Chapter 1
SYLVIE
THE CONVENIENT TRUTH I’ve learned about the extremely wealthy is that they trust their money to technology more than people.
It makes this robbery so much cleaner. Through the large pane-glass windows I can see there’s probably close to a hundred million dollars in assets localized to one ostentatious garage, and I’m not going to have to slit a single security guard’s throat.
Good. Contrary to what seems obvious, I don’t love spilling blood.
This garage costs more than most mansions.
I can already smell it from the outside—the poured-concrete cleanliness; the faint sweetness of tire rubber kept at a temperate sixty-eight degrees; the ozone tang of a security system that thinks it’s smarter than I am.
At least twenty cars under custom covers, lined up in two neat rows like coffins at a wake.
Somebody loves them enough to tuck them in, but I doubt these cars have ever left their display prison.
Pity. Born for speed, destined to sit still.
I crouch at the side door with my back to the wall and watch Dani work.
She’s got her laptop balanced on one knee, her tongue tucked into the corner of her mouth, the blue glow making her look about twelve.
Outside of her new haircut, that is: a platinum bob, freshly cut.
She’s been fussing with it all night. Every few seconds a line of code scrolls and she frowns at her hazy reflection in the screen like it personally insulted her.
“How long,” I say. It’s not a question; it’s a demand. I don’t do questions on a job.
“Thirty seconds. Maybe forty.” She doesn’t look up. “Whoever installed this paid for the brochure and not the brains. There’s a backdoor in the laser grid the size of a barn. And like a barn, this whole security system stinks like shit.”
“Poetic.”
“That’s because I’m a motherfucking poet.
Boom.” She taps something, and somewhere behind the steel door I hear the system exhale—a soft electronic sigh, the technology version of surrender.
“We’re in. Cameras are looping the last four minutes.
Lasers are off. You’ve got the run of the house, princess. ”
Fuck yes, I love that sound. I get high off it, the half second where a sealed thing comes open and the whole world tips toward you.
Better than anything you can drink or any pill you can pop.
Old companions have told me I’m addicted to taking what’s not mine.
I’ve been called a kleptomaniac. But I’ve also been called worse.
I haul the door, and we slide in.
Inside it’s a museum. The regality of the garage smacking all our senses at once—new-car smell, fluorescent lighting, squeaky-clean concrete floors.
The teal track overhead lighting throws soft azure shadows down a row of sheeted shapes.
Our footsteps don’t echo—the floor’s been treated, sound-dampened, the kind of detail I only notice because I’ve been listening for the thing lurking behind me for over a decade now.
Like a cat with a fierce grudge, I watch everything and trust absolutely nothing.
One by one, I start uncovering cars. The thick acrylic covers squeal as I strip them off, letting each one pool on the floor where it falls. I wonder what the owner will think when he comes home…how and why his ghosts have been undressed.
Dani lets out a low whistle behind me, thinking my same thoughts.
Hot damn, what a fucking collection.
There’s a vintage Jaguar, racing green. A matte-black thing so low to the ground it looks poured into place.
A cherry Mustang that somebody’s grandfather probably died inside of, emotionally.
I run my palm along the Jaguar’s flank and it’s cold and perfect and I want it.
I always want it. Wanting things I can’t keep is like muscle memory.
Built into my bones. The familiar itch of mine, mine, mine begins to flare.
“You’re drooling,” Dani says.
“I’m appreciating.”
“You’re going to appreciate us right into a holding cell. Eyes on the prize.”
The prize is somewhere in here under a cover that costs more than the last three cars I uncovered combined: a Formula One chassis, still mid-build, the prototype for a constructor that doesn’t want a rival constructor seeing it for another eight months.
We’re to steal the blueprints, photograph the frame, plus swipe whatever Dani can pull off the design servers.
When it’s done, we walk out a hundred grand richer. Split two ways. Fifty-fifty.
That’s the part I haven’t told her about yet. The fifty-fifty.
The man who hired us—and I use the word man loosely, because the contact was an eerily calm robotic voice that did not match the enthusiasm of a heist at this scale—asked me for something else on the job.
He kept me on the phone, privately threading his additional request into the brief like it was a simple matter of fact.
There’s no reason to split the payout. Use the tech girl, then when you have what you need, get rid of her. No need for any witnesses.
