Sapphire

by Sophie Lark

  But here the confusion came into play: had the first thief been successful back at the hotel? The guards would have sworn that wasn’t the case. But that would only focus suspicion on themselves. It would appear that one of the guards had pocketed the tiara while packing up the rest of the gems. Because they also swore that no one came near the truck on the journey back to Strauss.

  No one thought to examine the truck itself—it was clearly empty. At least to the naked eye.

  So, the truck was taken back to the depot and parked in its usual spot.

  And once it was dark, once everyone left the depot except the lone guard up in his room, out came Lex, with the diadem tucked inside her jacket.

  She had set it on the nightstand in their hotel room, so they could both enjoy the deep, blue hue of that vivid stone.

  “It really is beautiful,” Lex said.

  “Makes you want to keep it, doesn’t it?” Luca said.

  “A little bit,” Lex admitted. “But don’t worry, we’ll give it to Bruni.”

  She moaned as Luca pressed his thumb against a particularly tender spot on her back.

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

  “No, you’re helping me,” she assured him.

  “I’ll help you much more than that,” Luca said. He rolled her over and buried his face between her thighs.

  “How’s that?” he growled.

  “So much better,” Lex sighed, melting back into the bed.

  In the morning, they packed up all their stuff and prepared to make the long, circuitous trip back to Italy. They were driving, but not directly, in case Black had caught news of their latest adventures and tried to intercept them.

  Luca saw Lex fiddling with the diadem, pulling out one of the smaller diamonds with a set of pliers.

  “Don’t switch those out,” he warned her. “Bruni’s not an idiot. He’s going to have the whole thing checked.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lex said, “I’m putting it back.”

  True to her word, Lex refit the stone and boxed up the whole thing up, ready for delivery.

  22

  Byron Black

  Stockholm

  Thief is not the one who steals, but the one that is caught.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Black spent three days in Lyon, watching the French police unload two hundred and eighty-two works of art from Lex’s attic.

  The pieces were carried down the rickety ladder one by one and laid out in her workshop. They were carefully examined, registered, and wrapped up, to begin the Herculean task of returning them to the museums, galleries, and private homes across the globe from whence they’d been stolen.

  The French media went nuts for the story. Black’s face was splashed across front-page headlines, websites, and news reports: the hero of culture, recovering an unprecedented number of stolen artworks.

  The face that was not publicized for all to see was Lex’s.

  Black never exposed her.

  He gave reporters and the police a bland story about a tip that lead him to the old, abandoned textile workshop.

  The workshop itself had been registered under a shell corporation, which belonged to another overseas company. There was no tie to Lex, at least none that the police were able to parse.

  Black supposed that some of the other textile workers in the area remembered the woman who had owned that workshop, once upon a time. Perhaps they even knew who her great-granddaughter had been. They must have seen Lex come and go during her visits. But none of them had any interest in speaking to the police. Their loyalty lay with Lex’s family, or what was left of it.

  Why did Black keep Lex’s secret?

  He doubted she would ever thank him for it. After all, he was still responsible for the loss of the collection she’d spent her whole life building.

  By keeping her identity a secret, he would be accountable for anything she stole in the future.

  But he still had this last vestige of loyalty to her. He knew she valued her freedom above everything. And he could never take that from her.

  Paradoxically, Black was still in plenty of shit with Gorman.

  Gorman didn’t give one goddamn if Black was a hero over in France. He only cared that Black had made precisely zero progress on the cash-heist case.

  Johnson had told Gorman that Black was in Venice, chasing down a long-shot lead related to the Brotherhood. Gorman was less than pleased to see Black pop up in Lyon, with a bunch of paintings and sculptures, but fuck-all in the way of actual arrests.

  The rest of the team had come up similarly empty-handed in Stockholm. Half the ATMs in the city had run short on cash over the weekend, and the Piketen were being lambasted in the media.

  “This gang of fucking hooligans is making fools of us,” Gorman raged.

  He yelled at Black and the rest of the team for over an hour. Black knew that the FBI didn’t give a shit if the British and Swedish police looked incompetent, but they weren’t going to tolerate a blow to the American reputation.

  In some ways, Black liked working with the Americans. They had money to burn, a seemingly bottomless budget with almost no oversight. And they loved to take action without half the red tape required by the British police.

  But they took everything so goddamned personally.

  “They’re laughing at us!” Gorman screamed, his face red with anger.

  Black wasn’t sure the Brotherhood were thinking about them at all. But he wasn’t going to argue, not with Gorman in this kind of a state.

  He didn’t feel like arguing, anyway.

  He didn’t feel like doing much of anything.

  The backslapping and champagne and piles of praise he’d received in Lyon had done nothing to raise his mood.

  He was sunk in a black hole of depression.

  He hadn’t realized, over the last two years, how much of his sense of purpose and drive had been derived from his search for Lex. Every day, he’d thought about finding her.

