He was halfway down the path away from us when I called out to him impulsively. “Dad, can I borrow your bike?”
He stopped, looked up at me, and after a quick glance at Darius, said “Sure kiddo. Helmets are on the wall.”
Until he said yes, I hadn’t thought about taking Darius with me, but then it was all I could think about, and the blush on my face must have been epic, because he almost looked concerned. Almost.
“Want to go for a ride?” I asked quickly, in a futile attempt to divert his attention from my face.
“Your father has a tandem bicycle?” Darius asked, and suddenly my blush melted into a grin, and I felt my confidence slide back into place.
“Not at all. Come on, let’s go chase the wind.”
* * *
I took us north around the rocks and points, inland on the small, twisty roads where I’d first learned to ride my dad’s Triumph, and then finally south to Land’s End, where I parked the 1972 Bonneville motorcycle that my dad had rebuilt from the wheels up. Darius practically flung himself off the back of the bike, and I tried to ignore the voice in my head that said he was disgusted by me. He stood with his back to me and pulled off his helmet to look out at the view of Thacher Island, where the twin lighthouses still protected the ships from the rocky shore.
I removed my own helmet and wished we were still riding and his arms were still around me. I almost suggested we keep going, but when he finally turned to look at me, the expression on his face made me glad that I hadn’t.
It was raw and hungry, and it sent a shiver of something that definitely wasn’t fear up my spine. I suddenly realized it might not have been disgust, but desire that sent him off the back of my bike. Like being pressed against my back, with his arms around me, had been too much. It had been for me. I looked away to compose my face into something that didn’t scream I want you, and when I looked back a moment later, prepared to say the words out loud, his expression had slipped back into something cool and detached.
“You ride like the motorcycle is a part of you,” he said, with about as much investment as if he were discussing the sunny day. Okay. Two could play at this game.
“My dad started teaching me on a dirt bike when I was little and on this one when I was fifteen,” I said, my tone carefully neutral as I kicked the stand down and stepped off the bike.
His eyes jerked toward the lighthouses. “Why are there two?” he asked roughly.
“They’re twins,” I said, with a small smile at the memory of picnics on Thacher Island when we were kids. “And when they line up together, they point you to true north.”
Darius’s eyes reflected wry amusement as he contemplated the view. “Do they still operate?”
I nodded. We’d learned the history of the lighthouses from Dad, who grew up in Rockport and was part of the association involved in their preservation. “They were built in 1771 by the British, and rebuilt in the 1860s. For a while after the Coast Guard took over, they only lit the south tower, but when they relit the north tower, they became the last twin lighthouses in the U.S.”
“Did you grow up here?” Darius asked when he turned back to face me.
I nodded. “My dad used to take me out there in his kayak because Colette was never brave enough to go on the ocean in such a small boat. He said that back in the late 1700s, the lights were called “Ann’s Eyes” when they lit up stormy nights. That’s how I got my name. Mom chose Colette for the firstborn twin, so Dad chose Anna for me. I’ve pretty much been his ever since.”
“That explains the handshake,” Darius muttered.
“What handshake?” I asked.
“The one with which your father nearly crushed my hand.” I must have looked concerned, because Darius chuckled. “I guess I should be flattered that he felt the need to warn me.”
“To warn you about what?” I’d noticed the odd competitiveness of their handshake, and if Darius could explain it, I was all ears.
Darius’s gaze slid away from mine and back out toward the lighthouses. “That I’m not to hurt you.”
“Oh.”
Too late.
Actually, to be fair, he wasn’t the one who hurt me. Working with Darius over the past few days, I had let myself dare to hope for something more than just sex.
“I’m sorry, Anna.”
He still didn’t look at me. I liked how my name sounded in his voice, but not the carefully blank expression on his face.
I pasted a cheerful smile on with thoughts of corgi butts and tumbling kittens. “So,” I said, “how does this go now? You go back to Chicago, give my name to the police, and my mom’s painting back to the Grays? Will you give me enough warning to get out of the country, or do I need to change my identity and run?
“Anna—”
I looked away, toward Thacher Island. “I always thought the name Anna was too boring for who I wanted to be. Anna isn’t a skydiver, or a mountain climber. That’s Parker, or Scarlett, or Shane.” I smiled a little at that. What if I changed my name to Shane and became a P.I.? Except for that whole stealing-someone’s-identity thing, not to mention the fact that we looked about as related as an Afghan hound and a shih tzu.
“Do you know what a shih tzu is?” I asked him. “It’s a zoo with no elephants or zebras.”
I reached for my helmet, but Darius grabbed my hand before I could take it from the seat. He pulled me around to face him, and all I wanted to do was lose myself in his gaze. I had lost myself in it – that was part of the problem.
He searched my eyes, and then his eyes went to my lips and lingered there. It seemed like it took effort for him to meet my eyes again.
