Wicked Games: The Complete Wicked Games Series Box Set

by J. T. Geissinger

  “Tell me your last name and where you’re from, and I’ll tell you where I’m keeping the diamond.” When she hesitates a moment too long, I remind her, “You decided to trust me, remember?”

  She shoots back, “That was before I decided I wanted to kick you in the balls.”

  I lift a shoulder like I could care less either way, and turn back to the eggs. “Suit yourself.”

  She starts to mutter in Spanish. I think I hear curses involving my mother and a few imminent threats on my life, but I’m not proficient in the language, so maybe I’m imagining it.

  “My last name is Lora. L-O-R-A.” She spells it out like I’m too dense to guess, her tone loud and condescending. I swallow a chortle.

  “And where do you live when you’re not traveling the world in search of booty, Ms. Lora?” I glance at her over my shoulder. “The jewel kind, not the other kind. I wasn’t implying you travel the world in search of men.”

  “How gallant,” she deadpans. “Thank you for clarifying.”

  I send her a wink. “No problemo.”

  She appears to be doing deep-breathing exercises for several moments, complete with closed eyes and pursed lips on slow exhalations. Then she opens her eyes. “My home is in Morocco. But that’s not where I’m from.”

  I instantly lose interest in the eggs.

  Morocco.

  I slip through a basement door in my memory to a place I visited once and never forgot. A place teeming with life, color, noise, and scents, so many exotic scents assaulting the nose, it was dizzying.

  Orange blossom and cardamom, mint tea and jasmine oil, roasting meat and sweat. Dusty markets called souks filled with tourists and snake charmers, food stalls and laughing children, henna artists and musicians, a labyrinth of alleyways leading in like tributaries from the mazelike medieval city beyond. Lush gardens shimmering amid golden desert sands. Quiet riad courtyards adorned with mosaic-tiled fountains. Lapis lazuli glittering on ancient tomb walls.

  Opulence and poverty and beauty, such beauty everywhere, you could drown in it and be grateful for such a glorious death.

  I look at her with fresh eyes, this exotic creature regarding me with disdain at my kitchen table, and feel the sharp, painful throb of my heart.

  “What?” she asks, nonplussed.

  “I can picture you there, among the date palms and veiled women. I can picture you stealing into a locked room at dawn with the morning call to prayer echoing over the empty medina, the sun on red-tiled rooftops already hot.”

  By her expression, I can tell we’re both surprised at the thickness of my voice.

  After a moment of stillness, she murmurs in Arabic. It’s the opening recital of the Adhan, the call to worship that rings out from minarets atop mosques five times a day in Islamic countries.

  I listen the way an alcoholic drinks wine. Her singing is like the song of angels. It inspires the exact same kind of dumbstruck reverence in my heart.

  Over the roar of my thrumming pulse, I ask, “Do you practice Islam?”

  She shakes her head. “But the prayers are beautiful.” Looking at her hands, she adds more quietly, “And so are the people. Morocco is the most beautiful place in the world.”

  I’m struck with realization. “You miss it.”

  Her shoulders round the way they do when you’re bent with exhaustion or remorse, your body unable to hold itself upright any longer. In a voice so low it’s almost a whisper, she says, “Like someone chained to the wall of a cave for a hundred years misses sunlight.”

  I take a breath that feels like inhaling fresh-fallen snow.

  This.

  This is why I answered Reynard the way I did when he asked me why I didn’t turn her in to the police. This feeling of awe, for lack of a better word. This powerful, mysterious force that makes my chest ache with yearning, though I don’t even know its proper name. This magic of hers that drew my eye and held it from the second I caught my first glimpse.

  For me, Mariana holds an allure I’ve never encountered, something elemental, a pull as strong as gravity and just as impossible to resist. She makes me wish I had a talent for sonnets or sketching so I could capture the essence of it on paper, put it down for others to marvel over the way I do, the way people marvel over the magnificence of the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal.

  She makes my pulse quicken, my blood run hot, and every cell in my body and soul come alive.

  She moves me.

  And I’d move mountains for her.

