“Narcissists gonna narcissist,” Will grumbled.
That got a bark of laughter out of Cole. Will held up his fist, and Cole couldn’t help it—he bumped it.
Lilith watched them with an amused curl to her lips.
Right then, Will’s phone went off, and he jumped to his feet. “That’s my colleague. Excuse me for a second?” Without waitingfor a response, he stepped out into the hall, the door shutting just after he said, “What have you got for me?”
As soon as they were alone, Lilith turned her amusement on Will. “Are you sure you two can work together without killing each other?”
“Would the world be a worse place if I ended up killing him?”
She just laughed.
“Anyway,” he said. “There might’ve been other pieces stolen last night. If someone got the real Puffin, or if anyone took advantage of the chaos as a distraction.”
“Possibly.” Lilith pursed her lips. “Maybe, if he weren’t such a dumbass about security…”
Cole snorted. He was about to say something when the door flew open again.
“You two aren’t going to believe this.” Will heaved himself into his chair, phone in hand. “My buddy got the CCTV footage.”
Cole straightened. So did Lilith.
Will continued, thumbing through something on the screen as he did. “There were three other people at the party last night. Faces I don’t recognize and neither does my colleague. They each got away with some small but very, very expensive items during the fray after the Puffin shattered.” He turned the screen toward Cole and Lilith. “And I’ve got confirmation that someonedidget their hands on the real Iberian Puffin.”
Cole and Lilith leaned in. The footage wasn’t the usual angles from cameras around the room. It was from the vault door itself. Slightly off to the side, likely invisible to an intruder. That type of vault had, Cole knew from experience, a camera just above the keypad, and he watched as the masked thief sprayed something on that camera.
Then, unaware of the second camera focused right on his face, he pulled down his mask and peered at the keypad, giving the lens a perfect, crystal clear shot of his face.
“Holy shit,” Cole breathed.“Marcus.”
CHAPTER 4
The good thing was, they knew Marcus had the Puffin.
The bad thing was, they had no idea where to find Marcus.
Some thieves had home bases—places they could retreat to for planning, for relaxing, for looking over their pretty haul or licking their wounds. Hell, Will had one of them. It was a little risky, but that was what cover identities were for. His home was wherever Baby Boy and his family were; the one place he knew he’d never be kicked out of or turned away from. Didn’t mean he went there much—especially after a job went south and people were feeling stabby—but he knew it was there.
Marcus was the other type of thief—the free spirit, or so he liked to think of himself. “A zephyr on the wind,” he’d said in a moment of poetic pathos one night not long after Will had first met him.
“I thought the zephyrwasthe wind.”
Marcus had peered at him like he was something to be scraped off the bottom of a boot. “You’re such a Philistine.”
Yeah, he probably was. Will only put on airs he didn’t have for marks. For his fellow professionals, he preferred to play up the country hick version of the truth. Nothing gotyou underestimated faster than a pair of cowboy boots and a “Howdy, y’all.”
The point was, Marcus didn’t have a home base. He was very good at inveigling himself into other people’s lives, taking up space and time—and money, usually—until a job was done or he was bored, then moving on. He was easy to lose track of but hated to be forgotten, so the next step was talking to someone with more information than they had and seeing if they could point them in the right direction.
Check that: the next step was convincing Cole not to ditch him and go do that on his own, which judging by his brisk stride and straightforward gaze as they left Lilith’s gallery was what he intended. “Slow down, partner.”
“Not your partner, not in any way, shape, or form.”
“Baby.” Will pressed a hand to his chest as they marched past the neo-cubists on the wall. “After everything we’ve been through together!”
“Exactly.”
“All I’m saying is—hey there, it was great to see you again, darlin’,” he said in a diversion to Cheyenne. “Take care, a’right?”