He wanted me to kill Dani. I uncover another car, letting his words run on replay. “Only one name gets paid,” he said. “Make it yours.”
My line of work runs on one rule, and the rule is simple: betray, or be betrayed. There is no third door. You spend enough years doing what I do, and trust isn’t a feeling anymore, it’s just a mistake you haven’t made yet.
So when a voice on a numbered account tells me to use my best friend and put her in the ground, the professional answer, the correct answer—the answer that’s kept me breathing for the past ten years—is yes, fine, of course. What’s my cut?
But I’m going to do the opposite.
I’m going to deliver the plans. I’m going to take the money.
And then, when our generous benefactor strolls in here in—I check my analog watch—fifty-one minutes to collect his blueprints in person, I’m going to put a bullet in him and walk out with the whole payout, and I’m going to split it with Dani anyway.
Down the middle. Because she’s mine. Because four years ago she stitched a wound closed for me in a motel bathroom with a sewing kit and a bottle of tequila and didn’t ask a single question, and in this business of hitmen, assassins, and the dregs of humanity, it’s the closest thing to a marriage vow I’ll ever get.
Loyalty. It’s a word people like me aren’t supposed to own. But I own it. The one thing I stole that I never gave back: hope.
I stick up for Dani. Just like I’m sure she’d stick up for me. One day I’ll tell her about this. About the temptation, and how I chose our friendship instead. I might even tell her how I immobilized her gun, just in case.
She’ll scold me for ever doubting her. I’ll remind her that insurance is just good sense.
“Silver.” Dani’s voice goes quiet. A different quiet from the norm. And she used “Silver” instead of Sylvie, so it’s serious. “Don’t laugh at me.”
I look over. She’s stopped working. She’s got one hand up at the back of her neck, fingers in her newly short hair, and the hard professional shell encasing her face slips for a moment. There’s just a woman, dressed head to toe in black leather, carrying what most women do—insecurity.
“I hate it,” she says. “The haircut. I look like a thumb. I went shorter because the woman said it’d be edgy and now I look like a divorced substitute teacher and I have to wear it for weeks because my hair grows back so slow—I look stupid, Sylvie.
I look stupid and I let some woman with scissors talk me into looking stupid. ”
I cross the floor. I take her chin in two fingers and tilt her face up into the light like I’m appraising a car.
“You look lethal,” I tell her, and I mean it, which is the only reason it works. “You look like the last thing somebody sees. The blonde catches the light right and it makes your eyes look like steel. You’re hot as fuck, Dani. I wish I bat for the other team.”
She searches my face for the lie. She won’t find one. I don’t lie to Dani about the things that cost nothing.
“Lethal?” she repeats. “That’s your answer?”
“Well, that, and I prefer dick.” I let go of her chin and flick the short ends. “Now finish breaking into the rich man’s computer so I can fatten my wallet.”
She laughs. Her cheeks flush as if she’s embarrassed to be grateful for my compliment. But we’re just women. Tortured? Yes. Hardened? Hell yes. Stripped of our humanity? Mostly. But deep inside, we’re still girls who worry about bad haircuts and need our best friends to hype us up.
“Hey Dani?” I ask. “You’re my real one.”
Her gaze flits down, suddenly too shy to meet mine. She doesn’t answer. Instead, she bends back over the laptop, and for a second I hate the silence between us. I answer for her in my head: Thanks, Silver. You’re my real one too.
After a few more unveilings, each more tempting than the last, because who the hell knew they made Lamborghini Venenos in a sparkly plum, we find the prize. I should’ve guessed. It’s under a cover so white it’s almost blue. It reminds me of a sheet-covered body at the coroner’s office.
I peel it back and there it is. Half a race car, skinned. Carbon fiber and exposed geometry, the front wing off and resting on a stand beside it, the whole thing looking less like a vehicle and more like a broken promise.
But only an F1 fan would see the magnificence of the engineering.
It’s so elite, it’s almost cruel. The competition won’t stand a chance.
Everything is shaved down to the gram, no mercy anywhere in the design, every curve there because a wind tunnel demanded it and for no other reason.
I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s most definitely the most beautiful thing I’ve ever stolen.
“Okay,” I whisper to the car. “You gorgeous fucking waste of money. Hold still.”