‘Til Heist Do Us Part

Chapter Twenty-Three

Twenty-Three

I screamed myself hoarse, pounded on the walls until my hands bled, and kicked and stomped until I’d torn a hole in my shoe. Jack participated in the noise fest for the first half hour, but after that he left me to it and searched through the crates and boxes for something we could use to escape.

“How can you want to do anything except break down this door?” I shouted at him between poundings. “We might die in here.”

“I don’t believe in suffering until it’s time to suffer.” He held up a stone dildo and a circular ring made of jade. “And if we do get to that point, at least we’ll die happy.”

“I can’t believe you can think of sex at a time like this.” Exhausted, I slumped against the door, resting my head on the cold steel in the semidarkness. We’d turned off one of the flashlights to conserve the batteries, and Jack was using the other to search the boxes. Without even a glimmer of outside light to let us know if dawn was approaching, I had no idea how long we’d been trapped.

“I think about sex all the time when I’m with you,” he said. “You’re a very sexy woman. I’m often amazed I can even function when you walk into a room. All I want to do is drag you to my bed and—”

“Stop.” I held up my hand. “We are not having sexy times while there is still work to be done. When we’ve run out of options and there is no hope and we are in the depths of despair, then we can have sex. All the sex. As much sex as you can handle with only fifteen breaths per minute. We can die having sex. In fact, I’d like to die in the middle of an orgasm so when they find our bodies, I’ll have a smile on my face and my mother will know that even though I ran off with a white boy, I was happy.”

“Are you happy?” He dove into one of the crates and pulled out a fertility statue.

“I was happy until Angelini walked into my office and said he was going to kill us if we didn’t bring him the necklace.” I leaned against the door, dropping my hands between my legs. “Well, sort of happy. My business wasn’t doing so well. There is a lot of competition in the event-planning world, and I didn’t have the kind of connections I needed to make it big. I had to move into funerals, and honestly, except for the circus-themed celebrations of life, they were really getting me down. Who wants to be reminded of their mortality every week when they haven’t even figured out their life?”

“It’s not easy starting your own business,” he said. “I was impressed how you jumped right in without any hesitation. You wanted it, and you went for it. Not a lot of people have that kind of courage.”

“Not a lot of people get an $833,333.33 reward so they have a cushion when they start out.”

Jack looked up and frowned. “I thought you used most of the money to pay off your parents’ mortgage.”

“Yes, I did. And my student loans. And then there was the down payment for my condo and the rental for the office. There wasn’t much left after that. I never realized my parents had taken out a second mortgage to put us all through college, and that was after we’d all maxed out on loans. And then there was Nikhil’s wedding, and they’d put aside money for the twins’ weddings, and my wedding, which I guess isn’t going to happen since I’ll be dead in 48.7 hours. Just as well. I used to want to have kids, but they’re too damn expensive.”

“If I had kids, I’d want one who wouldn’t think twice about using her money to pay off my mortgage even if I’d treated her unfairly all her life.” He pulled out the skull I’d seen when Vera had first taken me downstairs to view the collection.

“They were doing their best in a difficult situation. They love me and that’s what’s important. I’ve worked through the rest and moved on.” I hesitated. “Well, I thought I had until you ghosted me, and then it all came back.” I pushed to stand and walked over to help search the boxes. “What about you? Did you get some closure after you put Joseph Angelini in jail? What he did to your grandmother was beyond awful.”

“It felt good, but it didn’t bring her back.” He held the flashlight closer to the skull. “If this is a fake, it’s a very good one. I could swear it’s real.”

“If it can’t help us get out of here, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or fake.” I picked up the fertility statue. “Do you think this is heavy enough to bash our way through the wall?”

“Not a chance.”

“There has to be something in here that we can use to pry the doors apart.” I pulled out a four-inch diamond star that consisted of a sea of shining jewels surrounding a cross of rubies and a trefoil of diamonds around a sky-blue enamel circle. “What about this? Vera said Peter thought it was one of the missing Irish crown jewels. Diamonds are supposed to be the hardest substance on Earth. Maybe we could use it to cut our way out.”

“Too small,” Jack said, picking up the second piece of the set, a matching diamond badge with a similar pattern of emeralds, rubies, and rose diamonds, the whole thing surmounted by a crowned harp. They’d been haphazardly tossed in the box, wrapped only in an orange silk scarf. “They’re probably glass and if we apply any pressure, they’ll shatter.” He held the flashlight over the badge and frowned. “Although…”

“What?”

“Do you see the shimmer? A real diamond reflects light easily and provides a disco-ball or rainbow effect. Fake diamonds don’t reflect spectral rays, but a real diamond’s refractive index is high; it makes the white light entering the diamond split into multiple colors before it exits on the other side of the stone.”

