The first step to drawing the Chekhovskaya bratva out of hiding was to lure them.
That was Kylie’s impression of the plan, anyway.
So Kylie’s part of the first step of the plan involved her getting dressed up in a slinky gown that she’d purchased with Micah’s credit card under the direction of the fantabulicious Countess Gen Finch-Hatten and then sitting still while a cosmetician came into their guest suite on the boat to do her hair and makeup.
Kylie watched the cosmetician’s work closely. Somehow, when she was done, Kylie looked high-class, which she’d been trying to do when she’d been scamming in Atlantic City but never achieved.
Her hair fell in glossy curls but was swept into an updo with sparkly combs, and her face was glowy like she had no pores.
It was probably expensive makeup.
Kylie tilted her head and stared at the pretty girl in the mirror.
Her skin looked like it was made of pearls. That was amazing and a little alarming.
Yeah, those cosmetics must be really expensive.
Micah tipped the cosmetician and shooed her out of the cabin, and his scorching look made Kylie blush from her toes to her hairstyle.
“Later,” he promised with a throaty growl. “Later, I will ruin all of this.”
Micah had a box with a necklace and earrings that glittered like silver snow, and Kylie recognized quality diamonds. She’d seen enough of them while helping marks part with their cash. When he slid the heavy necklace around her throat, the cold metal felt like, for a night, she wasn’t a trash kid who lived in an apartment with a rusty boiler and a stained sink.
And then there was another box she hadn’t seen, and he wrapped her in a soft jacket that felt like silk.
The last paper shopping bag held a tiny clutch purse of quilted leather in dusky peach and the initials YSL.
She felt demure, or dainty, or something that Kylie Miller-slash-Chiarina Merlino had never felt before when Micah held her hand at twilight as she stepped down the gangplank from the ship onto the floating wooden sidewalk alongside. At the road, Micah opened the car door and handed her into the back seat of the limousine waiting for them in front of the Monaco Yacht Club.
Everything was a little shimmery, like the world was a little bit more okay and she was less afraid. Micah’s words echoed in the sunny places between the buildings and on the platinum-capped wavelets of the sea.
I’m counting the minutes until I find you again.
My whole world is turned upside down.
His words wrapped her, held her, vibrated between them in the place where her hand was tucked in his elbow.
Kylie felt very quiet, holding the prismatic light with open hands, lest this feeling be startled into flying away.
Their limo was one among a fleet of limousines, and well-dressed people seemed to be stepping into each before they pulled away and other limos backed into their places.
“What’s this thing tonight?” Kylie asked.
“Rain forest or something,” Micah said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter. It’s yet another charitable false front the wealthy use to shield their holdings and yet simultaneously display their vast wealth to each other like elephant seals flopping their nasal scrotums around and screaming to define their territories.”
Outside Kylie’s window, a middle-aged white dude in a tank top was listening to hip-hop as the orange and gold Bugatti convertible he drove screeched to a halt at a red light, and then he screamed until his face turned red at pedestrians in the crosswalk as the green walk signal blinked benignly.
Micah continued, “Considering that we’re in Monaco, the charity is most likely associated with money laundering, too, which is why Monaco is the dirty pool where we’re fishing for Russian organized crime rings like the Chekhovskaya.”
“This place doesn’t look like a dirty pool,” Kylie said, staring out the window at the glittering boutique jewelry and purse stores they passed.
Stores like these would be in the private high-roller area in the AC casinos, except that even the highest rollers probably wouldn’t be admitted to these shops. Kylie had a sneaking suspicion that you had to be on a list or known by sight as worthy of crossing the thresholds of shops like those.
“I’m worried we won’t be able to pull this off,” she told Micah.
Micah wrapped his fingers around hers. “You can’t con an honest person, right?”
You could, but you used a pity con instead of a greed con. “Yeah,” Kylie said. “That’s how you hooked me.”
“And so, we’re in luck because Monaco attracts thieves, gangsters, and criminals of all sorts. Everyone here is trying to steal something from someone, whether it’s cheating on their taxes or selling drugs, guns, or people. In Monaco, everyone is a crook, which means everyone is a mark.”
The limo turned a corner, and the nose tilted downhill. The street led to a long glass building like a turquoise and verdigris ocean wave as the sun dipped into the Mediterranean Sea beyond it.
The car turned into a circle in front, and Micah told her to wait while he walked around the back and offered her his hand as she stepped out. They walked into the Grimaldi Forum convention center together.
She shouldn’t gawk. She shouldn’t fall off her red-soled shoes and splat all over the marble floor.
