So yeah… all is well that ends well, I guess.
Except I’m here in Pittsburgh while Sin is God knows where, pissed off and uncommunicative. I’ve talked to George twice. While he’s been pleasant and empathetic, he made it clear he’s on Sin’s side and he wasn’t going to share a goddamn thing with me.
Which I understand.
“How long have they been in there?” I ask Bebe as I take a leather chair opposite her.
When she glances up, I jerk my chin toward the conference room.
“About an hour,” she replies, focusing on her laptop again.
I watch a moment as Kynan talks to several people in the conference room. It’s Malik’s parents, his two brothers—Max and Lucas Fournier, who play hockey for the Carolina Cold Fury—and their sister, Simone. They’re here for answers to questions that have gone unanswered. I’m sure, more than anything, they want to know what’s being done to find Malik as it has been a month since the ambush.
I don’t know how much Kynan can tell them, because while it was an off-the-books mission, our government funded it, which implies there’s some secrecy involved.
Man, I feel for them, just as I do for the families of all of those who lost their lives. But the situation with Malik is hitting us all a bit harder because we don’t know what happened to him. He could be dead, or even perhaps worse—yes, worse—he could be a prisoner suffering repeated torture. It’s caused me a few nightmares thinking about it, so I can’t even imagine what his parents are going through.
“Did you hear about the Renoir?” Bebe asks, and I raise an eyebrow.
No need to ask what Renoir she’s talking about. “What about it?”
“The police found it,” she replies, smirking at me over the screen of her laptop. “In a room in a seedy motel after an anonymous tip was called in about it. Now it’s back with the rightful owner.”
I frown. That’s weird.
But she’s not finished with her story. “Apparently,” she drawls with a dramatic flair, “the tip coming in was so close in proximity to Mercier’s arrest, the police wondered if there was a connection. They returned to Mercier’s chateau for another look through, only to find a secret room suddenly wide open—filled with stolen artwork—under his office.”
My jaw drops.
“Further rumors report there was an empty spot on the wall, exactly the size of the Renoir. So now charges are going to be amended against Mercier to add all that stolen loot on, and the police are scrambling to figure out how the stolen Renoir was lifted from Mercier’s estate and tipped to the police. Quite the mystery, right?”
A flush of anger sweeps through me as it all clicks. “Goddamn it, Sin,” I mutter.
“Quite daring,” Bebe remarks.
Because yeah… there’s no doubt Sin somehow managed to avoid police scrutiny as they’d actively investigated Mercier for the stolen diamonds, found and opened a secret hidden room only to steal back the Renoir, and then tipped off the police—for no other purpose than to return that piece to its rightful owner.
Damn Sin and her conscience for so unnecessarily putting herself at risk like that.
I’m still thinking about the ways I can cheerfully strangle her when and if I see her again, when Bebe asks, “Why didn’t Sin come back to the States with you as planned? I worked hard to create a fake alibi for her here.”
I’m unable to come up with an answer. I mean… it’s simple, but it’s also complicated.
“Oh, come on,” she urges. Setting her laptop on the couch cushion beside her, she leans forward and wraps her arms around her legs with clear interest on her face. “What’s the story? You clearly knew her before you went there, right? And I’m thinking there’s some major history between you two, but you care for her. Otherwise, why would you have us work so hard to help make her safe with fake alibis? And then… you have Cruce go over there to kidnap her and give you a bomb jacket so you can play ‘who has the bigger dick’ with Mercier—which I still need the details on how that went down by the way—but then you come back after all is said and done and Sin isn’t even with you. That was a letdown, and now you’ve been moping around here all week and—”
“I’m not moping,” I growl.
“—I know there’s a good story behind all of this.” She finishes by taking a deep breath, letting it out, then watching me expectantly for answers.
I’ve never had close friendships before, and there’s a part of me that wants me to tell her to mind her own business.
But being here at Jameson over the last several months has taught me that these people are more than coworkers. They’re my new family, and Bebe’s like the nosy sister who needs to know about my dating life.
So I give it to her.
I start with how I first met Sin—to which Bebe sighed with a romantic look in her eyes—to how we fell in love to how she betrayed me. Bebe gasped and got outraged over that, then I told her how I saw Sin in Paris, shocked as hell she was involved in this, and, ultimately, her real story behind sending me to jail.
“And so you forgave her?” Bebe asks a hushed whisper, her hand covering her heart as if it hurts.
“Forgave her and fell in love with her again,” I admit softly.
“You fucked up,” she drawls, her eyes widening as she now reconsiders what she knows about me taking Sin out of the equation by force. “Oh, you fucked up so bad.”
“She did the same thing to me,” I snap. “And I forgave her, so I expect her to do the same for me.”
Bebe shakes her head. “You should have talked to her, Saint. You should have told her your worries. Convinced her to back away.”
“I did try that.”
She cocks her head, her tone admonishing. “But did you really?”
“I tried to get her to leave,” I say sullenly. “Offered to help her and her dad disappear until I could finish out the plan, but she wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I see.” Bebe rolls her eyes, sitting up and planting her feet on the ground. “She wouldn’t do as you asked, so you took it upon yourself to make her do it. Except, the way I see it, you kept her around for the actual heist, but not the delivery to Mercier. You used her to steal the diamonds, but then took away her satisfaction in completing the full job. You used her, Saint. If you were worried about her safety, you would have had Cruce kidnap her before the heist.”
My jaw drops as Bebe’s words slam into me. I had not considered those ramifications when I was figuring out how to protect Sin, but now that Bebe has uttered them out loud, I realize what a supreme asshole I’d been.
I had used her.
I’d let her take the risk for the heist, knowing she could be caught, arrested, and sent to prison for years.
“At least she would have stayed alive, even if caught,” I feel the need to defend myself, but even I know how weak that sounds.
“Really? You think that’s a way to live? In prison?”
“Christ,” I mutter, knowing Bebe is right because she was in prison for years, too, just as I had been. And I’m in the wrong here. Still, I hold out hope. “She’ll forgive me. Eventually.”