CHAPTER 16
Josie
BOB’s been running the same lunar overlay for forty minutes and I haven’t looked at it once. The coffee at my left elbow is ignored and I’m absolutely uninspired today.
While I’m at my desk doing the choreography of working—hand on the trackpad, eyes on the screen—my head is firmly back on the events of last night.
I switch monitors and attempt to read the FBI’s most recent surveillance summary on the Bellevue bakery. I glance away and realize I can’t remember one word of what it says.
What I do remember, with acute clarity, is Connie kissing Finn’s cheek last night and touching the lapel of his jacket.
I had clocked that as I was talking to Margaret about her art.
It was familiar and practiced. A public claim, so to speak, and jealousy ripped through me.
I should have felt better when I saw Finn step back from it and the move was of a man that has been managing that situation for a long time.
It didn’t stop me from sauntering that way, wanting to interject myself into that conversation.
To stake my own claim.
In a million years, I never thought the situation would devolve the way it did.
The compliment about my dress was the most precise piece of cruelty I’ve been on the receiving end of in a long time. Connie picked the one thing in the room she could weaponize and did it within seconds of me entering her perimeter.
She watched me stiffen.
She enjoyed it.
And I realized that no matter what she was to Finn, I’d never like her.
Connie had no clue what that dress meant to me and it didn’t matter. She just knew it was something I was wearing because I cared what Finn thought, and she made it ugly.
I’d be impressed if I weren’t busy hating her.
But that isn’t the part that has me at my desk staring at a lunar overlay without really caring if I get a decent output.
“She works for people who hunt people like us,” she’d said.
“Our house,” she’d invoked.
She put me firmly on the outside and she wasn’t going to let me in.
Truly, I’ve gleaned she’s a foolish woman ruled by emotion. She knows I’m the lead intelligence analyst on the Voronin case and she stood in front of me and confessed in three sentences that they’re running something illegal.
I take a sip of the nearly cold coffee and swallow it down with a grimace.
“Ugh.” I close my eyes for a beat and I’m back at the art show with Marcus beside me. Finn nearly dragged Connie out of the gallery and Marcus babysat me in the aftermath. I remember thinking he had very kind eyes as he handed me a fresh glass of wine I didn’t want.
“She’s been like that for as long as I’ve known her,” he said quietly, eyes roaming the gallery.
“In love with him?” I guessed.
“He doesn’t return it,” he said. “Never. Not for one minute.”
I couldn’t help but ask. “Does she understand that?”
He smiled sardonically. “She knows. She just hopes.”
I drank the wine I didn’t want and watched the door Finn had walked Connie through.
When he came back inside, he was alone, and while his expression was composed, his eyes were not. He locked his eyes on me, crossed the floor and didn’t stop until he had his hand at the small of my back.
“We have to go,” he announced and then turned to Marcus. “Tell Janelle she can close out the night.”
“Got you covered, boss,” Marcus said, his expression tight with worry. I could see he wanted to ask Finn a million questions about what happened in that alleyway but didn’t dare.
I had a million questions too.
I take a breath. I press a finger against the dip between my eyebrows where the headache lives.
I close my eyes and the rest of last night comes back to me whether I want it or not. I sink down into it, searching for clarity.
I dropped the keys in the bowl by the door and turned to face Finn.
The ride home was silent, but he’d walked me inside. He hadn’t quite crossed into my house all the way, one hand still on the door, like he was deciding whether to go back through it.
“Finn?”
He blinked at me. “Yeah.”
“Come in or go. Don’t stand in the doorway.”
He took a step in, rubbed at the back of his neck. He was tortured, but then again, so was I.
“What did she say to you out there?” I asked.
“Nothing you need to know.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Josie—”
“You don’t get to decide what I need to know on my behalf.
Not tonight.” I pulled my heels off, one by one, and dropped them in the corner.
I didn’t take my eyes off him. “I spent the last hour completely lost as to what’s going on and I held it together because I’m very good at being composed when I need to.
But it’s just you and me now, and you don’t get to stand in my foyer and tell me I don’t need to know what was said in that alley. ”
His jaw worked back and forth. I could see the indecision in his eyes, but then he sighed, almost in defeat. “You’re right.”
