Page 24 of City Of Thieves
His smirk widens, and he raises his refreshed glass in a toast. “To a mutually beneficial partnership.”
“That ends in precisely”—I make a big show of checking my wristwatch—“forty-seven hours and thirty-one minutes.”
The jet starts to taxi, and I clip my belt into place. The moment we’re in the air and the cabin is leveling out, he’s on his feet again and pouring himself drink number three. This time, when he reaches for the decanter, I spot the solid bulk of his gun beneath his jacket.
A shiver of fear races up my spine. Secrets are the only real currency between us. There are things he’s not telling me, and things I don’t want to know. I just need to fly to London, agent this painting for him, return to Manhattan, and forget we ever met.
“Truce,” he says, offering a glass to me, but I jerk my head away, preferring to watch the unfolding colors of dawn outside instead. “Suit yourself.”
For the rest of the journey, I pretend to work, but in reality, I’m just recycling his words over and over in my head. Turns out, I have no price on my soul because I gave it away a long time ago.
I sacrificed it to save a little girl with dark hair and green eyes just like her mother, who is kept in a different kind of captivity a thousand miles away.
A precious little piece of me who will never know I exist.
Chapter Seven
Renzo
Listen to silence,for it reveals the truth hidden by words.
For more than six hours, that shit has dominated my thoughts: a mindfuck, courtesy of being raised by a former psychiatrist turned mafia matriarch.
I toss back another glass of whiskey as the landing gear releases with a tortured groan. It’s a welcome sound that cuts through all the familiar psychobabble inside my head. However, for once, my mother’s cryptic words of wisdom aren’t a bunch of scattered dots… They’ve manifested into the soundless woman to my right.
Tatiana has been staring at her laptop this entire journey to avoid conversation with me. She expected me to break the monotony, and my refusal to do so is bending that straight line she pretends to walk.
Still, the longer I watch her, the less of an enigma she becomes.
Her silence is her weakness.
And somewhere, buried deep within those protective layers of barbed wire lies the reason for it. It’s not her gallery’s impending bankruptcy that’s shut her down, and it’s not the painting I bought out from under her. It’s bigger than that, and whateveritis, I don’t have long to figure it out…and then use it to my advantage—a life lesson straight from the Don himself:
“Always have a trump card in your back pocket. An unprepared stronzo is a dead stronzo.”
As the wheels hit the tarmac, Tatiana’s eyes snap up to meet mine. “You look far too satisfied with yourself after a long-distance flight,” she says, unbuckling her seatbelt with a flick of her wrist. “Did you blackmail a convent while we were flying over the Atlantic? Maybe sell an orphan or two?”
Sharp and quick.
Steel-tipped sarcasm seems to be Miss Sanders’s weapon of choice.
Releasing my own seatbelt, I offer a leisurely tilt of my glass, partly to piss her off, but mostly because I never waste a good shot of Macallan. “Just thinking about something my father taught me.”
“The art of extortion?”
“Cute, but no.” Offering no further explanation, I tip the glass back and drain what’s left.
The stale silence eventually drives Tatiana to her feet, her posture as rigid as her words. “Well…?”
I shrug. “Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to enlighten me?”
Standing, I take two steps toward her, crowding her up against the cabin wall, those jade eyes tracking my every movement. I’m a bastard for cornering her like this, but her determination to stand her ground feeds something dark and hungry inside me.
The truth is, it’s been a long time since anyone has had the balls to challenge me.
Forcing a lethal smile, I point to her forehead while slicing a vertical movement through the air. “And miss seeing that line sink between your eyebrows when you don’t get what you want? Not a chance.”
