Burn For Me (Violent Vows #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

RORY

The dead man's signature is giving me trouble.

I've been staring at the lower right corner of a canvas worth absolutely nothing for twenty minutes. I can't get the R in "Rothko" to stop looking like it was written by someone who is alive.

That's the problem with forging a dead artist. Their hand had weight. Gravity. The letters leaned into the canvas the way old men lean into doorframes---like they knew the ground was coming for them eventually. My R has too much fight in it. It's too energetic. Too young.

I set the brush down on the table. I pick it up. I set it down again.

"You're being difficult," I tell the painting.

Rain hammers the skylight above me. It turns the whole loft into a drum, a relentless, drowning rhythm.

The squat used to be a print shop---you can still see the ink stains bleeding through the plaster like bruises that never healed.

Shoreditch gave up on this building the way London gives up on everything: quietly, with a passive-aggressive council notice and a padlock that took me forty seconds to pick.

The space is perfect. High ceilings. North-facing windows covered in grime that diffuses the light. It comes in the colour of wet cement, which is ideal when you're trying to match the palette of a man who painted like he was trying to capture the end of the world.

I roll my neck. My spine cracks in three places. The sleeping bag in the corner has been my bed for six weeks. My body has opinions about it. My lower back aches with a dull, persistent throb.

I dip the brush again. Thinner this time. A number four with the bristles splayed just enough to mimic a hand that shook from age and bourbon and the slow, creeping knowledge that the colours were already said.

I breathe out. I empty my lungs until they burn.

I touch the canvas.

The R lands.

Tired. Heavy. The loop collapsing in on itself like a man folding into a chair.

Perfect.

"There you are," I whisper. "You stubborn old bastard."

I lean back on my heels and look at the whole piece.

Four feet by three. Oil on canvas, aged with a tea wash and sanded at the corners to mimic fifty years of handling.

The colour field is a deep, bleeding crimson dissolving into a bruised amber at the base---Rothko's No.

14, 1960. A painting that sold at auction for thirty-six million dollars.

This one will sell for fifty thousand to a private collector in Monaco who doesn't ask questions and thinks his taste is better than his eyesight.

The deal had come through three layers of encrypted intermediaries.

No name. No face. Just a numbered account in Liechtenstein and very specific instructions about the piece---the exact dimensions, the exact period, the exact Rothko.

Most collectors tell you what they want in broad strokes.

This one had handed me a blueprint. I'd filed the strangeness away and cashed the deposit.

I should feel guilty. I don't.

The real No. 14 is safe. It hangs in a climate-controlled vault where it will be adored by exactly zero human beings until the estate loans it to a gallery for tax purposes.

My version will hang in a dining room on the C?te d'Azur.

It will be looked at. Argued about. Loved badly, but loved nonetheless.

I'm not a thief. I'm a redistributor of beauty.

My phone buzzes against the paint-smeared table. The sound cuts through the rain. I ignore it. It buzzes again. And again. A pattern I know: three bursts, a pause, two more.

Killian.

I wipe my hands on a rag that used to be a shirt. It smells of turpentine and linseed oil, the perfume of my life. I pick up the burner.

One word. No greeting, no how-are-you, no please.

Meridian. Tonight.

I stare at the message long enough for the screen to go dark. Then I read it again in the reflection.

The Meridian Gallery. Mayfair. The kind of place where the champagne costs more than my rent and the art on the walls is chosen by committee for maximum inoffensiveness.

A charity gala tonight---I'd seen the invitations circulating through certain channels.

The kind of event where oligarchs and arms dealers get to feel cultured while they launder money through donations to children's hospitals.

Killian wouldn't send me into a room like that for fun.

This is the job.

The one he briefed me on three months ago in a safehouse that smelled of disinfectant and Rocco's awful coffee. The one where he gripped my shoulder hard enough to bruise and said, Don't be clever, Rory. Just be invisible.

I'd smiled at him. He hadn't smiled back.

I look at the Rothko. At the studio. At the rain turning the windows into something abstract and grey.

Six weeks of this beautiful, lonely quiet. Six weeks where nobody called me a liability, or a screw-up, or Killian's little brother. Six weeks where my hands made things instead of ruining them.

