelchair ramp in the back and put my luggage in the trunk before rushing to open the door for me. I was struck by the awareness that this was not the team van and that it had been left behind in Canada at the time of that final heist. Before returning, I had been unaware of how everything I saw and did was going to remind me of that final heist. The guilt about what happened to Bentley and the heavy feeling of failure drifted back into my mind after having been gone for so long. I tried to push it away but it was almost impossible just to not think about it.

"It'll be fine" Sly said, sensing my distress. He was probably right.

"How did you two get over it?" I asked and they both knew what was on my mind.

"Time" Bentley answered. "We've had to face it every day because there isn't anything that doesn't remind us of what happened. Eventually we realized it was time to move on."

"That sounds a lot easier than it seems" I replied to him, looking at him in the rearview mirror.

"It's a lot harder than it seems" he said. I enjoyed being exposed to his wisdom again.

"Give it time and things will get better" Sly said as he placed a hand on my knee.

"Okay, I'll try" I said with a sad smile.

We finally made it to the safe house and Sly helped me get my things inside and unpack what little I had taken with me. It was so little that it only took us a few minutes to get it all put away where it needed to go and then we all sat down together. A sense of business overcame us.

"So, what is it that we have to do?" I asked.

"Well," Bentley said with a smile, "first we're going to find Murray."

My eyes widened and I felt a bit of excitement at seeing the hippo rejoin the gang again. "Where is he?" I asked.

"The last we've heard of him, he's in Venice, Italy" Bentley replied.

"Why?" was the first thing I thought to ask.

"Well, to start, we got word that he ended up in the Australian Outback studying something called Dreamtime from an Aboriginal guru" Bentley began to explain. "I guess things are going well because his teacher sent him on a walk about all over the world and the last time he was seen was in Venice."

"So let's go to Venice" I said decisively.

"It's more complicated than that" Sly said. "We don't know what he's doing there and to make things worse Venice is the turf of Don Octavio, a local mob boss."

"What's the story on this Octavio guy?" I asked, curious to know what we would be dealing with.

"Well, he used to be a celebrity in opera" Sly began.

"Gross" I replied.

"Exactly," Sly continued, "with the changing times his career was ended before it could really take off. He kept a few fans, mobsters, who got him into the mob business. I don't want to cross paths with him if I can avoid it. His turf is notorious for being dangerous."

After letting it sink in, I stood up and looked at Sly and Bentley. "One thing is for sure. If we don't go to Venice we might never see Murray at all. One way to make sure this doesn't happen is to not do it. So let's get going."