Chapter Twenty-One #2
Spiker’s scrutiny intensified. “I remember. Crazy fucker who built himself a bedazzled trailer park palace. We ran ops on him years ago.”
“Four years ago,” she supplied. Bagley had been an oddball and a billionaire in the same vein as Alec Oliver.
Curious, how she didn’t make that connection until this moment.
One man had a purple castle with a stark white interior.
The other had connected one mobile home to the next, decorating their interiors with all the excess he could afford.
There was something repugnant to Vanka about his endless wealth and housing, which he otherwise would’ve shunned if not for his elaborate game of trailer-sized Legos.
Spiker’s pupils constricted. His index finger tapped on his thigh.
Vanka took the picture frame back and rehung it on her wall, then retrieved her phone from the kitchen. She opened a browser tab as she walked back to Spiker and typed in her query. “Read this.”
He eyed her for an unreadable moment, then took the phone. The search yielded a bevy of news headlines. A preservation organization in Egypt had announced the anonymous return of gold bracelets and pendants that belonged to an Egyptian queen.
“Check the dates,” she urged. “They’re about a month after our trip to the spa.”
Spiker pressed his lips together and set her phone on the glass table. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“What do you think I’m saying, Spiker?”
His head cocked to the side. Then he dropped back against the couch and scrubbed his face with his hands. She was scared of his expression when he dropped his fists.
Spiker’s hands threaded into his hair, and he shook his head. Finally, he locked eyes with Vanka. “You’re telling me that was you?”
She nodded.
“The guy everyone calls Robin Hood—” He jumped to his feet, apprehensive and angry, and gestured to the empty glass table. “All those files. The reports. The analysis that you pored over, that was you?”
She continued to nod.
“What the hell were you thinking?” He threw out his hands. “You could’ve been killed—” Spiker stopped cold. She could see the puzzle pieces falling into place. “Your parents were murdered.”
Tears burned and brimmed in her eyes, and she nodded.
His fury and understanding turned crestfallen. “You never told me.”
The weight of his disapproval threatened to be her undoing. “No.”
Spiker stared at the table as if he could still see the reports she’d neatly piled, and when he looked up, distrust dulled his eyes. “You scouted those while working with me?”
Vanka couldn’t bear his reproach, but she kept her chin up. “Yes.”
Spiker crossed his arms. “You didn’t trust me?”
A tear spilled down her cheeks. “It’s not that, and I do.” Another tear. She hated that he questioned their bond. “I’m telling you now.”
His lips pressed into a thin line. “What kind of faith do you have in me if you couldn’t tell me that you moonlight as…” He lifted his hands and stared at the ceiling. “Whatever the hell you are.”
“I am sorry.” Her voice broke. “I didn’t want to hurt you—”
“You could have been killed! Do you understand that? I don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing, how the hell you pulled this shit off, but you could have been dead, somewhere that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t get to you. Do you get that, Vanka?”
She nodded.
“Do you?” he roared, then caught himself. His chin dropped. He pinched the bridge of his nose, adding in a hoarse whisper, “If something happened to you, it would kill me.”
Vanka couldn’t stay away. She tucked herself against his chest, needing his arms to wrap around her and keep her close. Spiker cocooned her to him and repeated, “It would have killed me.” His lips pressed to the top of her head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“My parents…” A sad smile formed on her lips.
She pushed herself out of Spiker’s embrace and pulled him back to the sofa.
“When I was a child, I thought of my parents as superheroes. They knew everything, and they tried to teach me that too. I didn’t go to school like normal kids—no one taught me the birthday cake rule, just manners.
” She quietly laughed. “They didn’t just teach me to appreciate the arts and history; they made sure I understood ethics.
They wanted me to know how unfair life could be.
” She paused and recalled how passionate they had been.
“They were teachers and activists, and one day, they were tired of playing by the rules that so many in power chose to ignore. And that’s when the heists began. ”
His forehead furrowed. “They found stolen pieces and returned them?”
“More or less,” she agreed. “That wasn’t easy before the internet.
Nan was their primary researcher and one of their best friends.
They had a fourth person on their team. His name was Osman, and he was just as close to my parents.
” Vanka swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “Osman was Nan’s first husband.”
Spiker blinked, taking it all in. “What happened to him?”
“Dead, I hope.” The bitter words hung between them like a scathing canyon.
Vanka couldn’t recall Osman. She’d been too young when everything had gone wrong, but time hadn’t lessened her hatred for the bastard.
“At the time, we were living in New York City, but they were working on a project out of Paris. Unbeknownst to my parents and Nan, Osman reached out to their target and negotiated a deal very similar to modern-day hackers and ransomware.”
“He betrayed them.”