  Our petty game of tit for tat abandoned with the next beat of my heart, I stride over to the table, bend down, and take her startled face in my hands. I give her a kiss, firm and potent, letting all the joy singing in my veins leach through my lips. When it’s over, I pull away and stare into her lovely brown eyes, the rich hue of fine, barrel-aged bourbon.

  My voice all gravel and sandpaper, I say, “All right. I’ll show you the diamond and I’ll tell you the whole plan. Then you’re gonna tell me everything I want to know. Your life story, where you grew up, everything you love and hate and are proud of and regret. Your favorite music, your favorite food, the name of the first boy you ever kissed. And I’m gonna tell you mine.”

  Mariana laughs breathlessly, her eyes alight. “You kissed a boy?”

  “Smartass,” I growl, falling, falling, falling, head over heels and around again.

  21

  Mariana

  I once heard insanity described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That was Albert Einstein, a much more intelligent person than myself. I’m thinking of him now as Ryan drives me to wherever he’s keeping the diamond. I’m in the passenger seat, mulling all my life choices that have led me to this moment as the cityscape of Manhattan flashes by outside the windows, a silent movie of color and light.

  It’s silent inside the car, too. For once, we’re not fighting or fucking. We’re just sitting side by side, holding hands.

  Such a simple thing, yet so painfully tender. My whole life, I’ve felt lioness-strong, toughened by the cruelty of fate and circumstance, but meeting Ryan has taught me that my heart isn’t the fortress I thought it was.

  Instead, it’s is a newborn baby bird, blind and vulnerable to predators and the elements, trembling with hunger and terror in its nest.

  I want to kick my own ass for being so weak. This whole thing has disaster written all over it.

  “Pretty grim over there,” Ryan observes, squeezing my hand.

  I keep my gaze turned to the window when I answer, because I know how good he is at reading what’s in my eyes. “Just ruminating on the vagaries of life and how arbitrary it all is.”

  His chuckle is warm. “I understood about half the words in that sentence, but my advice is not to worry. It’ll all work out in the end.”

  Now I do look at him, because my curiosity is overwhelming. The sunlight treats him differently than it does other people, caressing him in a hazy, lover’s glow, gleaming the tips of his hair and burnishing his skin to gold. Before I met him, I never even considered a man could be pretty, but he’s beyond merely pretty. He’s mind-meltingly beautiful.

  Yes, that’s it. He’s melted my mind. No wonder I’m having trouble thinking.

  “You’re an optimist,” I say flatly.

  “You say that like you’re accusing me of murder.”

  “Have you always been like this?”

  He glances at me sideways, the flash of dimples in his cheek annoyingly adorable. “Like what? Awesome? Amazing? Unbearably cool?”

  “Guess you weren’t kidding when you said you were conceited,” I mutter.

  “The only difference between me and you, Angel,” he says, squeezing my hand again, “is that you’re a plotter and I’m a panster. You sweat every detail, and I live by the seat of my pants. We both get where we want to go in the end, I just don’t waste time fussin’ over what-ifs.”

  I suffer a brief but violent pang of jealousy that he doesn’t have the worry gene, but
then am insulted that he’d refer to all my careful planning—for instance, on a job like stealing the Hope—as “fussin’.”

  “I don’t fuss. I deliberate. I consider all the options. It’s called being professional.”

  “It’s called bein’ anal.”

  “It’s called being an adult!”

  He sighs like every man has ever sighed when dealing with a woman who doesn’t agree with him. That “here we go” sigh. That “maybe it’s PMS” sigh.

  I’d like to hear the sigh he’d use if I stabbed him in the neck.

  He says, “You’re awful dramatic for someone who’s so anal.”

  “I bet your brain feels as good as new, seeing as how you never use it,” I grit out.

  His shoulders shake silently. While I’m over here steaming, the bastard is trying not to laugh! When I try to extricate my hand from his, he just holds on tighter.

  “Nope,” he says with infuriating cheer, “you don’t get your hand back just ’cause you’ve got your panties in a twist.”

  Instead of trying to force it or argue, I just smile sweetly. “Okay. But when you get your hand back, it might be missing the rest of your arm.”