I studied the light pattern on the badge. “I see a rainbow. Does that mean they’re real?”

Jack held the light to the badge at different angles. “Possibly. It’s hard to tell for certain without proper light or equipment.”

“I forgot you were a jewel thief.” I put the pieces back in the box. “Sometimes I think you’re just a regular guy.”

“I thought you wanted a regular guy.” He leaned against the boxes, his face half-hidden in the shadows.

“I did, too. I complained incessantly to Chloe about the fact you were never around when I would go home for Sunday dinner and a slew of eligible bachelors would be paraded through the door. Or when I’d had a bad day and needed a hug. Or when I needed to get out of the city and my friends only wanted to do tame things like go for a hike or drive along the coast…”

“I would have thought of something interesting,” Jack said. “Bungee jumping or cliff diving, maybe kayaking over a waterfall—”

“Or taking me to the worst bar in Chicago to meet a man who makes fake passports, or to an architect to talk about a fake renovation while you break into his computer, or into a dark alley for illegal sexy times.”

Jack grimaced. “I put you in danger.”

“The things we did made me feel alive.” I pulled out a marble plaque with a hideous face on it—half animal, half man. “I think I got addicted to the adrenaline rush of being left behind as a kid. I’d be alone in a gas station or at a sports hall or in a shopping center, and I’d have a few heart-pounding moments of terror before I could think clearly enough to make a plan.”

“You do like your plans,” he said, smiling.

“They keep me calm.” I tipped my head to the side. “What makes you calm?”

“Being in control.”

I flipped through a few paintings securely crated in boxes. “I guess you would need that after losing all the people you loved when you were a kid.”

“And when I was older and found myself tethered to someone who took me down a dark path.” His voice hitched and I froze, afraid even to breathe. Jack had told me about his life before his grandmother died and a bit about the foster homes he’d stayed in after that. But he’d never shared anything about his life with Mr. X.

“Do you…work for Mr. X now?”

“No.” He used his penknife to open another box. “But Clare does.”

I tried to play it cool, like he shared secrets about his past with me every day. “Clare said you betrayed him.”

“I did.” He hesitated. “I betrayed her, too, when I left. We’d known each other a long time. We’d been close…” He sucked in his lips. “I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“I know you have a past,” I said. “I do, too. I don’t have a problem hearing about yours.”

“He took us both off the streets around the same time,” Jack continued. “He offered us food, a home, and the opportunity to go to school if we worked for him in return. At first it was just simple errands, but then he wanted me to steal something, and then he set me up so that if I refused to do as asked, he could go to the police with proof of my crimes.”

“He blackmailed you.”

“He blackmailed all of us. That’s how he put together his crew.”

“But that was a long time ago,” I said. “Why does he want to kill you now?”

“He wants me to suffer now.” Jack pulled a rolled blanket out of a box. “He wants to kill me later. You saw how his minions beat me almost to death during our last heist, but that wasn’t the first time. He’ll keep sending them after me until he gets bored, and then he’ll end me for betraying him. No one leaves Xavier’s crew.”

My throat closed at the thought of Jack gone forever. “You seem pretty nonchalant about the whole thing.”

“I was, but not now. I get an immense amount of satisfaction from repatriating stolen historical artifacts, especially because I’m often working against Xavier’s interests, but I never had anything to look forward to, except the next assignment. I never had a real home after my grandmother died. I never had someone who made me want to survive the next beating or shooting. And then I met you.”

Despite our dire predicament, a smile spread across my face. “You kidnapped me and dragged me into the bushes. That’s not the traditional meet-cute of romance.”

“You were cute,” he said. “You made me laugh. You were brave and so fiercely loyal that you refused to leave Chloe even when you knew you’d be arrested. And now you are determined to save Cristian even though it would be much easier just to flee the country.” Jack unrolled the blanket and gasped out loud.

“What is it?” I studied the long, gleaming, curved sword in his hands.

“If it’s real, it’s a legendary samurai sword that was passed from generals to shoguns throughout the centuries. It was supposedly created by Gorō Nyūdō Masamune, who lived from 1264 to 1343 and is considered by many to be the greatest sword maker in Japanese history.” He swung the blade in an arc, the fine edge cutting through the air with a terrifying whoosh . “The sword was a Japanese national treasure, lost after the Second World War when Japan was forced to hand it over to American soldiers.”

“It’s very shiny,” I said. “Too shiny for something that’s almost eight hundred years old.”

“Someone might have taken very good care of it.” Jack laid it over the box and inspected it with his flashlight.

