Wicked Intentions

33

I grab my coat and stumble away, vision blurred with tears of rage and desperation, vowing for the thousandth time that someday, somehow, I’ll find a way to take him down. Until then, I’ve got to figure out how to steal a world-famous diamond from one of the most secure locations inside the capital of the United States.

Within ten days.

Or Reynard dies.

I grip the small velvet bag of silver coins in my pocket and hurry back down to Limbo to pay a visit to the concierge.

12

Ryan

B

y the time

the police finished poking around my room and collecting evidence, I’d missed my flight. I’d also discovered from my new friend the chief that a twin-engine Cessna was stolen from the local airport sometime during the night. Security cameras caught nothing but a glimpse of a woman—dressed in a black T-shirt and a pair of men’s white briefs and carrying a small backpack—slicing through a chain-link fence with bolt cutters before sprinting away across the tarmac.

I got hard thinking about Angeline wearing my clothes as she flew off into the night. After breaking into an airport and stealing a plane. After breaking into a hotel suite and stealing a ruby necklace.

After breaking into my heart and stealing the whole goddamn thing.

I’d never spent time considering what my dream woman would be like, but apparently she’s on Interpol’s Most Wanted list.

My mother always said I didn’t like things easy.

I spent another two days at the resort after Tabby and Connor continued on the rest of their honeymoon and Darcy, Kai, and Juanita headed back to New York. I was determined to assist the local police in their investigation, but when it became apparent they worked on island time, I took matters into my own hands.

I talked to everyone at the hotel who’d interacted with Angeline. I hacked into the resort computers and pored through the video footage. I broke into Angeline’s room after the police were gone and hunted for any clue that might point me in the right direction. Her direction.

I came up with zilch. She was Gone Girl.

But only for now.

Tabby was amused by the whole thing. And ridiculously unhelpful. She liked Angeline nearly as much as I did.

“I’d help you find her, but I’m on her side,” she’d said brightly, kissing me goodbye as she and Connor got into their taxi to head for the airport.

“Fuckin’ Hello Kitty,” I’d muttered, shaking my head.

“That too, but here’s the thing, Ryan.” Tabby looked me dead in the eyes. “She’s living life on her own terms. She’s nobody’s fool. You know how I feel about women like that.”

Jesus. The fuckin’ crazy chick mutual admiration society. “She’s an outlaw, Tab.”

“She’s a badass.”

“She lied to me! She drugged me!”

Tabby’s gaze softened. “She didn’t want to.”

“How the f**k do you know that?”

She shook her head. “What you understand about women wouldn’t fill a thimble, you know that?”

Then she got into the cab and left with Connor, who was chuckling like a real asshole the entire time. I had to drop and do fifty pushups just so I didn’t punch someone.

My plan at that point was to go back to New York and regroup, but then I got a hit on a search spider I’d set up on Metrix’s computer system that trawled all the online news outlets, and it changed everything.

Cessna stolen from St. Croix found abandoned in a field in a rural part of Cornwall.

Cornwall is in southwestern England. That’s about as far as a Cessna could fly from the Virgin Islands on one tank. And one hell of a trip across the North Atlantic for a lone pilot. It would probably take nine hours nonstop, maybe ten, mostly in the dark, completely over water.

Talk about grueling.

But still…Cornwall. It has one city. It’s one of the poorest parts of the UK. Not exactly a great place to fence a fifteen-million-dollar ruby necklace. I took a look at a map to see if it might jiggle anything in my mind. Sure enough, it did.

Cornwall is a four-hour drive from London, one of the richest cities in the world.

With some of the oldest and most powerful crime syndicates in the world.

When I did a search of police reports for stolen vehicles in the Cornwall area within the past seventy-two hours, I got one hit…and the stolen car was found with switched license plates less than a day later in a parking garage in Chelsea, a suburb of London.

For the first time in two days, I could breathe again.

I spent the flight to London thinking about something else my mother used to say: It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

I had a bad feeling the fun-and-games part was behind me.

13

Mariana

A

fter I finish

my business with Genevieve, I take a taxi to the Victoria Coach Station and retrieve my bug-out bag from the storage locker I rented before I visited Reynard. Then I use the burner phone in it to reserve a suite at the Ritz-Carlton for the night because there’s nothing on earth that could compel me to stay at the Palace while Capo is there. And I can’t stay with Reynard. He’d take one look at my black-and-blue throat and do something stupid like go and confront Capo and get himself killed.

Reynard might be a lot of shady things, but a man who tolerates violence against women isn’t one of them.