Finn walked past me into the living room, where he didn’t sit. He stood by the window looking at the framed photograph on the mantel of me and my parents at my UW graduation. “She wanted me to admit out loud that I don’t feel about her the way she feels about me,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping into the living room but not going to him. He looked wound tight. “That had to be tough.”
“I should have done it years ago,” he admitted softly. “I told her she’s family. I told her she’s crew. But I also told her I’ve never felt about her the way she’s wanted me to.”
“How did she take it?”
Finn grimaced. “Badly.” His eyes glimmered from the light over my mantel, making his green eyes luminescent. “Then she asked me what I feel for you.”
I felt the air go out of the room. “And… um… what did you say?”
“I told her I’ve never felt anything more real.”
The thing about being a person whose job is composure is that sometimes the composure cracks at the worst possible time. Mine cracked there and my eyes must have revealed all the ways in which my insides softened. Finn watched it happen, but he didn’t move toward me.
“Then she crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed.”
Images of Connie throwing herself at Finn, plastering her mouth to his, assaulted me. I felt sick and enraged.
Finn must have clocked my feelings because he came to me, took my hand and led me to the couch. I sat beside him and watched as he put his elbows on his knees, hung his head and stared at the rug. “She threatened to call Mikhail’s people and give you over to them.”
The air whooshed out of me and a cold trickle of fear went down my spine. “Um… okay,” I muttered, trying to pull all my training back into my body. “What did you say to her?”
Finn’s head swiveled my way, his eyes filled with anger and pain. “It’s not for you to know. There’s a version of me that you don’t need to meet. Not unless you have to.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sat quietly. He clasped his hands, knuckles turning white.
And then he admitted, “But I scared her. Hopefully enough that she’ll keep quiet.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” I observed, because I could see the torture in the fact he’d lost trust in one of his crew. “And you don’t believe her.”
His eyes met mine. “No. I don’t believe her.”
I closed my own eyes for a second, wondering what this meant for me. Was my life in acute danger at that very moment?
I looked to the door. Was someone out there right now?
“I need to tell you some things, Josie.”
My gaze snapped back to him. “Okay.”
“I’m not going to be careful about it. I’m going to tell you and you’re going to do what you will with it.”
Oh, fuck. He was going to tell me… everything.
My first instinct was to hold up my hands and insist he keep it to himself. I didn’t want to know what Finn was into. I didn’t want that knowledge or the responsibility that came with it.
But then I saw it in his expression.
Trust.
He trusted me to do the right thing, whatever that might be.
“I met Connie on the streets when she was sixteen and I was seventeen. I was selling stolen iPhones on a corner, and she was a runaway with a stepfather who’d done her wrong six different ways.”
“Oh,” I murmured, an unfathomable well of sympathy for that poor, young teenage girl.
“The man I worked for at the time took her on. Put her up and gave her work. She was smart and she was hungry and she was loyal to the bone because she had been waiting her whole life for someone to be loyal to. She latched on to me because I was the one who pulled her off the corner and I have spent eighteen years being the person she fixated on. She’s been at my side through every hard thing I’ve done in my adult life.
I’ve trusted her with everything. With my crew. With my boat. With everything.”
Finn paused. He looked at the rug again. “And tonight she offered to give your name to a man who slits women’s throats.”
A shudder ripped up my spine.
“I’m telling you this because you need to know what I’m dealing with. And because of what I’m about to tell you next.”
I swallowed hard. I was ready, or as ready as I could ever be to hold Finn’s secrets.
“I move art but not the gallery kind. The other kind. Paintings with complicated provenance, antiquities that were looted decades ago and no one’s looking for anymore, pieces that buyers want to acquire without paying the tax man or filling out customs forms. I work clean and I work careful.
I don’t move drugs. I don’t move weapons.
I don’t move people. But I do know people who do, Voronin being the big one.
And for nine years, we’ve stayed in our own lanes. That was the arrangement.”
He’s an art smuggler.
I mean… I knew he smuggled something illegal, and one fear I had was drugs, but somehow knowing he smuggled art relieved me.
“Um… how exactly did you go from selling stolen goods to smuggling art by water?” I asked, because yeah… I was very curious.
“When I came to Seattle, I met a man named Jim Price. I mentioned him to you once. He found me on the docks in Ballard when I was eighteen, trying to find a hustle job. He gave me a sandwich the first day and a job the second.”
“What kind of job?”