That bitch.Lilith had orchestrated all of this chaos. She might not have pulled any triggers herself but she’d fomented it all—fed the beast so she could make her escape. Will had the feeling that giving in to the urge to badmouth her right nowwasn’t the best play, though. He needed to take care of Cole, and that couldn’t happen here.
He laid a hand on Cole’s shoulder. “We should go. She’s not here, an’ she’s not coming back anytime soon from the look of things. C’mon.” He put on a smile. “I bet your Courbet’s missing you.”
“Lilith pointed me toward that Courbet, you know.” Cole’s voice was almost normal, but Will wasn’t fooled. His eyes weren’t quite focusing, vaguely trailing across the desk like if he just stared a little longer, the view might change.
“I didn’t know that.”
“She’s an excellent art historian. She can make any subject interesting, even French Realism. Even cubism.” Cole almost smiled for a second there, Will could tell. “I stole a lot of things on her recommendation. She liked how that particular Courbet accentuated the colors in the living room.”
The colors in… “She knows about that safehouse?” Will asked, his heart sinking.
“She knows about most of the ones I have here in the city,” Cole said, finally turning to Will. His eyes were lively with emotion again, but not the kind Will wanted to see. “I trusted her.”
And she’d broken that trust. It had to hurt, toburn; Cole wasn’t the sort of person who worked well with others in the first place. He didn’t let people in easily and always preferred to work alone. It was one of the only things Will had known about him before the Puffin disaster, other than his regrettable accuracy at throwing things and his ability to curse like a sailor where their ex was involved. And now, he’d lost one of the few people he’d let know him in the worst way possible.
If Will wasn’t really fucking careful right now, Cole would start to pull away, and Will might never be able to reel him back again. “We need to leave the city.”
Cole sighed and shut his eyes. “We need to leave the state, but I guarantee you the watch on the airports has doubled.”
“We can take a train.”
“Same for all the train stations.”
Well, this was getting depressing. “We’ll drive, then. We can?—”
“Lilith has been inside my apartment.”
Will sat back, recognizing that this was a moment where he needed to listen, not speak.
“I brought her there once to consult on a job,” Cole went on, “and it turned into a standing dinner every third Friday of the month. I always kept surveillance on her while she was there, but I could have missed something.”I already did, the bitter twist of his mouth said. “I don’t know how much I can trust my own home, much less the information I stored there. My vehicles, every safehouse I’ve equipped, the boat…”
“You own a boat, too?”
Cole broke eye contact. “It’s the family’s yacht, actually.”
Of course your family has a yacht.And now Cole was spiraling, so it was time for Will to get ahead of things before they tore his lover apart.
He did it the only way he knew how. “I reckon we need to meet with Alders, then.”
Ah, there,thatwas the sharp look he’d been waiting for. The one that saidAre you fucking crazy?
“Are you insane?”
Close enough.
“We need a face-to-face if we’re going to get him to call off his dogs,” Will explained.
“What can we possibly say that will convince him to do that?”
“The truth,” Will replied. “We tell him that Marcus and Lilith were working together, that she’s taken off with the real deal, and that we have no clue where she is now. That should reorienthim on Marcus, who he’s definitely got by the balls at this point, and get him off our case.”
Cole shook his head. “It won’t be enough. People like Alders only care about results. His entire art collection was amassed for the sole purpose of making him the center of attention whenever he wants to throw a party. He’s aventure capitalist, for fuck’s sake. He’s made billions of dollars acquiring things in order to slice them up and profit until all that’s left behind is a corpse.”
“Jeez, that got dark fast,” Will muttered.
“It’s a dark world. You know that. There’s nothing to stop Alders from hurting us or worse once we’re in his hands just because hecan, because he wants to feel big after being made to feel small. He’s immune to blackmail because he has nothing and no one he cares about other than himself and his reputation, and he’s too good at keeping a low personal profile to take advantage of other than by stealing from him.”
Cole grabbed one of Will’s hands, holding on so hard it actually hurt. “You can run. You’re good at blending in, you don’t need to rely on crutches to get around. You could get out of the city right now.”