“Come on.” I gave him a nudge. “Do you really think an amateur billionaire fortune hunter really found so many of the world’s missing treasures and not one of his finds hit the news or your underground black market jewel thief network? What did he have that hundreds of years’ worth of treasure hunters didn’t? I met him briefly at the party and he seemed spectacularly unremarkable to me.”

“He had billions of dollars,” Jack said. “There is nothing he couldn’t buy. No one he couldn’t hire. He’d be able to trawl the bottom of the sea for Atlantis or blow up a mountain and still have money left over to buy an art island or two.”

“This whole thing doesn’t make sense.” I walked through the piles of boxes. “Someone killed Peter to get his finger to open the museum. If they thought all these treasures were real, why would they just haphazardly toss them in boxes? Wouldn’t they take more care than to wrap an eight-hundred-year-old sword in a blanket or bundle the Irish national jewels in a scarf?”

“They likely didn’t have enough time,” Jack said. “They had to get Peter alone, kill him, cut off his finger, knock Chloe out, get through three security doors, shut down the system, load up the boxes, and carry them through the bunker and down the tunnel before their truck arrived.”

“They had to have been invited to the party.” I studied the boxes, considering. “There is no other way they could have been inside. I had security at every entrance checking invitations. I also think they knew the art was about to be moved and the boxes had been delivered, because otherwise how were they going to transport everything?”

We searched all the boxes but didn’t find anything that would help us escape. Eventually exhaustion overcame me, and I slumped to the floor, leaning against a thick roll of carpet. Jack covered me with the blanket that had been wrapped around the sword and sat beside me, pulling me into his arms. The blanket was exquisitely soft and thick, and the cozy warmth eased my tension. After twenty-four hours without sleep, it didn’t take long before my eyes closed, and I fell asleep nestled in the crook of Jack’s arm.

I don’t know how long we slept, but I awoke to the sounds of grating gears, rubber on asphalt, and a hydraulic whine. A low rumble like an idling C-130 shook the container. Above us, the ceiling shuddered.

“What’s happening?”

“It’s a gantry crane taking the container on top of us.” For the first time since we’d been locked in the container, Jack’s brow furrowed the tiniest bit. “We’ll be next.”

“We can’t be loaded onto a ship, Jack.” I pounded on the container wall. “I don’t want to die at sea. I don’t even like fish. When my dad makes Malabar matthi curry, I run for the hills.” I thudded again. “Make some noise.”

“There’s no operator,” Jack said. “The cranes are fully automated. A computer sends them to pick up containers based on their serial numbers.”

A tidal wave of despair crashed over me. “Chloe will come,” I said, to reassure myself more than Jack, who didn’t seem very concerned about the imminent danger.

“If anyone can find us, it’s her,” he agreed. “She’s incredibly resourceful, and in my business, I’ve worked with the best.”

“Your current business or your past business when you worked for Mr. X?”

“Both.”

“And you can’t tell me what you do or who you work for?” I looked up at him. “Even if we’re going to die in here?”

Jack sat beside me and pressed a soft kiss to my temple. “If it gets to that point, I’ll tell you with my next-to-last dying breath.”

Frowning, I said, “Next to last? What are you going to say with your dying breath?”

“I love you.”

Silence hung in the air between us. Jack had told me he loved me before, but this felt different. We’d hurt each other—him with his secrets and his absence, and me with my lack of trust—but clearly, for him it hadn’t changed the way he felt.

“I suppose that’s not a bad thing to say with your last dying breath.” I leaned against him, my cheek against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart.

“It’s not a bad thing to say with any breath. The question is whether you believe it.”

“It was hard when you ghosted me. It made me feel like I wasn’t important, just as I did when I was a child. Seeing you kiss Clare was triggering, to be honest. Even now, knowing she set you up, I can’t move past the fear that I’m an afterthought. I can’t go through that again.”

“You have never been an afterthought to me.” He tightened his arm around me. “But I’ve never been a commitment kind of guy. I think I subconsciously stacked my jobs so that there was no opportunity to come back to Chicago. Part of me knew I still needed to sort myself out. I needed time to figure out what I really wanted, and as soon as I realized it was you, I came home to tell you. And then you dumped me.”

“You waited too long.”

“Yes.” His jaw tightened. “And Garcia was waiting to pounce.”

Laughter bubbled up in my chest. “You make him sound like a wild animal. He’s a very even-tempered kind of guy. Very kind, straitlaced, by the book—”

“Boring.” Jack puffed out his chest. “You need someone who can give you adventure and excitement.”

“Like getting locked up in a shipping container that’s about to be sent to Belize?”

