“God, you thought you had me all figured out, didn’t you?” Kane said, punctuating the words with a final chuckle. “Is that truly what you believed? That I gave Zaria the necklace because I wanted to help her? Because Icared?” His mouth tasted bitter, bitter, bitter. “Well, I don’t. Besides,” he added, splaying his fingers out in front of him, “I’m not without honor. Zaria outsmarted me. She stole the necklace, and therefore it was rightfully hers. That’s the first rule of being a criminal.”
Jules’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in a breath. “Criminals don’t abide by rules. That’s kind of the point.”
“Sure they do. The rules are just different.”
“Right,” Jules said tersely. “Well, my mistake. Far be it from me to forget your inability to care about anyone but yourself.”
Kane made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat, effectively ending the conversation. He let his gaze slide to the window. The effort to look unconcerned had his vision blurring, and he didn’t process a single sight as he fought to keep his composure.
Truthfully, he couldn’t put words to why he’d slipped the necklace into Zaria’s pocket that night, taking advantage of her distraction as an inferno rose around them. It had been a split second of weakness. A fracturing of his resolve, a lapse in his judgment. He’d comforted himself afterward by imagining her reaction. Perhaps she would think it a threat—an attempt to prove just how close he couldget without her noticing. Maybe she would see it as a show of confidence. A boast. A way of saying he didn’t need a primateria source to carry out whatever he had planned next.
But there was a very, very small part of Kane that had hoped Zaria would interpret the gesture as something else entirely. A part of him that was prone to irrationality. It had been a mistake, and it was why he’d taken this opportunity to put an end to any speculation.
He spent the rest of the ride feeling sick to his very core.
KANE
The first person Kane saw when he returned to the manor—because his life was a compilation of painful ironies—was Zaria. Of course she would appear when he was trying so very hard not to think of her.
She stood just inside the door, almost as if she’d been waiting for him. Half of her hair was pinned up in a complicated-looking twist while the rest flowed in waves down her back. Elijah hovered a few steps behind her, looking uncannily like a parent weary of trying to corral a young child.
“Kane.” The emphatic way Zaria said his name put him on edge. “Where’s—”
“Jules?” he bit, anticipating the rest of the question. “He went back to Petrov’s. Said he needed to get something.” In reality, however, Kane suspected the boy had wanted to escape the confines of the stagecoach at the earliest opportunity.
Zaria scrunched up her face. “I was going to say,Where’s a good place to talk. I need to tell you something. In private,” she added, tossing a pointed look over her shoulder at Elijah.
“She saw you arriving from her window,” Elijah was quick to add. “Demanded she be brought to see you at once.”
Kane quirked a brow. “And you comply with her every demand now, is that it?”
“I figured…” The other boy’s gaze flicked to the door, then back. “I mean, I told Adam I’d come with him to do a job, so—”
“I wasn’t being serious. You can go.”
Elijah didn’t wait to be told twice. He was out the door between one second and the next, slamming it behind him.
“What exactly are youdoingto him?” Kane asked Zaria. He’d been aiming for lightness, but she didn’t so much as roll her eyes.
“Can we talk, or not?”
“Yes,” he grunted, peering past her and into the drawing room, where several crew members seemed to be arguing in earnest. A couple men nearest the door were craning their necks to get a better view of Kane and Zaria, and Kane glared back in return, putting a hand on Zaria’s upper arm to guide her in the direction of the stairs. She tensed under his touch but didn’t pull away. A testament to how preoccupied she was, he supposed.
He refused to consider the possibility that perhaps—just perhaps—she no longer recoiled from his closeness.
“I got a letter,” Zaria said the moment they were alone in Kane’s office, positioning herself directly in front of him. With his back to the closed door, he had the odd sensation he was trapped between two immovable forces, but he gave himself a mental shake and walked around her to his desk.
“You got a letter,” he repeated, settling into his chair. There—thiswas better: the desk between them, and with it, some distance. The distance between a kingpin and his subordinate. The distance between two people who could not,wouldnot, trust each other to be anything more than that. “I didn’t realize you were accepting correspondence here.”
“God, you’re so—” Zaria broke off, pressing two fingers to the space between her eyebrows. “It’s from Vaughan.”
Kane sat upright so fast, something twinged in his lower back. “How did he know where you were? Have you been writing to him?”
“How would I have done that?” she snapped. “I don’t have a clue where he is. Besides, I was being honest when I said I was on your side, not his.”
“Right.”
“I can’t keep trying to convince you, Kane.”
