Page 10 of City Of Thieves
“Not me. But I know of someone who can. Perhaps if you wear the right suit, there is a chance you could get to them through a back door.” Smirking, he flicks his gaze up at me. “Or front... Depends on your skills ofpersuasion.”
I tighten my grip on the knife handle, a second thin line of crimson blooming across his pale skin. “Name.”
“Tatiana Sanders,” he blurts out.
“Who?”
“A New York socialite. She owns the most exclusive private modern art gallery in the city and can open any door for you… But good luck prying the keys away from her. That frigidsukais as cold as they come.”
Sanders…Why the hell is that name so familiar?
“What’s the name of her gallery?”
“Elysium.”
That’s when it clicks. Tatiana is Senator Rick Sanders’s daughter—a dirty New York politician, with one hand on the Constitution and the other in the pockets of every underground operation this side of the Hudson.
Rearing back, I plunge the knife deep into the center of his desk. “You want me to get a Senator’s daughter caught up in this?” I roar. “An innocent?”
Belov lets out a dark laugh. “That girl is no ‘innocent.’ You want to find who killed your brother? Find an incentive. Turn up the heat on Miss Sanders. Once you control the temperature, even ice can melt.”
Chapter Three
Tatiana
My father usedto tell me that each day starts out dirty, and it’s our job to clean it up. Considering who he is, I just assumed he meant for me to turn it to my advantage, by any means possible.
But what happens when the days are endless, and the stains prove permanent?
I find myself reflecting on this as I gaze out of the tinted window of my chauffeured Porsche Cayenne. Staring out at a city that’s been a protective fortress for me these past five years. It’s too easy to hide my pain amongst the nameless faces here. The towering skyscrapers have replaced the jagged spikes around my heart.
Pursing my red lips, I sweep my Chanel sunglasses onto my face as the car pulls up to the curb outsideRegency’s,the most exclusive auction house in Manhattan.
It’s the kind of morning when the bright New York sunshine exposes every crack and blemish on the sidewalk.
It’s also exposing my brittle mood. So far, the last couple of hours have given me the hangover from hell and a pathetic five-thousand-dollar commission from selling the artwork of a man I wouldn’t usually throw aNegroni Sbagliatococktail on if he spontaneously combusted. Every job has its limitations and working with self-important jackasses like Emanuel Scott is mine. Then again, choice isn’t everything when your finances have recently taken the jumping equivalent of a Wall Street banker during the Great Depression.
I check my phone, noting the three missed calls from the withheld number, the two from Erika, my personal assistant at the gallery, and one more from my twin brother, Seb. That’s another thing my father told me before we stopped speaking to each other, before the words “united family” became the new iron curtain.
“Never take money from someone you can’t sweet talk while fucking them sideways up the ass.”
My mother wasn’t so enamored with him for sharingthatmorsel of advice, but it turns out he was right. Dirty money is like a dirty day. Sometimes you can’t clean it up, no matter what you do.
Still, I’m bettinghewas never blackmailed into liquidation, putting his own private gallery, a place I adore with all the hot and cold in my soul, into major jeopardy.
“We’re here, Miss Sanders,” my driver announces, bumping sunglasses with me in the rearview mirror. “Twenty minutes before the auction starts. Right on schedule.”
“Thank you, Andrew,” I say briskly, gathering up my purse and this morning’s auction brochure as I wait for him to open my door.
The moment my heels hit the sidewalk, I’m glancing up at the cream-colored stone building while the rest of New York ceases to exist around me.
I can’t stop staring at it. It’s like a compulsion, brought on by the shiver of a memory. I’m reliving the first time my mother brought me here when I was ten years old. She let me eat pink ice cream in the white and gold lobby and then calmly purchased a painting for a million dollars.
She outbid a fiercely competitive room that day like she was bidding on cattle—just her, with a white paddle and a number, and a child who couldn’t stop fidgeting.
I remember the painting, too. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and the only piece of art I’d ever known her to buy that wasn’t abstract expressionism: a small square portrait in a shabby gilt frame of a young woman from the 19thCentury, with her hair in tight brown ringlets, a sad face, and downcast eyes.
I’d called her “Ines” after my pet dog. Ines was always burying her toys and forgetting about them, and “painting Ines” looked like she had lost something, too.