Jack sighed and rested his cheek against my head. “This was supposed to be my last heist. After it was done, I had planned to stay in Chicago and find a new job so I could be with you.”

“You were going to quit?” I sat upright. “For me?”

“For both of us.” He pulled me in a straddle across his lap and took my face between his warm palms. “I didn’t have anything, Simi. I lost everyone I loved, and the people I thought were my family turned out to be thieves and criminals. It wasn’t a life I wanted to lead, so I broke those ties. And then I had no one. You changed that for me. You and your beautiful smile.”

He kissed me ever so softly, and I wound my arms around his neck. I was tired of keeping secrets. I had been keeping Angelini’s final demand from him even though I’d long moved past the fear that he would abandon us. Instead, I was afraid he would offer himself up to save us. I’d needed time to figure out a way to save him, to protect him from himself. But our time had almost run out and I wanted to come clean.

“I need to tell you something, Jack. I’ve been keeping something from you and…” I hesitated, not sure how to explain.

Jack’s brow creased in consternation. “What is it? You can tell me anything.”

“At first it made sense not to tell you because of what happened between us and the thing with Clare…” My words ran over one another as I tried to get everything out at once. “And then it was just easier not to tell you because part of me was still afraid to trust you. But now…I was wrong, and you need to know—”

“Simi!” Chloe’s voice outside the container was muffled, but I would know my bestie anywhere. A wave of emotion swept over me so fierce and hard it knocked the breath out of me. Relief flooded my veins, pushing back the suffocating darkness.

“Chloe! We’re in here.”

“I found them,” she shouted. “Quickly. Bring the bolt cutters.”

“Give us a minute,” she said. “They’ve chained and padlocked the door.”

I heard the scrape of metal on metal. A grunt. The walls trembled. Beneath my feet I could feel a familiar rumble. “Hurry. The gantry crane is coming. It already took the container above us. I think we’re next.”

“Gage, get the fucking door open or your life won’t be worth living,” Chloe screamed. “They’re about to be snatched up by the crane.” I heard a series of loud thuds followed by a string of curse words I’d never heard from Chloe before.

I heard a snap, the rattle of chains, a creak of rusty hinges. The doors opened and cool ocean air rushed in, carrying the scent of freedom with it. A frantic Chloe ran into the container, grabbed my hand, and dragged me outside with Jack following close behind us. Gage slammed the door closed, slipping the remnants of the chain through the lock before he joined us in a narrow passage between container stacks. Moments later, a giant yellow gantry crane stopped above our container, its three-foot wheels resting where we’d stood only seconds before. The crane lowered and lifted the container, then whisked it away toward the dock.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “That was close. How did you find us?”

Chloe threw herself at me and wrapped me in a hug. “When you stopped responding to my messages, I knew something was wrong, so I messaged Emma and Gage while I checked for your signal on my finding friends app.” She drew in a ragged breath. “It showed your phone was at the bottom of the Harbor Estuary, and I would have lost it if Emma hadn’t run back to the parking lot and discovered the Elantra was gone. That’s when I knew you must have found the diamond and they got to you first, but I didn’t know…” Her voice cracked, broke, and she shuddered in my arms.

“Don’t let those tears fool you,” Gage said. “My girl was fucking pissed . We searched that quadrant for over an hour, but we couldn’t find the container. Chloe decided not to waste any more time and marched straight into the control room. She told them she was from the Port Authority and had been alerted to a system breach.” Gage’s eyes shone with pride. “When they wanted to call a supervisor, she shouted at them and told them they were incompetent. She made them cower like dogs.”

“I didn’t shout,” Chloe muttered under her breath. “I might have raised my voice.”

“She sent them outside to check the system box, and as soon as they were gone, she hacked that computer like there was no tomorrow.”

Chloe’s voice thickened and she shrugged. “Failure wasn’t an option.”

“She got the last known location of the container and removed her software so no one would know about the hack.” Gage beamed as he shared the story, and it warmed my heart that my best friend had found someone who utterly adored her. “Then because she knew we’d show up on the cameras, she told them she was going to check a container location at random to make sure everything was operational because she no longer had faith in their abilities.”

A smile tugged at Chloe’s lips. “I made them grovel. But really, they should have caught me the first time. I was doing them a favor.”

“I knew you’d come,” I whispered to Chloe.

“I would have shut down the entire New York City power grid if I had to.” She squeezed me so tight I could barely breathe. “But there were moments…” Her voice wavered. “There were so many containers, and we’d been searching for so long, and their system was tough to crack, and the app showed your phone at the bottom of the estuary, and I started to think…” Her eyes welled with tears. “That I’d never find you.”

“But you did.” I squeezed her tight. “You found me just in time.”