“What’s wrong with you?” Hale asked. Kat’s arms seemed especially small in his strong grasp as he pulled her to a dark and quiet corner of the room.
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah.” He stepped closer. “That’s my point. This is serious, Kat.”
“I know.”
“This goes off the tracks and we might not get it back.”
She looked at him. “What’s your point, Hale?”
“So you got conned.…So you’re human.…” He ran a hand through his hair and took a step back. “So you’re mortal like the rest of us.” He looked away, then back again. “Is that so bad?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying what I said in New York. We could go anywhere. We could do anything.” He brushed a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “We don’t have to do this.”
It wasn’t often that Kat wished she could go back in time. The world didn’t work that way, after all. There was no such thing as a second chance. But even as Hale said the words, she knew they were true—they could board a jet and disappear, haul up anchor and be in Casablanca before anyone even knew that they were missing. She could never change the mistake she’d made before, but nothing said she had to make the same mistake again. And for a second, she felt herself teetering, fighting the urge to run.
Run.
To boarding school and Moscow and Rio.
Run.
To a snowy cabin at the top of the world.
And right then, Kat knew it hadn’t begun with a lie in a diner in the rain—that the chase hadn’t lasted weeks—but decades. And the job that had started in Montreal had to end in Monte Carlo.
“Hale,” Kat said, but before she could finish, Simon’s voice was in her ear, saying, “Kat, Maggie is moving into position. Kat, did you copy?”
“Don’t worry.” She looked at Hale. “I hear you.”
And then the lights went out.
CHAPTER 35
To say that Katarina Bishop was at home in the dark wouldn’t be entirely correct. She did not have sonar like a bat. Her eyes did not process light and shadow differently, like a cat’s. But if Hale was at home in his six-thousand-dollar tuxedo amid the trays of champagne and caviar, then Kat herself was perfectly at ease standing in the shadows of the ballroom, surrounded by jewels and wallets and other people’s money.
Still, when the spotlights flickered on, bright beams slicing through the ballroom and onto the cases that stood empty and waiting on the small platform, Kat was like everybody else who stood waiting, needing to know what was about to happen.
“Kat?” Simon whispered, the word echoing through her ear. “It’s time.”
No one saw her say it. All of Monaco was too busy staring at those two cases and the man who stood between them, a microphone in his hand, looking out over the crowd, mentally counting his money.
“Messieurs et mesdames, ladies and gentlemen,” Pierre LaFont addressed the crowd, “thank you so much for coming to celebrate with us tonight the greatest cultural find of the twenty-first century.” Polite applause filled the room. Only a single whoop echoed out, and Kat made a mental note to have a word with Hamish once this was all over.
“I am very grateful to Monsieur Oliver Kelly for generously allowing us to share with you…” He paused for dramatic effect, and then swept his arms toward the case on his right and cried, “The Cleopatra Emerald!”
There was no applause, only a faint but steady clicking sound so slight it would have disappeared entirely in any other moment, in any other room. The platform had stopped spinning, and yet the case itself seemed to move, hydraulics working, smoothly raising the green stone from the casino’s vaults below. There was a gasp in the crowd when it came to the surface, but the silence returned almost immediately in its wake.
And the crowd stood—waiting.
People are all the same, as every decent con man knows. They have the same needs. The same wants. Every person in that room wanted to touch history. To feel fame. To hold love—hold it in the palms of two hands.
And that was why they stood in silence, watching, waiting for Pierre LaFont to say, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give to you for the first time in two thousand years, the Antony Emerald.”
Again there was the whirling sound, the sight of something rising inside a protective case. But no one seemed to believe what they were seeing until the lights caught the second stone and the platform began to spin, sending the Cleopatra and the Antony on a turn around the ballroom.
Only the small signs that hung on the two cases gave any clue that what the crowd was seeing wasn’t a mirror image, some elaborate mirage. The stones were identical. Perfect. Priceless and pristine.
They’re here. They’re real. And they’re together, the whole room seemed to think.
But not Kat. Kat stood silently in the center of the crowd, thinking, Charlie is a genius.
As the emeralds turned, they seemed to catch the light, covering the casino in a kaleidoscope of green, and yet it was nothing compared to the look in Hale’s eyes as he stood across the crowded room, staring right at Kat.
She felt like just another girl at the ball in that moment, just another person needing it to be real—a romance that had spanned two thousand years. A love that had overcome geography and class and time.
She wanted to believe in that. She looked at Hale and knew he wanted it too.
On the stage, LaFont was still speaking; the crowd was still staring. It was a moment that had been a millennium in the making, but it was also a moment built on a lie, and as badly as Kat wanted to believe it, she knew better than to trust the con.
“Simon?” Kat asked.
“We’re good,” he said though the small comms unit in her ear.
“Hamish, what about you and Angus?”
“We’re in position, love,” was Angus’s reply.