“Anna,” he said again in a hushed voice, “I don’t know how this goes now. Cipher doesn’t work for Gray anymore, he fired us, so my responsibility to him is done. But I still work for Cipher. I need to tell them what I know – what we found out – and see where they want to go from there.”
His hand was wrapped around my wrist, and I knew he could feel my pulse tripping along like a busy little jackhammer. I let ten beats go by without moving or saying anything, and then I nodded.
“When?” I asked. “I’ll meet you there.”
“You’ll—” he frowned, and then something that looked like respect crossed his face. “Monday morning. Ten o’clock.”
“Okay,” I said as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and entered it into my calendar. “Cipher Security. 10 am on Monday. I’ll meet you in the lobby?” I looked up to see him gazing at me with an expression that looked something like confused wonder.
“Yeah. That’s fine.” He shook his head a little like he was trying to clear his vision.
I stuck my phone in my back pocket again and tried not to look forward to having his arms around me again on the bike. Tried, and failed, and then laughed at myself for thinking it would ever be easy. “Okay,” I said to redirect my focus, “now, are you hungry? Because I’m starving, and the world’s most perfect fish and chips is a six-minute ride from here.”
His expression gradually softened into something less surprised and more … relaxed. “The world’s most perfect? Are you sure you want to make that claim to a man who lived in England?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Perfectly deep fried fish is all about the batter, and everyone knows the best batter can only be found at Marisma in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and at the Fish Shack in Rockport.”
“Everyone knows,” he countered as he reached for his own helmet, “that the best ingredient in fish and chips is the ink from the English newspapers the fishmongers wrap it in.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but then quirked my head at him. “Gray actually fired you?”
Darius looked a tiny bit chagrined, and then he shrugged. “Yes. My boss didn’t seem particularly worried though.”
“Worried about what?” I asked.
He exhaled quietly. “Gray threatened to kill us in the court of public opinion unless we were successful in retrieving the painting of your m
other and aunt. Apparently he has the connections to do so, but that didn’t seem to worry my boss. He has let me stay to sort out what I can on the heist, and on the Manet.”
“Well, the Manet is a closed case. Mom said she painted it,” I reminded him.
“She also said it was unfinished,” he said seriously.
I flung my leg over the seat of the bike and faced backward, then gestured to him to the seat. “Sit.” After a moment of hesitation, he did, and despite scooting as far back on the seat as he could, there was less than a foot between us. “What haven’t you told me?”
His expression did a rapid-fire shift, from something guarded to something resigned, and I didn’t like either, so I was glad when he settled on something neutral. “I did a cursory examination of the frame that was left behind in the panic room.”
I noticed that he was careful not to say “that you left behind,” which I appreciated.
“There were, as you obviously know, the remnants of two canvases left between the stretcher and the frame,” he continued.
“Right. The Sisters and Mom’s copy of the Manet.” I tried not to sound impatient, but I really was hungry, and he sat so close to me that it was fifty-fifty which hunger I’d try to satisfy first.
“Your mother said her Manet was unfinished. She never painted the edges.”
I waited for him to continue speaking, but he didn’t until he’d looked into my eyes for a long moment, like he really wanted me to get what he was about to say. “The edges were black, Anna. They’d been painted.”
The Roadrunner in the Looney Tunes loop in my brain screeched to a halt, and I stared at Darius, unable to process what he was implying.
“The edges of both canvasses in the panic room were painted black.”
31
Anna
“You can’t scare me. I have two daughters.”
Max Collins
Darius left my parents’ house soon after we got back from our ride. He’d been quiet during lunch, and it was clear that whatever he thought about the Manet, he wasn’t going to share it with me. I was a thief, after all, and he didn’t trust me. Fair enough.
I was in the garage wiping down the Bonneville when my dad found me.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, grabbing a shop towel and kneeling at the other side of the motorcycle to help. “Everything okay?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
He was silent for another minute. It’s how we’d always talked – working on something, with long silences between the words. “Your mom said you got an old painting of hers back from the guy who caused the rift between her and Alexandra. Seems like it meant a lot to her.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Dad must have caught the motion, because he nodded too. “You take it?”
“Yeah,” I said after a minute.
Dad sat back on his heels and studied me. That rarely happened. Most of the time our hands were too busy for our eyes to look. “He catch you?” he finally asked.
I knew he meant Darius. My dad and I had a shorthand that had never really required too many words, which might explain why I sucked at being a girl sometimes. I didn’t use the requisite number of words most of the time, or I used too many, and they were the wrong ones.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
More silence. I finished wiping down my side of the bike and moved next to him to get the parts he hadn’t gotten to yet. “That his job?” Dad finally asked.
“Yep. He’s good at it too.”
“Hand me the chrome polish,” he said, already reaching. I tossed it to him and got a clean rag to polish what he applied. We polished the chrome in silence for a few minutes, and I was glad to have something shiny to focus my attention on. My reflection in the pipes distorted to something fantastical and freakish, but the story that would usually spin its way out of my brain didn’t come, and the fantasy faded into something flat and strange with no magic at all.
