Chapter Sixteen
MINA
Long after Roux signed off, I stared silently at his phone. He and the others jumped right into organizing the practicalities of their assignment, but I barely paid attention. My head was still spinning with what I’d heard.
Mallorca…private estate…infiltrate and extract…
Gordon’s words made it all sound fairly harmless. But it wasn’t. At all.
Because infiltrate meant break in. Extract meant steal.
Worse still was By any means necessary, as long as you leave no loose ends.
Gordon — my sweet, loving godfather — had just given his mercenaries license to kill. Even before he’d gotten to that part, the plan reeked of sketchy morals and jail time.
I must have mumbled that aloud, because Bene shook his head. “Nah. Jail is for human crimes.”
I stared. “You mean, this Baumann guy he mentioned isn’t human?”
“Nope,” Bene said in his usual upbeat tone. “Ronald Baumann is a wolf shifter. A nasty one.”
Unlike Clement, I couldn’t help thinking.
What would he say if he knew about me getting involved in all this?
“What’s the penalty for a crime among supernaturals?” I asked.
Bene shrugged. “That’s only relevant if you’re caught.”
“You mean, the way you were caught at whatever it is that you did? The crime that made you need Gordon?”
He grimaced. “I prefer incident.”
“And you’re really ready to risk another incident?” I stared at the rest of them. “You’re seriously ready to do this?”
Roux shrugged. “We have to.”
“Do you?” I shot back.
Silence filled the air, heavy as cigar smoke.
How you get it all done is your business. Gordon had said. The less I know, the better. I just want it done. Understood?
Every one of them had echoed that line. Understood.
Well, I didn’t understand, dammit! None of it. What had happened to the kind, considerate Gordon I knew? And my clients… I’d started seeing them as — well, not friends, but tolerable, basically decent neighbors. (Okay, not Henrik. But the others.) Had I been wrong about them?
“If anything goes wrong, you’re the ones in trouble, not Gordon,” I pointed out.
Bene shrugged. “That’s the way this works.”
I gaped.
Roux switched to his most reasonable tone. “Look, we recognize that there are some gray areas…”
“Gray? This is closer to midnight, dammit. Stealing is wrong. Just wrong.”
“What if I told you Ronald Baumann is a murderer and arms dealer?” Marius offered.
I frowned. That shouldn’t play into the equation, but somehow, it did.
“And what if I told you the target was stolen, and we’re just there to return it?” Bene threw in.
I narrowed my eyes. “Is it?”
He looked at his feet. “No. Well, not that I know of.”
Roux shook his head impatiently. “Look, you don’t have to be part of this. We let you listen in on the call as a courtesy, but we don’t expect you to participate — other than keeping what you heard to yourself.”
He meant me spilling the beans to Clem, didn’t he? I crossed my arms indignantly. How dare he question my morals?
On the other hand, my morals were pretty messed up. As wrong as this mission was, I already knew I wouldn’t call it in.
“Of course I’ll keep it to myself.” I stood, took two steps toward the door, then spun around. “But one thing — once you’re gone, you’re gone. I don’t want you coming back.”
They all stared at me, and it took everything I had to hold my ground. Because all of a sudden, we were back to Day One, when they were just a bunch of strangers — powerful, scary strangers — and I was no one to them.
But when my eyes locked on Marius’s, I wavered. His lips twitched, reminding me of our stolen kiss — er, kisses, plural.
Was he a mercenary and criminal or my guardian and protector — the sweet, gentle soul who’d held me all night long?
My knees started to wobble. My lips too.
“Understood,” Roux said in a clipped, emotionless tone.
The other three whipped around and stared at him.
“Wait a minute,” Bene protested. “I like it here.”
Even Henrik looked unsettled. And Marius… He looked at me through eyes filled with pain…hope…desire…
Roux’s phone pinged with the details Gordon had promised to send through.
I forced myself to step toward the door. This was all for the best. It was the reality check I needed. It had been a mistake to start to trust my housemates — er, clients — and downright stupid to think of Marius as anything but a very attractive, very dangerous man.
“Okay, here’s the file,” Roux said to the others.
Their phones pinged with the files he forwarded, punctuating the sound of my footsteps.
“The first document is a file on Baumann…” Roux explained. “The second is a picture of the target.”
I moved toward the threshold, though my body protested every step. Then I cursed and headed back for my plate. It had taken me a week to train the guys to clean up after themselves. I couldn’t set a bad example now.
In the periphery of my vision, I saw Marius cock his head at his phone.
“Huh.”
I frowned, picturing gold ingots. Precious jewels. A briefcase of nuclear codes.
