“Okay, are we all—” Danny looked over his shoulder and smiled fondly. “Is that cookie good, Grace?”
“Mmmffff!”
“Is it better for the serenade?”
Hunter bit his lower lip to keep from snickering, but Grace nodded, unperturbed.
“Good. You keep humming to your food, precious. Subdue it with music. I can carry on.”
And he did.
First, he pulled up a slide of the jewel as they’d photographed it.
“You all know what this is,” he said, and they nodded. “Good. So you know that it’s lovely—and it will make a wonderful centerpiece for an amulet or tiara or even a really gawdawful tie clip. It’s beautiful, and the cut is extremely unique and extremely skilled. In fact there are maybe thirteen jewelers in the world who could make a cut like this, and maybe ten of them have the know-how to use a laser to cut information into the facets of the gem so precisely. This here is a singular item. Or it should be.”
“But my grandfather’s done four deliveries this year!” Tabitha exclaimed. “Do you think they were all jewels? He’d have to be working someone pretty hard, right? One of those would take… how long?”
“A couple of weeks to plan,” Danny confirmed. “And depending on how good our guy is, at least a week to inscribe the stone, as long as we wanted to leave it undamaged. So while you guys were playing climb-the-billionaire and how-to-steal-the-same-gem-twice, I was here making some calls.”
“You know these guys?” Chuck asked from his wall, admiration tinging his voice.
“We travel in the same circles sometimes,” Danny replied smoothly. “And six of them reside in Antwerp, which, as you know, circulates in the vicinity of 80 percent of the world’s jewels.”
“I did not know that,” Molly said, sounding impressed.
“Neither did I,” Chuck conceded.
“Did you know that?” Hunter asked Grace.
Grace stared at him blankly. “What’s Antwerp? Is it like a prison for diamonds?”
“It’s a city in Belgium,” Hunter replied. “The Antwerp diamond district is legendary. Like Danny said, a majority of the world’s diamonds pass through Antwerp in the course of being harvested, cut, set, or brokered.” He looked at Danny. “Where are the others?”
“Africa,” Danny said. “Which is really unfair because so many blood diamonds come from that country but so few members of the population benefit. But one of them is accounted for, and he’s brilliant, and I left him alone.”
“Good,” Felix muttered, which meant that Danny had probably slept with him during their ten-year separation. Danny did have good taste in men.
“He was just a friend,” Danny replied mildly.
Felix did a slow blink to indicate that he was not entirely convinced and then wisely let the matter drop.
“So is it one of the guys from Antwerp?” Josh asked.
“Can you count?” Molly asked. “There’s eight, nine, and ten to go!”
“Yikes. Long day.”
Hunter looked at Josh, who appeared to be beat. He didn’t usually make those mistakes.
“Well, eight and nine are in New York,” Danny said mildly.
“So the tenth one?” Josh asked, and Danny’s entire expression changed. Hunter saw a tightening in his jaw that indicated tension. And then Danny and Felix exchanged a look.
And Julia nodded slightly, as though she understood what that look was about.
“Uh-oh,” Hunter murmured, and Grace looked up from folding his paper napkin into a misshapen origami cup.
“Are we out of cookies? Here. Let me go get some.”
Grace stood up and practically grand jetéd over the heads of his friends, sticking his ass deliberately and rudely in Josh’s face as he bent over to collect more cookies. Hunter watched him with a slight smile, and then he caught the grown-ups exchanging looks again, and his stomach clenched.
There was something here—something that related directly to Grace—and Hunter was out of the loop.
“Ouch!” Grace cried out, standing up and staring at Josh. “You hit me!”
“I spanked you,” Josh said in that no-nonsense way he had of dealing with Grace. “You were being obnoxious. Go give Hunter his cookies and let my parents explain why they’re eyeball dancing with each other.”
“Well,” Danny said delicately. “About that tenth man. He used to live in Chicago—in this very neighborhood, or so I understand.”
Josh sucked in a hard breath, his eyes big. “No,” he said, and it wasn’t Hunter’s imagination. He sent a panicked look to where Grace was sitting again, handing Hunter a cookie and smiling winsomely.
Grace was gazing up into Hunter’s face, and Hunter was feeling a cold predator’s wind sweeping through the room.
“What?” he asked. Unconsciously, he reached down to cup Grace’s cheek, regardless of the fact that they were the centers of attention as it was.
“Grace,” Josh said gently. “We need you here. In this room. Right now.”
Grace physically jerked his attention to Danny and Felix as they sat at the bar with the computer. “What? You guys know this falls under the category of ‘Grace doesn’t care, just tell him what to steal,’ right?”
“Dylan,” Felix said, his voice a quiet, soothing dad-rumble. “You actually know this family. The one jeweler who could make that cut is the father of someone you used to know.”
Grace narrowed his eyes. “Wait—didn’t you guys tell me he was shipped off to rehab?”
“Yes,” Felix answered. “He was. Specifically, he was shipped off to rehab outside of Springfield. Very much near Lucius’s business in Peoria, to be specific. His parents split, but his father, I do believe, moved there to visit him.”
“So one of the best gem cutters in the world lives outside of Springfield, Illinois?” Chuck said in disbelief, but Hunter barely heard him.
“So… so Gabriel Hu’s father is working with the bad guys?” Grace asked, like he was assembling Legos in his head at lightning speed.
“We don’t know if he’s being coerced,” Danny said. “And we don’t know if Gabriel is with him. We did some hunting, and he graduated from Illinois State after he was released from the facility. We don’t see any signs of a record or of criminal activity, but then, as we all know here, that doesn’t mean anything. All we know is that—”
Grace stood up abruptly. “I absolutely have to go,” he said, and with that, he spun on his heel and disappeared up the stairs, leaving the room in shocked silence.
Josh zoomed in front of Hunter before Hunter could even guess where he might be going.
HUNTER CAUGHT up with them in Grace’s room, where Josh was standing, arms and feet spread to block the doorframe, in mid-yell.
“You don’t have to go anywhere!”
“I do too!” Grace was throwing random things into a school backpack. A pair of underwear, a small bottle of lube—which was not reassuring—a pocket knife, a black ribbed hat. All of it went crashing into the backpack while Josh harangued Grace furiously from the doorway.