Chapter 3 #2
He’d spilled enough of their blood, had been the boogeyman in enough of their stories. It was time they made him the fox and ran him to ground.
But the timing had been tricky. Celeste had to be the last person to see the painting in its special display alcove, with her security consultant, Harvey Merritt, in her company.
Stirling could disable and loop the cameras, Josh could fool the temperature sensors, and Grace could (and did) loosen all the screws in the frame and hide the forgery so Josh could have easy access, but the security really started at the door to the twentieth floor, where Celeste’s four floors of apartments began.
Hunter and Molly could get away with being on the catering team, and Julia and Josh’s uncle, Leon di Rossi, could crash the party on reputation alone, but nobody else on the team would have any reason to be upstairs while the party was in full swing and before the presentation of the painting.
Except Josh.
So Josh had retired to the restroom, scaled the wall, replaced the painting, and leaped back down to the balcony outside the bathroom, and now he had to mingle with the elite, the moneyed, and the beautiful as though nothing had happened.
It was a good thing he’d grown up doing this.
When he was a child, Felix, Julia, and Danny—tired of putting on a show for the elite in Chicago—had taken Josh on a tour of Europe.
For Josh’s mother, the freedom had been exhilarating.
Never in her life had she been able to get up in the morning, take a walk down by the river, and flirt with a handsome man while buying baguettes and cheese for breakfast. And Danny and Felix had been such fun companions.
They bantered to amuse themselves, and Julia, so relieved to live without her father’s constant efforts to control her life, had reveled in their foolery.
Josh had been along for the ride, and the four of them had lied, stolen, and grifted their way across the continent, learning the languages they didn’t know and practicing the languages they’d learned, and all of them giving money to the poor and righting the wrongs nobody else would, simply because they could.
Josh wasn’t afraid of crowds or of getting caught with a false name. He knew how to brazen out a lie, and while he’d never meant for it to be his livelihood, he’d been on the professional stage for much of his adolescence and young adulthood.
And of course Danny had taught him everything he knew.
So he could smile charmingly at a matron, flirt harmlessly with her daughter, and offer a firm handshake to the sugar daddy who bankrolled them, making a good impression—but hopefully not a memorable one.
He knew he was pretty, but he was a lackey for this production.
An art dealer should never be in the forefront; the art should be the star.
He’d immersed himself back into the role effortlessly, was in fact enjoying one of the canapes Hunter had offered him, with a chaser of sparkling water so Josh could knock back the ibuprofen hidden in the flap of prosciutto, when he sensed a disturbance at the door.
“Remember,” Hunter murmured, “one of us needs to be next to him for the count of twenty.”
Josh didn’t even nod. He knew that part of the plan. It had been his idea.
He glanced over casually and then returned his eyes to the modern, arresting painting by Armani Howard he’d procured for Celeste before the Abercrombie had fallen into their laps.
Titled Rapture, the work featured electric humanoids rising to an apocalyptic sky from a bucolic earth, and Josh rather mourned that he hadn’t been able to get it for his parents’ display of artwork, because he loved it.
But that one casual glance had been all he’d needed to see that their trap had sprung.
Celeste’s tasteful (and oh my God vast) display apartment space was entered by private elevator. Her living quarters and dining room were on the floors between the gallery and this cavernous living room, and while her party was very well attended, it was easy to spot the newcomers.
The man crossing the space, his hard-soled shoes ringing on the tile along with the shoes of the giant bodyguards on his flanks, was not “brutally handsome” like Josh’s Uncle Leon.
Instead his looks were simply “brutal.” At fifty, his flushed skin was coarsened—apparently by drink and sun and scowling—and his wiry hair was slicked back from a deeply receded widow’s peak.
The crevasses between his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose did not appear to be cleaned, harboring flakes of skin that Josh was going to have to not stare at, and his blue eyes were practically hidden by his brows and his cheeks, which were sagging into jowls.
He walked like he was sex on legs and knew it, and once, perhaps twenty years ago, Andres Kadjic had been brutally handsome. Now Josh had to control his revulsion, particularly that this man had ever touched his Uncle Danny.