  Now he had found her.

  And she was gone again.

  And this time, there was no point in looking for her.

  It was a hard thing to accept—that it was really over. Even harder to try to understand that she just never felt about him the way he did about her. She had cared for him, but she didn’t love him. Not with a full heart. She had been the sun in his universe, but to her, he was just another star.

  Well, maybe now that she was gone for good, he could start focusing on his actual job.

  He did want to bring down the Brotherhood. He despised their callous violence. The guards they’d mowed down on their way into the depot were innocent men just doing their job. Three of them had children.

  The problem was, the Brotherhood really were good. They left almost no evidence. The helicopter they’d used had been stolen. It had been found, abandoned, by a private airstrip. They’d taken off from there in two SUVs, also stolen, and later left outside a train station.

  Whether they’d actually gotten on the train was another question. They could have simply switched vehicles in the parking lot. There was no CCTV footage to tell.

  Still, Black sat down at his desk and read through the files for the hundredth time. With a case like this, you had to simply grind and grind and grind, until you finally got a break. You never knew what that break would be: a witness, a piece of evidence, or simply a pattern that you’d never noticed before, but that emerged on the hundred-and-first viewing.

  Johnson came back from the bathroom, where he’d been hiding while Gorman yelled at everybody.

  He sat down at his desk, across from Black’s.

  “Hey,” he whispered, “your tracker’s back on.”

  “What?” Black said, glancing up from his folders.

  “Your tracker’s on again. Actually, it has been for about twelve hours. At first it was traveling, but it’s been stationary for eight hours now.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s in Rome.”

  Black pondered
on this.

  He knew as soon as the tracker went dark that Lex must have found it. He’d assumed that she’d destroyed it. But now it was sending a signal again. Which meant that Lex had put it somewhere, deliberately. She was sending a message to him.

  Why?

  His first thought was that she’d planted it on her partner. Maybe they’d had a falling out, and she wanted Black to come nab him.

  But he didn’t think that was the case. As much as he hated to admit it, he’d seen the way Lex looked at the other thief. She’d brought him to her home, purposefully. She’d shown him her collection.

  She did that willingly. He didn’t have to stalk her the way that Black had.

  So what else could she be up to?

  Maybe she was trying to lure Black into some kind of trap. She might want revenge, because he’d handed over her collection and made her lose her house forever. It might not be dangerous, she just might be trying to get him to make a fool of himself again.

  But somehow, he didn’t think that was the answer either.

  He believed Lex when she said she was sorry. She felt guilty for hurting him. She didn’t want to be with him, but Black didn’t think she harbored any animosity toward him either, not even for following her to Lyon.

  What was it then?

  He sat silent at his desk, tapping his pen softly against his thigh.

  What if it was the opposite?

  Not revenge, but a gift?

  One last thing she wanted him to find.

  Black sat up, leaning toward his laptop. He typed in a few search terms and began to scroll.

  He was looking for recent thefts in Europe.

  Police Release Video to Find Woman Suspected of Stealing $20,000 Watch

  Security Guard Steals $1M From Own Van Then Abandons it in Street

  GoFundMe Refunds $400,000 in Donations from Couple’s Scam Fundraiser

  And then:

  Dutchess’s Diadem Disappears from Armored Truck

  Bingo.

  A priceless sapphire tiara was stolen from a Strauss exhibition of its famous British Collection. Security guards foiled a thief at the Schlosshotel, only to have the diadem vanish en route back to the vault.

  That sounded exactly like Lex. Divert, distract, then grab.

  Was she trying to start a new collection, since she’d lost everything she had?

  Or did she have a different purpose in mind?

  “Where is it, in Rome?” Black said.

  “What?” Johnson popped his head up from behind his computer screen.

  “Where exactly is the tracker, in Rome?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly in Rome—it’s a bit outside the city, in Ostia,” Johnson said. “It’s on a compound. But it looks like the signal is coming from underground.”

  “Who does the compound belong to?”

  “That’s what I’ve been looking up,” Johnson said, grinning. “It’s Federico Bruni.”

  “I know who he is,” Black said, nodding.

  Suspected mafioso and probable member of the Fratellanza, the Italian chapter of the Brotherhood.

  Black stood up.

  “Let’s tell Gorman to round up the team.”

  “Are you sure?” Johnson asked, looking dubious. “You’re gonna have to swing a big stick to get on this guy’s property. If we come up blank on a search, you’re gonna be in trouble. Career-ending trouble.”

  Black shrugged.

  “I’ve been in trouble before,” he said.

  He was going to trust Lex. One last time.

  The whole FBI team stormed Bruni’s estate the following morning, with two dozen of Calcio’s officers in tow. Black knew his last shred of credibility was on the line, as well as Calcio’s career with the Polizia.

  If they didn’t find anything, if Bruni had hidden his loot or moved it off-site, the raid would be highly embarrassing for everyone involved.