  “We’re here anyway, so there’s no need for violence, darlin’.”

  Pulling up to a solid steel gate, Ryan winks at me, then rolls down his window. He punches a code into a black box, then he grins up at a camera pointed down from the top of the brick wall that flanks the gate, and flips it the bird.

  “Were you in a fraternity?” I wonder aloud, watching him in all his cocky, Captain America football-hero glory as he makes lewd gestures at a piece of electronic surveillance equipment.

  “In?” he scoffs. “No. I was a founding father of the Kappa Alpha Delta fraternity, the coolest frat on campus.”

  “It’s all starting to make sense now.” I shake my head as the gate swings open.

  We pull into a large lot similar to the one at Ryan’s home and park near a building similar to his, too, only much bigger. It looks like a converted industrial warehouse. All the windows are blacked out and there’s only one entrance, a huge hammered steel door that’s at least ten feet tall and about as wide. A fleet of hulking black Hummers lurks on one side of the lot, windscreens and chrome rims gleaming. They look like a group of metal sharks ready to feed.

  The whole effect is über-masculine and weirdly threatening.

  “Is this your other bachelor pad?”

  “This is Metrix Security’s headquarters.”

  “Oh. Yes, I guess it makes good sense to keep the diamond at the headquarters of a security company. This place must be as impenetrable as Fort Knox. Or your tooth enamel.”

  His only answer is a smile as he exits the car. I undo my seat belt, but before I can open the door, Ryan is holding it open for me, his hand extended to help me out.

  “Thank you.”

  As we walk hand in hand toward the colossal door, he says, “The camera at the gate has facial recognition software—so nobody who isn’t supposed to get in doesn’t, even if they have the entry code—but there’s also a guy watching the camera who mans the submachine guns set into the walls on either side of the gate.”

  “Machine guns?” I repeat, astonished. “Who’re you expecting, the Terminator?”

  Ryan says darkly, “Never know who’s gonna come knockin’. Better armed to the teeth than caught off guard.”

  Our eyes meet. I think of acrid clouds of smoke over avocado fields, the rank, rusty smell of blood on dirt, and shudder. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  His gaze sharpens, but he doesn’t comment further because the steel door is silently sliding open. It reveals a beast of a man, dressed all in black, a gun strapped to his waist.

  “Hey, brother,” says Ryan, breaking into a grin.

  In a rumbling baritone, the man replies, “Hey yourself.” His eyes, dark and flinty as obsidian, flick toward me. “Lady Danger. Nice to see you again, sweetheart. Stolen anything since I last saw you?”

  “Yes. Bought any clothes that aren’t black since I last saw you?”

  Ryan laughs, and so does Connor. They look at each other, something silently passing between them.

  “Nope,” says Connor, glancing back at me, his eyes warm. “Don’t hold your breath for it, either. C’mon in, kids, everyone else is already here.”

  My brows shoot up. Everyone else?

  Seeing my look, Ryan sheepishly explains, “They kind of insisted.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “You didn’t think the crew would let this opportunity pass by to say hello, did you?” Connor throws over his shoulder as he walks away into the gloom of the warehouse.

  I stare at his retreating back with rising panic, then I stare at Ryan. “Who are we talking about? The FBI?”

  “Worse. Come on, the sooner we go in, the sooner it’ll be over with.”

  When I balk, he adds, “I have one word for you, Angel.” He lowers his head and looks at me from under his brows.

  Regretting I ever mentioned it, I exhale heavily. “Trust.”

  “Bingo. Now loosen that Vulcan death grip you’ve got on my hand. You’re cuttin’ off the circulation in the right side of my body.”

  He turns and drags me inside. As soon as we’re over the threshold, the steel door slides shut behind us. We’re swallowed in shadows. It’s cool and dim inside, the cement floor polished to a subtle sheen. As we walk farther, my eyes adjust. I glimpse black computer towers extending the length of one wall in blinking, softly humming rows. Dozens of cubicles on the east wall house hard-jawed men wearing headphones, staring at computer screens. Another wall has a huge collection of weaponry displayed behind glass cases.