Josh knew enough to not let his eyes linger, to pick up the details on one casual swoop as though looking for somebody behind his target and not the target himself. Personally, Josh was dressed to disappear in a black suit, chic but conservatively cut, with a black pocket square—
As he glanced down automatically, Josh’s eyes widened. Rather than the black square he’d chosen originally, a turquoise bit of silk now poked from his vest pocket, and he had to fight not to yank it out and hide it in his pants pocket instead.
Liam!
Josh had caught him, too, in his sweep of the room, having a casual interaction with Hunter, probably to ask if Josh had gotten the painkiller for his shoulder.
That turquoise scarf hanging at Liam’s waist like a pirate’s sash still looked dashing, and Josh had to take a deep breath not to stalk across the room and start a wholly irrational argument with him.
You want to play romance games when I’m in the middle of a job?
But then Liam met his eyes, and there was no play in him. Then Josh got it. The pocket square wasn’t some sort of bullshit power play—it was a reminder.
No matter what happened, Josh wasn’t alone.
Josh turned his attention back to the painting, the internal shaking he’d been fighting since he’d smacked into the wall on the descent finally easing up.
Not alone.
In his ear, Grace murmured, “You see him yet?”
“Yup.”
“And…?”
“Ugly as sin.”
“Step on him,” Grace said, and Josh smiled softly, immersing himself in the painting once more.
In fact he was so immersed in his job that he was surprised by an authoritative tap on his sore shoulder.
He held back a wince and turned to find himself face-to-face with the enemy.
“Is nice,” Kadjic said dismissively of the painting. “But not what we are here for.”
Josh gave him a deliberate glance and then turned back once again. “I like this artist,” he said. “I’d like to work with him some more.”
“Too… how you say? Ethnic.”
Josh refused to look at him—or rise to the bait. “As is much of Chicago,” he said. “An African and Thai American background gives him amazing choices of history to choose from.” He offered his own casual, dismissive glance. “European heritage is not the end-all and be-all of art.”
He heard it—the sucking in of breath—and regretted his words. He wasn’t supposed to catch Kadjic’s attention.
“You are?” The question was low and obviously intrigued.
“J.D. Morgan,” Josh responded without offering a hand. “I’m Celeste’s art dealer.”
Some of the innuendo fell away. “Oh! You’re the one who found the Abercrombie?”
Josh nodded, able to tell the truth. “A friend of mine did. It was at an estate sale. Hidden treasure.”
“What sort of friend?”
Real reactions are the best reactions, son. Don’t give away any piece of your soul to this man. He’s dangerous, so we’ll trap him—but he’s nobody we need to play up to.
His other father, Felix Salinger, had said that, and his mother had seconded it.
“A friend who doesn’t need to be harassed,” Josh retorted. “He called me, and I made the sale. Does it matter?”
To his surprise, Kadjic affected an ingratiating sort of smile, and Josh realized with a shock that the man was playing up to him.
“I want to make sure I am not… imposing,” he said, and Josh’s stomach roiled.
“Only on me,” he said mildly, although that bright, whimsical little pocket square seemed to spread a web of protective warmth over his body.
In his ear Grace was saying, “He’s not close enough for the clone, dammit. But don’t move any closer—he’ll take it wrong.”
At that moment, Celeste, wearing a bright red satin version of what Yzma wore in the children’s cartoon Emperor’s New Groove, stood on top of her wood-and-steel staircase to the next level and called out, “We should be ready! Everybody put down your canapes and drinks and come up to the exhibition level. My art dealer and I have been very busy preparing our little display for you, and we’re so proud for you to see our newest selection! ”
“Oh thank God,” Grace said in his ear. “No lie, you’ve got Chuck and Carl out here ready to rush in there and defend your virtue.”
Josh didn’t respond—he couldn’t without arousing Kadjic’s suspicions—but he did allow his lips to curl into a smile.
“Will you accompany me?” Kadjic asked. “Ms. Buenaventura asked me here specifically to see this painting. The least you can do is escort me up.”
“Don’t let him,” Grace hissed. “With that staircase, all he has to do is hip-check you off and you’re toast.”
The staircase was frightening—no guardrail from bottom to top, and Josh had been forced to use the elevator more than once. But Celeste had wanted her guests to “tour” the grounds, and that involved the three flights of stairs through her kitchen and sleeping quarter levels.
“Mr. Morgan,” purred a female voice behind Josh, “if you remember, you promised to escort me and my date to see the new painting.”