  But Johnson assured Black that the tracker was still faithfully sending out its beacon.

  So they surrounded the villa, which was a sprawling, three-sided complex, in brilliant white stone, with airy archways, open courtyards, and four separate swimming pools.

  There was a tense moment when they thought the security team might put up a fight. Bruni’s security was armed to the teeth and only a little out-numbered. They might have fought, had it only been the Polizia. Once they saw the FBI badges, however, they backed down immediately. That was a pandora’s box no one wanted to open.

  Bruni raged when they broke down his door, making some particularly colorful threats towards Calcio and his family.

  Calcio looked a little green around the gills, but he kept his composure as the officers swarmed over the house, looking for evidence of evil-doing.

  They found nothing in Bruni’s office, not even in his wall safe—other than a few stacks of cash and a couple of gold bars, which weren’t illegal. They did find a small amount of cocaine in his desk, but not enough to get him in any serious trouble.

  Bruni looked smug from his position under guard in the dining room. Until Black followed the signal of the tracker down to Bruni’s wine cellar. There, behind a false wall, they found his safe.

  Bruni refused to give them the combination, so they hauled in the necessary equipment and spent four hours drilling through the door. At last, they entered his treasure trove.

  There they found the missing diadem and dozens of other stolen pieces. The Chalk Emerald, the Golden Jubilee, and even the Romanov Cross. Calcio swore with pleasure when he saw that one—he knew he’d receive particular praise for restoring the Russian treasure entrusted to the Venetians.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Black warned him.

  He had picked up the cross to examine it.

  It felt much too light, for a piece made of solid gold.

  When he turned it over, he found a sticker on the bottom.

  Made in China.

  23

  Alex Moore

  Rio de Janeiro

  She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

  Yiyun Li

  Lex and Luca decided to leave Europe for a while, until the heat cooled down. They knew that the Roma had been released from custody, the police not having enough evidence to actually charge him with anything. Whether he would bother chasing after them with his employer behind bars was another question.

  Lex had watched the news faithfully, waiting for news of Bruni’s arrest. She thoroughly enjoyed the footage of him being escorted out of his villa in handcuffs. She thought she recognized Black’s tall, broad frame standing off to the side, arms folded over his chest.

  She’d known that he would see her signal, but she hadn’t been certain if he’d trust her enough to follow it.

  “Do you feel bad for Bruni?” she asked Luca, seeing his serious expression as he watched the broadcast, seated on the bed beside her.

  She was cognizant that the man had meant something to Luca, for better or worse.

  “He deserves it,” Luca said with a sigh. “He might have been good to me, but he wasn’t a good man.”

  “Well,” Lex said with a laugh, “let’s hope we don’t all get what we deserve.”

  “Oh, you’ll get your punishment, you little thief,” Luca growled, pinning her down on the bed.

  He kissed her, his lips soft and warm in the humid evening air.

  The window next to the bed was open. The breeze drifted in, dancing across Lex’s skin as Luca stripped off her clothes. He began to kiss down the delicate line of her jaw, to the tender flesh of her throat, along her collarbone, down to her bare breasts.

  He ran his tongue up and down the swell of her breasts, licking in circles around her nipples, but not giving her what she so desperately wanted. He held her wrists pinned above her head with his strong arms.

  His skin had become browner than ever from the Brazilian sunsh
ine, his wavy, dark hair full of copper strands. His bright hazel eyes looked down into her face.

  “I love you, Lex,” he said.

  He wasn’t the first man to say it to her. But it was the first time those words didn’t make her feel trapped and panicked. Tonight, she could hear it without wanting to run away.

  She knew that he was saying it to her, to the real Alex Moore. Not a false fantasy she’d shown him, or an image on a pedestal he’d built up in his mind. He knew exactly who she was, as a partner, as a lover, as a friend. And he loved her for it.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  He kissed her harder than he ever had before. He devoured her mouth, and he kissed her breasts exactly the way she wanted, sucking and biting her nipples until she almost screamed, pinning her to the bed with heavy, muscular body, not letting up for an instant until she begged for mercy.

  Then he lay between her legs and he gave her the release she craved. He treated her pussy like the most complicated combination lock on earth, using his lips and fingers with such delicacy and skill that he brought her to orgasm three separate times in quick succession, manipulating and controlling her body in a way she’d never dreamed possible.

  Then, and only then, did he climb on top of her once more and thrust inside of her.

  The night was so hot that they were both dripping with sweat, the breeze feeling orgiastic against their skin.

  He lifted her up so she was sitting on his lap. He fucked her gently at first, then harder and harder.

  His skin was giving off the most intoxicating scent. She felt obsessed with him, fixated on him, more than she’d been on the most dazzling artifact she’d ever laid eyes upon. He had the glow now, his tan skin suffused with the light of the most precious object in the world.

  And unlike a piece of art, she knew that he felt exactly the same in return.