  “Wow,” I murmur.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. There’s enough free-floating testosterone in this place to get a convent of nuns ovulating in sync.”

  Ryan wrinkles his nose. “Don’t be sacrilegious. Nuns don’t ovulate.”

  When he doesn’t smile, I say, “Please tell me that was a joke.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “God, you’re serious.”

  “Why would they ovulate if they don’t ever have sex?” His voice rises. “Hey, Connor. Back me up, here, brother. Nuns don’t ovulate, right?”

  A few steps in front of us, Connor stops short. He turns and looks first at Ryan, then at me. He points to his own face. “You see how I don’t look surprised by that question?”

  “I’m guessing these little gems of his aren’t that unusual.”

  Connor says, “It’s not that he’s dumb, don’t get it wrong. The man’s got an IQ of 156, which, by any standards, is way above genius level. Einstein himself clocked in at about 160.”

  “Funny you should mention Einstein, I was just thinking about him on the way over.”

  Ryan says, “Uh, guys? You realize I’m standin’ right here, right?”

  We ignore him. Connor says, “It’s just that he has no idea—literally, none—about the inner workings of the female body.”

  Ryan extravagantly rolls his eyes. “Excuse me for not bein’ a gynecologist!”

  “Don’t they teach sex education in schools in the United States?” I ask Connor, genuinely curious.

  “Oh yeah. But this one gets weirdly squeamish at any mention of menstruation, so his mother had to write him a note to get him out of the days in class where the teacher covered it.”

  My brows lifted as high as they can go, I look at Ryan.

  He’s glaring at Connor. He says accusingly, “Bro.”

  Smiling, Connor replies, “It’s one of my favorite stories.”

  “You’re not supposed to tell anyone!”

  “She’s not anyone.” He glances at our clasped hands. “She’s your girl.”

  Ryan is in a kerfuffle for a moment after that, unsure of how to respond. “Fine, but just don’t tell her I’m afraid of spiders!”

  I ask laughingly, “You’re afraid of spiders?”
>
  Connor says, “Screams like a little girl when he sees one.”

  Ryan says, “Bro!”

  “You’re the one who brought it up, idiot.”

  Bypassing all the spider talk, I ask Ryan, “Have you seen a psychiatrist about your fear of bleeding women? That seems extremely Freudian.”

  “Some deep-seated shit, for sure,” Connor agrees, nodding.

  On an aggravated exhalation, Ryan says, “When I lived at home before college, my sisters used to fuck with me by hiding their used pads and tampons in my stuff. I never knew when I was gonna stick my foot in a sock or put my hand in a coat pocket and have it come away covered in period blood.”

  Connor and I make identical faces of disgust.

  “What the hell?” Connor says.

  “Oh, yeah, they thought it was hilarious. Meanwhile, I’m traumatized for the rest of my life. Every time I walk by the feminine products aisle in a grocery store, I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

  I picture him as a teenager, freaking out over a maxi pad he found in his sock drawer and shrieking every time he sees a spider, and I start to laugh.

  Connor looks at me, and he’s laughing, too. “Can you believe this shit?”

  “Unfortunately, yes, I can.”

  “Glad to know my psychological wounds are so entertaining,” says Ryan drily, but I can tell he’s not really angry. I love it that he can take a joke at his own expense.

  On impulse, I kiss his cheek.

  His blinding grin comes on in full, megawatt voltage. “By the way, I know all I need to know about how the female body works.” He looks at Connor and waggles his eyebrows.

  Connor’s sigh is the aggrieved but fond one of a mother whose favorite child is misbehaving again. Shaking his head, he turns and walks away. We follow like a pair of ducklings.

  When we arrive at Connor’s office, there’s a welcome party waiting.

  Darcy reclines in a big leather chair, her feet propped up on an even bigger black oak desk, her eyes closed as Kai, standing behind her, massages her shoulders. Judging by their outfits, they both got dressed in the dark this morning. Or lost a bet. Nothing matches, and it’s all eye-wateringly bright. Python cowboy boots are involved.