“Oh.” Bene’s eyebrows shot up as he checked his screen. “That’s what we need to extract?”
Roux nodded.
“Well, that’s different,” the lion shifter murmured.
Henrik didn’t seem interested, but when Bene angled the phone toward him, his eyes widened.
“Oh.” He drew out the word into several syllables, clearly impressed.
Okay, my curiosity was officially piqued.
Mercenaries and criminals, I reminded myself. Guaranteed jail time.
Grabbing my plate and mug, I turned back toward the door.
Bene squinted at his screen. “A painting. With squiggly trees. Doesn’t look too valuable to me.”
“What is that? A Picasso?” Marius rumbled.
“Not Picasso, you fool. Van Gogh,” Henrik said.
I stopped in my tracks. A real Van Gogh or like a Van Gogh?
Bene shrugged. “Hell, I could paint in better focus than this.”
A comment I’d heard in a dozen museums in front of real masterpieces.
“Okay, okay.” I gave in. “What is it?”
Bene covered his screen. “Thought you weren’t interested.”
I wasn’t. Was I?
“You don’t want to see it,” Marius assured me.
I reminded myself that I didn’t. Except, suddenly, I did.
Roux held his phone against his chest. “Sorry. If you’re not involved, you don’t need to know. Nothing personal.”
The more he refused, the more I wanted to see the damn thing. Just to satisfy my curiosity.
I motioned to Bene. “You’ve insulted my coffee machine for a whole week now. You owe me.”
He shot Roux an apologetic look and turned his phone toward me.
I stared, then sat down. Hard.
And, yikes. If Marius hadn’t stuck a chair under me, lightning-fast, I would have been ass-down on the floor.
“What is it?” Marius asked from what seemed like a hundred miles away.
I stared at the picture, then him, then back at the picture.
My heart thumped ponderously. By their own admission, these men were mercenaries — but they had been decent enough to me. Even kind at times (except Henrik, obviously). Shouldn’t I at least inform them what their target was? What it represented?
Marius touched my arm, and I swallowed. Hard. Then I turned to Bene and motioned for his phone. “I need a closer look, please.”
Roux shook his head firmly. “Sorry, Mina. You already know more than you should.”
“Maybe you know less than you should,” I shot back.
He frowned, then shrugged. “We’ve been hired to extract goods. Whether that’s a painting or a pumpkin, it’s not our business.”
“That’s not any painting.”
“No? Then what is it?” Roux demanded.
I pursed my lips, then whispered as if someone might be eavesdropping. “Van Gogh. The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.”
“Road to where?”
“Tarascon,” I murmured, staring at the phone.
Bene studied the image again. “Is it super valuable or something?”
I shook my head. “No. Yes. I mean, that’s not the point. This painting has been missing since World War II.”
“Well, I guess someone found it,” Bene muttered, unimpressed.
I shook my head. “It’s called Raubkunst. War plunder — if it’s the real deal.”
Roux shook his head. “What it is isn’t our business.”
“Well, maybe it should be,” I snipped. “Maybe you should think.”
He glared, but I glared back. When that got me nowhere, I did my best to explain.
“Throughout the war, Nazis confiscated, stole, or ‘bought’ thousands of masterpieces at extortionary prices. Some were recovered. Others were destroyed. Some just disappeared.” I pointed at the image on the phone. “Like that one. It was hidden in a salt mine in Germany with a lot of other art.”
“Were you an art major or something?” Bene asked in the same disapproving tone I might use to ask if he was a mercenary.
“Yes.”
His mouth formed a surprised O. “I thought you were a teacher.”
“I am. I started out as an art teacher, but the school district scaled back the program, and I had to switch to classroom teaching.” Reducing a valuable art program was another crime as far as I was concerned, but I forced myself to get back to the point.
“A fire broke out in that salt mine in the last days of the war, and that Van Gogh was reported lost with everything else.”
“But it wasn’t,” Marius murmured, catching on.
“There have been rumors about it being part of a private collection ever since. An illegal private collection,” I said.
“What happens if it’s found?” Bene asked.
“It’s supposed to be returned to its rightful owner or their descendants. Best case, it goes to a museum for the public to enjoy.”
“Supposed to be, huh?” Bene said dubiously.
Roux jutted his chin at Bene to put away his phone. “Well, thanks for informing us. But since we have some planning to do…” He tilted his head toward the door.
My mind spun. Leaving now was the prudent thing to do. But my heart thumped wildly, and not because of a Van Gogh, or even a long-lost Van Gogh.
I knew about that painting — and others like it — because I knew someone who’d worked tirelessly to track plundered artworks. Someone who had died while hot on the trail of The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
My father.