He came out of the bedroom, grabbed a receipt to use as a bookmark, and dropped onto the bench seat across from me. “So, Anna,” he said as he took a swig of his beer.
I sighed. It couldn’t have been boat engines or a problem at work that inspired my brother to show up at ten o’clock at night?
“Do we need to talk about this tonight?”
Reza leaned back, sipped his beer, and regarded me. “We don’t ever need to talk about it, but if you’re not going to keep her, can I take a shot?”
“Fuck off, Reza.”
A smile crept along the edges of his smug mouth, and I wanted to wipe it off with my fist. I’d never punched my brother, not even when he had begged for an attitude adjustment, but he was finally bigger than me, and my degree of self-loathing was such that I actually wanted the fight.
“I think she’s the best thing to happen to you since you bought this tub,” he said, gesturing around him. He loved my boat and had spent long hours helping me strip and sand the wood.
“She’s gone,” I said, glaring at him. “And she’s not for you, either.”
The smugness disappeared, and he sighed. “What’d you do?”
Sometimes I hated my brother for his ease with himself, because it shone a spotlight on everything I struggled with.
What had I done? And worse, why had I done it? “I let myself forget what I believe in for a little while – told myself it didn’t matter, because whatever it was …” I trailed off, because I knew exactly what it was. “The attraction between us couldn’t be real.”
“The attraction is visceral, man. It sparks the air between you like electricity, but ungrounded, like a live wire.”
He was right. It was dangerous.
I picked at the label on my beer while I chose the words I hadn’t even said to myself. “If I let myself be with her, it would make what our parents stood for, what they left Iran for, what I built my own ethics from, a lie.”
Reza scowled at me. “What is she, man, a terrorist?”
I huffed a mirthless laugh. “No. With her it’s not one big thing. It would be death by a thousand cuts every time she bribed the police with coffee, lied for information, traded a favor, asked for forgiveness rather than permission.”
“She’s a bounty hunter, right? Isn’t that what they do?” It was so easy for Reza.
I peeled the label off the bottle in one continuous strip and found the words to explain. “It’s more than her work. She lives by her own code, and if I let myself play by her rules, I’ll lose my own.”
My brother was silent for a long time, turning the bottle in his hands. “Who made your rules?” he finally asked. “Because it seems to me that you made them yourself a long time ago, maybe even when you were a kid.”
Reza had been a toddler when we left Iran. All his memories came from other people’s stories, and yet he continued. “You heard the things people said, people who were afraid and maybe justifying their choices to leave Iran, and your little seven-year-old brain decided what was right and wrong, and how the world should be.” He held my gaze as though making sure I heard every word.
“You were three, Reza. You don’t remember,” I pushed back.
“I know the stories. I remember the dog …”
I flinched and he pushed harder. “You’ve been living by a seven-year-old’s rules, probably since the day we left Iran, and seven-year-olds don’t have the full picture of the world.”
Reza stood. “I don’t know about you, but kids don’t get to make the rules for me.”
He drank the last of his beer, grabbed the book off the table, and clapped me on my shoulder as he headed for the door. “Good talk,” he said, and was gone before I could have the last word.
38
Anna
“I’m allowed to hate my sister, but nobody else is.”
Anna Collins
Colette was asleep on my bed when I got in, which was good, because it meant I wouldn’t be tempted to cry, but annoying, because my pity party was not for sharing. But then I saw the mascara trails on her face, and all inclinations to self-indulgence disappeared.
“Colette,” I whispered. “What happened?”
It wasn’t that late, and my sister was a night person, which meant she’d cried herself to sleep. She cracked an eyelid open and then rolled away to face the wall.
“I’m going to make some hot chocolate,” I said as I got up and turned the kitchen light on.
“Do you have any whipped cream?” Her voice sounded raw.
I scoffed. “No.”
“What good are you then?” she said, and I was glad to hear the snark.
“I have marshmallows,” I said as I got the milk out of the fridge and poured it into the pot from a fondue set that I used as a saucepan.
“Homemade?” She rolled over to watch me.
“Who are you? Do you know how hard marshmallows are to make?”
“Lazy.”
“You’re lazy,” I said as I whisked good chocolate into the milk.
“No, you.” There was a smile in her voice, and it made the tension in my chest let go enough for normal breath.
She got up off the bed and went into the bathroom. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, presumably to her reflection. Then I heard the sound of running water, and when she emerged, her face was clean and bare of make-up. She looked at my outfit with a raised eyebrow. “You had a date?”
“Why do you say that?” I countered, because it wasn’t a date.
“Because that’s an actual shirt, not a snarky T-shirt.”
“I have actual clothes.”
“You’re avoiding the question. Who’d you go out with? Cipher man?” she asked as she parked on a barstool across from me.
“Why were you crying?” I countered, and then immediately regretted it. Her expression clouded, and she looked so vulnerable I wanted to drop-kick whoever made her feel like that.