We finished the chrome, and my dad stood up with only a slight wince.
“He wants you,” he said.
The words startled me, and I shook my head. “No. He might have if I hadn’t lied to him.”
He studied me. “You lied?”
“Yeah.”
“About a life or death thing?”
I shook my head and scoffed. “A freedom thing maybe, but not life or death.”
“Same thing to some.” My dad took the shop towel out of my hand and turned me around to face him. Then he opened his arms, and I stepped into them for a hug. In my dad’s arms was the one place I ever felt like I could be vulnerable, and I let myself relax into his hug.
“Thanks, Dad,” I whispered into his sweater.
“Your mom’s already got that painting up above the fireplace,” he said after a long moment.
“How attached are you to the purple sofa?” I asked.
He chuckled at that. My mom was known to change all the furniture in a room to highlight a new piece of art. There was no question where my sister had gotten her decorating skills.
“I could never give your mom her sister back. You did that.”
“Colette and I did it together,” I murmured.
Dad stepped back so he could look at me, and he wore a wry smile. “She might have had a little something to do with it, but we both know who did the taking.”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about that, Dad. Flattered that you think I’m capable, or insulted that you’re so sure I’m the one with the criminal tendencies.”
He laughed and pulled me back in. “Both. But not insulted.” Abruptly, he let go of me and busied himself cleaning up the shop towels. “Your sister is a princess, and God knows, she has her own way of getting what she wants.”
I smiled at that. “She does, doesn’t she?” I had to admit I was kind of proud of her for it.
My dad studied me. “But you think outside the box like there is no box, and you’re the only one creative enough to see that.”
I sighed and hung the helmets on their hooks on the wall. “I’m not sure what to do next. Taking the painting has opened a whole can of worms that I don’t know how to close back up again.”
“Here’s the thing, kiddo. Right and wrong aren’t as simple as black and white, because there are about a million shades of gray in the world.”
“You think?” I scoffed, because that was exactly what I thought. And exactly what Darius didn’t.
He sighed as if he wanted better words. “You’re who you are because of the life you’ve had. You had advantages and an education that shaped you – you’ve traveled the world and done some pretty incredible things. What’s right for you might be a couple of shades different than what’s right for someone with different experiences.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” I thought about what Darius had said about building three hours into his travel schedule because the sound of his name fit a profile. Meanwhile, Colette could talk her way out of a ticket just by smiling.
My dad continued. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a hard line on things that hurt other people, but you know what your own code is. You know what you can live with and what you can’t, and I like to think you were raised to make workable choices.”
“I’ve never had a problem with that, Dad. I’m pretty clear on where my hard lines are.” I had realized when I was a kid, choosing Honor as my D&D character, that my personal code felt a little like a mix of Robin Hood and Mulan, with an unfortunate dose of Sid, the filterless sloth.
“So, work with what you’ve got,” my dad said as he organized his impeccable workbench. “Trust your gut, protect yourself and the people you care about, don’t hurt anyone, and stay true to what you believe in. At the end of the day, there are a lot of things more important than a couple of swirls of paint on a canvas, even if they make your mom happy.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
He swept a hand over his spotless work bench and headed for the door, but turned back just before he left the garage
.
“Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“You bring people to life when they’re with you. Choose someone who does the same for you.”
32
Darius
“Art isn’t the answer, it’s the reason.”
Sophia Collins
I made it to the museum just before it closed and went immediately to the Blue Room to study the Manet. The docent on duty was the woman from the Dutch Room, Amber, and she greeted me with recognition and a smile when I walked in.
I had spent the drive from Rockport pointedly not thinking about Anna. Instead, I used the time to look at the problem of the forged Manet from every angle I could see. First, if the painting behind the Kiriakis sisters was the original Madame Auguste Manet, then Anna’s mother and aunt were implicated in its theft. That it hung in Markham Gray’s panic room implicated him in the theft as well – an idea that troubled me less. Theoretically, an unknown thief might have hidden the original Manet behind a painting that had been stored in the annex, but that didn’t explain its presence in Gray’s panic room. But the constant through all of it was that Anna herself was implicated – not because she had necessarily stolen the Manet, but because she’d been responsible for the uninvited liberation of the Kiriakis sisters’ painting from Gray’s mansion and was now likely in possession of a stolen masterpiece.
The option that I continued to hope for, but which seemed less and less likely in the face of the circumstantial evidence, was that the Manet on the wall of the Blue Room was the original, and the one in Anna’s portfolio was just an excellent copy painted with period paints and brush techniques by her mother.
I stood in front of Madame Auguste Manet, staring up at the stark black-on-black of her dress, when I felt someone approach. I looked over to see Amber standing next to me. She studied the painting as she spoke. “Manet painted this just two years after he painted the nudes that made him infamous. I wonder what his mother thought of them?”
Code of Honor Page 19