CHAPTER TWELVE #2
“And what better place is there to work from? They can protect you, Sylvie. You need a team.”
“This shit again,” I snipe. “I’ve already told you, I’m only working alone. I couldn’t trust my own blood for common decency.”
“The final piece isn’t a one-person job.
” Her tone takes on the talking-Sylvie-off-a-ledge quality I loathe and the world-renowned-thief wisdom I can’t ignore.
“Yes, it’s a risk to work with people. But you’re in over your head, so the risk is warranted.
I know a thing or two about how this could slip through your fingers. What happens if you fail?”
“You orchestrated this with him.” I slice my hand toward the man who is invading every facet of my life. “He shows up and dazzles you, so you’re abandoning me?”
She smacks the creamy quartz countertop to punctuate her words. “What. Happens. If. You. Fail?”
I shake my head, refuting her implication. “E knows there’s no guaran—”
“Who’s E?” Cash barks.
“No one.” I cast him a censuring leer.
“He might know it’s not guaranteed, Sylvie,” my mother says, drawing me back to her, “but he will not accept it. He owns you now.”
“No one owns me.” A wayward tear trickles down my cheek because this coastal kitchen, with its whites and blues and open concept, is closing in on me. “This is it. Then I’m done.”
She can’t even look at me when she says what we both know. “That’s what your father said.”
This is a hell of a time to rehash this, when I’m already shackled to a job and halfway through it.
All the ire I try so hard to stuff down comes spilling out of me. “So, what, your plan is to shove me toward a man who can take the fall for me? Unlike you, I will serve my own time.”
In all the years I struggled to accept that my father paid the price for both of them, I never blamed her.
He would’ve been livid with me. He was the best father in the world, but he worshipped my mother.
Hurting her was the quickest way to piss him off.
And right now, she looks as though I slapped her, and I heed the sting in my bones.
“I did that for you and Flora. And for him.” She wipes her own tears away, still unable to meet my eyes. “It’s all he wanted. He died, knowing you both were safe. If I’d been in there with him, you two would’ve been thrown into the system, and he would’ve died years sooner. Heartbroken.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I rest my hands on the table, hanging my head and releasing a choppy breath. “That was so shitty. You did everything the way he wanted you to. All I meant is that I am the one who set this fire, so I will accept the burn.”
As soon as that analogy leaves my mouth, my heart plummets to my stomach. I search Cash to see if that was too close to home, but when our eyes collide, he sees my guilt and shakes his head, assuring me it didn’t wound him.
Oblivious to that detour or simply too determined, my mother plows forward. “Your father was killed because he said he was done.”
“What?” I flick my head up to read her expression. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t know, but …” She raises her palm and digs into a drawer that has cigarettes in it, plucking one out and lighting it over the sink.
“We talked about it a few days before he was killed. He said he’d been contacted by some old associates since he was up for parole, but he told them to find someone else because he was done. ”
“Maybe …” I hedge, trying to collect my thoughts when my gaze snags on Cash, who appears utterly broken on my behalf.
“C’mon, Sylvie.” She sucks in a hit, blowing it out with a tightness in her jaw.
“It wasn’t a coincidence. He wasn’t a common thief.
He was a mastermind, and once the wrong people understand what someone like that is capable of, they either want that talent for themselves or they want to be certain no one else can get their hands on it.
” She studies me, ashing her cigarette into the drain and sharing the crux of her reasoning for all this. “Then you went and showed off.”
“Well, you should have told me that.” I finish my flat, watered-down soda as my placid rebuke fuels her truth.
“You were going to be an Olympian. I didn’t expect you to follow in our footsteps.”
“It’s not failing”—Cash leans forward, clasping my clenched fist—“to accept help from La Lune Noire. It’s what we do.
We can build you a team. It’s like getting the latest equipment to crack a safe or hack into a security system.
You wouldn’t be stronger by not using the best tools.
You’d be naive. Because everyone else is utilizing the expert resources they have access to. ”
My attention remains on his hand covering mine, the warmth of his skin and the bizarre outcome of Cash Noire being my serenity in the storm.
His index finger taps my wrist a few times. “I thought we’d established that Axel and I were going to be helping you with this.”
“That was before.”
“Before what, Sly?” He removes his hand and settles into the back of his chair. “Before I called you on your bullshit?”
I don’t respond. I glance between my mother grief-smoking at the sink and the man I’m somehow entangled with—no matter what label we put on it—absolutely exasperated by me.
He cleans up his dishes, sticks a spoon in the forgotten crème br?lée before setting it in front of me, walks back to my mother and says something I can’t hear, and finally addresses me.
“I’m going to pack. Don’t let that kiss in the ocean keep you from using the resources that could save your life. ”
My mother widens her eyes, smoke floating out of her mouth with intrigue as Cash strides down the hall. But the only thought in my head is that I don’t want him to think I regret him kissing me. It can’t keep happening, but I’m not mad that it did.
Jumping out of my chair, I chase after him. “I’ll come with you. I mean, now that you’ve seen me at my worst, I might as well.”
In one fluid movement, he turns toward me and has me caged against the wall. “That was your worst?”
For just a second, all the versions of him that others see flicker before me—the talented playboy, the formidable Noire who threatens to kill without a speck of hesitancy, the man who reveres his family—and I’m not sure which to grip.
But there’s far more to him than what I believed, probably more than what anyone realizes.
I shrug, recalling how hurtful I was. “I said really shitty things to both of you.”
“And you apologized seconds later.” He skims his knuckles down my cheek, his eyes meandering all over my face before he puts some space between us. He stands there, drinking me in, his fingers diving into his hair, like he’s at the end of his rope. “If that’s your worst, I am so fucked.”
He swaggers away, and my mother bursts out laughing in the kitchen.
“Be ready in an hour,” he calls.
I guess I’m going to New Orleans.