“I need the Manet,” she said quietly.
“Colette,” I said with a sinking stomach, “what did you do?”
“Why do you assume I did anything?” she shot back defensively.
“We think it’s the original,” I said, ignoring her outburst.
“Who the hell is ‘we’? You and I are ‘we,’ not you and Cipher man, or whoever you’re sharing a bed with.”
She was hurt, and I’d just poked a stick into the wound. I took a deep breath and started again. “I met with Cipher man and his bosses today. Sterling’s dad fired them, so they’re not actively trying to bust me, but they do want whatever we can get about why Markham Gray might have a stolen Manet hanging on his wall.”
Colette closed her eyes as the fight seeped out of her. “I asked Sterling why his dad was freaking out so much about the painting. He said he didn’t know, but that it looked like there’d been another painting behind it.”
“Did you tell him we had it?” I asked.
Her eyes flew open. “No! He still doesn’t know about you. He can’t, because then he’d know we stole it.”
“But …” I prompted, and Colette closed her eyes again.
“His father knows something. I don’t know what, but something,” she whispered. “Sterling took me to meet his dad for lunch today. He was in town for a meeting.” She took a deep breath for courage, I thought. “When Sterling left the table to take a call, Mr. Gray told me that he didn’t know how I’d done it, but he knew I was involved in the theft of the painting, and if I didn’t give him back what was his, he would plaster my naked butt on every billboard and in every interior design magazine in the city.”
Her naked butt. The butt she’d exposed to his security camera to give us both an alibi. “He’d do that to his own son?”
She barked a laugh that had no humor in it. “Apparently so. A Sterling Gray sex tape would probably help his career, but it would sink mine.”
I turned the stove off and poured the simmering hot chocolate into two mugs, then put a bag of gourmet marshmallows be
tween us.
She scoffed. “You do have good marshmallows.”
“No point in bad wine, cheap chocolate, or crap marshmallows.”
She dropped two of the cubes into her cup and raised it to toast me. “Truth.”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said as I blew across the top of my drink.
Her eyes got wide. “What?”
I shrugged. “Not sure yet. Some variation on what we did before, probably.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not going on camera again.”
“No, but you guys go out, right?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
I gave her my best side-eye. “Just sometimes? Are you sure you’re not just a booty call for the guy?”
“He introduced me to his dad,” she said, defensive again.
“Who proceeded to threaten you when he conveniently left to take a call.” I sighed. “Sterling Gray was supposed to be the booty call. You were going to love him, leave him, and never take another call from him again.”
“I like the way he treats me,” she said. “He thinks I’m funny, and he’s interested in things I have to say.” She took a sip of her chocolate and pondered the melting marshmallow. “It may not seem like much to you since guys always treat you like a real person, but he sees me for more than my face and my body.”
She’d surprised me. I needed a minute to think about her words, so I took my cup and walked over to the window that looked down into the garden. The only thing moving down there was my neighbor’s cat.
I thought about the Disney prince – how he laughed at my jokes and rolled with the crazy things I said. He argued against my self-deprecation and said he loved the random bits of trivia I knew. I felt seen and known and understood in his eyes. It was a heady feeling.
“I get it,” I said, turning back to Colette. “It’s addicting to feel like a whole person in someone else’s eyes.”
“You’re a whole person to me, Sister,” she said. “I always feel a little anemic next to you.”
I scowled. “You’re the beauty, I’m the badass. Or maybe more accurately, you’re the princess, I’m the thief.”
“You do realize we’re identical twins,” she said.
I turned to look at Alex’s painting of us. “I know Alex meant this painting for Mom, but I really like it. Even though she didn’t know us, I feel like she kind of got who we are.”
Colette came to stand next to me, sipping her chocolate. “It’s weird that she didn’t finish the edges though. I mean, how hard would it have been to paint them?”
I looked at her in surprise, then I put my cup down and took the painting off the easel. “Let’s do it. What should I use to get this off its stretcher?”
“A flathead screwdriver to get under the staples.”
“There’s one in the kitchen drawer, and I have black paint and brushes in the medicine cabinet.”
She scowled at me, opened her mouth, then shook her head. “Nope. Not going to ask.”
Colette handed me the screwdriver and then went for the little tub of black acrylic paint I kept in the bathroom for face painting when being a panda or a skull was called for.
I laid the painting face down on the rug and started pulling up the staples. Colette held out her hand for the staples as I pulled them, and in a few minutes, I’d removed them all. We carefully peeled the canvas back from the wooden stretcher. “I have newspaper to put on the floor—” My voice trailed off as I saw tiny words, handwritten in the distinctive architectural writing of Alex Kiriakis, revealed around the entire canvas as we pulled it free.
“Is that—?” Colette began.
“A message from Alex,” I finished.
The words had been perfectly placed so they were directly behind the one-inch-wide wood and therefore invisible until the stretcher was removed.
“Where does it begin?” Colette asked as I threw away the staples and got a flashlight.