I'm going to miss it.

I type back: What should I wear?

His reply is instant: Don't be you.

Charming.

The tuxedo is a Tom Ford.

Midnight navy. Single-breasted. Satin peak lapels that catch the light the way a blade catches the light---a flash, then nothing.

I lifted it from a Savile Row fitting room four months ago.

I walked out with it under a garment bag like I owned the building.

The tailor had left it hanging while he went to fetch fabric swatches for some hedge fund creature getting fitted for his third wedding.

I altered it myself. I took in the waist. I let out the shoulders. I shortened the sleeves by a quarter inch so my wrists show---a detail that screams old money. The kind of fit you get from a tailor your family has used for generations, the kind no one buys off a rack.

I stand in front of the cracked bathroom mirror. I don't recognize myself.

That's the point.

Rory Kavanagh---the paint-stained disaster with the bruised knuckles and the mouth that has never once in its life stayed shut---is gone.

The man in the mirror is someone else. Someone with cheekbones that could cut paper and green eyes that have been engineered, through careful practice, to say absolutely nothing.

I slick my hair back. It resists, because my hair is a war I have been losing since birth. But enough product and enough violence and it surrenders into something dark and gleaming.

Cufflinks. Silver. Engraved with initials that aren't mine---R.H. I found them at a Portobello Road stall, tarnished and forgotten. The story I've built around them: Robert Hathaway. Old Etonian. Art collector. Boring enough to be believed.

I roll my shoulders. The jacket moves with me. It doesn't bind. It doesn't pull. It fits like armor.

In the mirror, Robert Hathaway tilts his head. He studies himself with the disinterested confidence of a man who has never once questioned whether he belongs in a room.

"There you are," I say.

The same words I said to the Rothko. Because this is the same thing. A forgery. A perfect, beautiful lie.

I slip the device into my inside pocket.

It's the size of a SIM card---a frequency scanner that will piggyback on the gallery's wireless payment systems and clone the transaction data passing through them.

Every donation made tonight. Every wire transfer, every credit line, every name attached to every number.

A financial fingerprint of every person in that room.

Killian doesn't want me to steal anything. He wants me to listen.

The gallery's systems will do the talking. All I have to do is get the device within range of the server room, plant it, and walk away.

Simple.

Nothing about this will be simple.

The Meridian Gallery sits on a street in Mayfair that was designed to make poor people feel like trespassers.

Georgian townhouse. Portland stone facade.

The kind of building that has survived wars and recessions because the people who own it are the people who profit from both.

Rain slicks the pavement into something reflective.

The black cars lined up outside throw back the light in long, liquid streaks---Bentleys, a Maybach, two Rolls-Royces idling with their drivers still inside.

Engines hum like old money purring in its sleep.

I step out of a taxi. A black cab, deliberate---a hired car would mean a booking, a digital trail. Cash in hand, thank you, keep the change.

The rain is fine and cold. It doesn't fall so much as hover. I don't rush. Robert Hathaway has never rushed anywhere in his life. He has nowhere to be that won't wait for him.

The entrance is flanked by two security men in suits that don't fit properly around their shoulders. I catalogue them in the time it takes to climb four steps: earpieces, no visible weapons, eyes trained to scan for behavior rather than faces. Private firm. Professional but not military.

The hostess is positioned just inside the door. Blonde. Jaw-droppingly beautiful in the way that event staffing agencies require---symmetrical, approachable, aggressively pleasant. Her smile is a master class in manufactured warmth.

"Robert Hathaway," I say. I offer my hand the way I've practiced: palm down, gentle pressure, a half-second hold. Old money doesn't shake hands. It grants them.

She checks her tablet. The invitation had been the hardest part---Killian's people had created a digital identity three months deep. Social media. LinkedIn. A shell company that donated to last year's gala. I exist in the algorithm. Therefore, I am real.

"Mr. Hathaway, welcome. You're at table seven. May I take your coat?"

"I'm afraid I didn't bring one." I give her the smile---the one I practiced for weeks. Warm but restrained. The smile of a man who is comfortable being admired. "Optimism, I suppose."

She laughs. It's real. I'm in.