I knelt next to her. “Here,” I said, shining the light on a small infinity sign in the upper left corner. I read out loud as I deciphered the writing.
“If you have retrieved our painting from Markham, you will have found the Manet. He believes it is the real one. The Gardner heist was his plan, but he wasn’t in charge and had to follow orders about what to take, so to get anything for himself, he had to make sure it was never reported. Sophia’s copy of the Manet was the perfect cover for stealing the original, and I made some bad choices for love. I was to finish her edges, which I did, and switch the paintings in the annex, which I didn’t, though I told him I did. He’s a vindictive man, and I’m afraid he could go after your mom if he discovers my lie and thinks I told her about his role in the robbery. I stayed away from all of you to protect you from my mistakes. Please tell Sophia I always loved her, and I’m so sorry.”
I met my sister’s shocked eyes, knowing mine looked the same. “He can’t know we know about any of this,” I said.
“I think Alex was right about Markham’s vindictiveness. If he knew he was duped, he could still go after Mom. We know he’s capable of it, and since she painted the forgery, it’s his word against hers that she wasn’t involved in the heist itself.” Colette looked genuinely afraid as she worked through the ramifications.
Hysteria bubbled up through my chest and came out as laughter. “Holy heist, Batman, I have to put the painting back.”
39
Anna
“Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”
Roald Dahl
I hated that I was so nervous as I walked into the Cipher Security building the next day. Gabriel was at the front desk, talking to a tall, beautiful woman I realized was Shane, and I almost turned right around and left.
Shane saw me though, and she waved. “Anna, it’s good to see you again.”
“Funny, it’s intimidating as hell to see you, Shane of Cipher Security,” I grinned, not joking even a little bit. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” she laughed. “Have you met Gabriel?”
I nodded. “We met yesterday.” I looked at him. “You were right; the coffee in that conference room is excellent.”
The look Shane gave Gabriel sent a wave of pure jealousy washing over me. Not because I particularly wanted either of them, but because I wanted that look for myself. It didn’t help that I was about to put myself at the mercy of the guy I wanted it from, or that the only looks I was likely to get from him at this point would be cold and disapproving once he heard why I was there.
So I steeled myself and asked, “Is Darius in yet?”
“He is,” Shane said, then turned to Gabriel. “You want to call, and I’ll take her up?”
He was already picking up the phone and dialing when Shane walked me toward the elevator. “Sorry about ratting you out to Darius after the D&D game,” she said casually. “I’m glad Gray fired us though, so it turned out okay.”
I looked at her through narrowed eyes. “It’s not weird for you to be friendly with someone who broke into one of your systems?”
She laughed as we stepped into the elevator. “I met Gabriel because I did a little unauthorized money transfer from one of his clients. Turned out the client was shady as hell, so it all worked out in the end.”
I scoffed. “This client is shady as hell too. Kind of makes you wonder about the people who need private security.”
“Quinn has moved toward corporate security. A lot of these guys are hold-overs from when he and Dan were just starting out.”
The elevator doors closed and Shane turned to me. “Dan told us a little about what happened. I just want you to know that I don’t see things as black and white as some people do, and there is a lot of stuff that happens in the gray areas that I’m fine with. If you and I happen to run into each other at Sparky’s D&D nights, I want you to know that I’m just a nerd who wishes I were as cool as you.”
My scoff was far bigger this time. “You’re the cool one, and I’m the dork with aspiratio
ns to Shane-ness.”
She laughed and held out her hand to shake mine. “Excellent. I look forward to our next campaign.”
The elevator doors opened and Darius stood there, looking impossibly handsome in a gray suit with a lavender tie. The man was so elegant I might as well have been wearing cut-offs and flip flops in comparison.
His eyes searched my face for a brief moment, and I wondered what he was looking for. Evidence of tears, of anger, of defiance? “Anna,” he said quietly.
I turned to Shane. “Thanks for bringing me up. I’ll see you at Sparky’s this week?”
“Yes you will,” she said with a smile as she walked away.
Then I turned back to Darius. “I’m sorry for dropping by without calling. Can we talk? It won’t take long.”
Something in his expression shifted from searching to shuttered, and whatever warmth had passed between us a moment before was gone. He led me to a small room with two sofas and a coffee table between them.
“Is this room someone’s office?” I asked, looking around. It felt warm and cozy, like a nice place to nap or play board games with friends.
“There are a few spots around the building that are designed as mixed-use work spaces. I often find a hacker asleep in here when I come in early.” He gestured for me to sit on one sofa, and he sat on the other across from me.
I leaned forward. “I need to put the Manet back into Gray’s panic room.”
If my statement surprised him, he did a good job of controlling his expression. “Why?”
“Because he threatened Colette. He doesn’t know about me, and he doesn’t have proof she was involved in the theft, but the only way he’ll let it go is if the painting goes back.”
This did surprise him. “With what did he threaten your sister?”
Code of Honor Page 24