Kylie just needed to con these snooty upper-class criminals instead of her usual middlebrow ones. It was fine.
At least she was adequately dressed for it.
Micah flashed an invitation at the security guys stationed at the doors, who read the QR hologram with a device and stood back for them to enter.
As they entered the convention center with three floors of overdressed guests, conversation noise bounced off glass walls that let the sunset in at one end of the building. Kylie asked Micah, “How did you get an invitation for this?”
Trumpets sounded.
A tuxedo-clad man and a softly pregnant blonde wearing a long gown appeared at the top of one of the staircases. A tiara wove in her hair, and every guest in the convention center turned toward them and applauded.
Micah whispered to her over the din. “Arthur called a friend of his to get us an invite. Hors d’oeuvres or dancing first?”
“Hors d’oeuvres. I’m famished.”
Towers of canapés filled large tables along every available landing and nook in the convention center and were obsessively replenished by waitstaff.
The tiny pie crusts topped with roasted peaches and pastry cream globes shattered into flakes and caramel in Kylie’s mouth.
She snagged a couple of cucumber rounds topped with cream cheese-piped flowers and salmon slivers. “These people don’t fool ya. They feed ya.”
“Indeed, and I would hope so, as tickets started at twenty-five grand.”
Kylie carefully chewed and swallowed the most expensive appetizer she’d ever eaten in her life. The crisp cuke paired perfectly with the herbal cream cheese and mild sushi-grade fish. “Are you serious?”
“Quite.”
She leaned over and whispered, “Couldn’t we have just ransomed my sister and mom for that?”
“Probably not, and we aren’t sure where they are.”
“Right.”
“If you’ve had enough grazing, perhaps some dancing?”
“Okay, but I’m coming back for those tiny waffles with chicken nuggets on them.”
Kylie held up the front hem of her silk dress as they climbed a curved staircase that seemed to spiral up toward the stars.
The dance floor was on the top floor of the convention center in a wing constructed from blue glass like an extension of the azure water outside the transparent walls and ceiling. The last streaks of sunset glowed in the darkening sky and reflected on the rippling surface of the Mediterranean Sea that rolled to the horizon.
Eight musicians played violins, bigger violins, cellos, and a standing bass fiddle. Kylie didn’t recognize the song, but she hadn’t listened to much classical music since her nonna died. No one else in the family listened to opera and Italian music like Nonna had because she’d been from the other side. The casinos played instrumental versions of classical songs, familiar and catchy but not interesting enough to distract people from gambling.
Micah flicked Kylie’s hand, and she was spinning and then clasped in his arms. He smiled down at her, the teal flecks in his silver and aqua eyes catching the last of the sunlight outside the glass walls and ceiling like they were dancing under the sunset.
She asked him, “What color do you say your eyes are?”
He chuckled and looked over the heads of the other people dancing as he swayed with her in his arms. “I usually write down they’re gray.”
“But they’re not gray.”
“It depends on what I’m wearing.”
“You must get that question a lot.”
He shrugged. “It’s a conversation opener. I have stock answers depending on who asks.”
Kylie tried to follow his feet as they danced, but they ended up bobbing from side to side because she didn’t know how to waltz or foxtrot or whatever he was doing.
She was in Micah’s arms, and he kept smiling at her.
It felt kind of natural.
But like a toddler with a butterfly that alights on her finger, she decided to smash it. The only way to see if something was alive was to kill it.
“When we were on the yacht this afternoon—” Kylie began.
Micah tilted his head. “Mm-hmm?”
“You didn’t mean what you said, right? I was just emo, and you cheered me up.”
“I meant it,” he said quietly, his voice low.
“But it was just because I was crying, right? Because I was manipulating you, just like I always do with guys in Atlantic City.”
His soft smile turned a little more amused. “Is that what you think you were doing?”
“It’s what I always do.” Her strained voice sounded like she was forcing the words out.
Micah chuckled. “That is one interpretation of what happened, that you and your admitted conspirators presented me with a scenario where they were supposedly in jeopardy with time pressure and needed money, and you emotionally manipulated me into giving them ninety thousand dollars. Classic pity con. Huh. I guess that could also be an explanation.”
The glass dome above them must have vanished, and the clammy sea air must have rushed in like a tsunami because Kylie’s skin felt like a sheet of icy sweat had dropped over her. “Oh.”
Micah’s smile widened. “I don’t believe that’s what happened, even if it does fit the circumstances.”
“But maybe I did.”
Micah bent down to whisper in her ear, “You can’t scare me off, cara mia.”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“You’re testing me to see if I’ll abandon you. I won’t, and you can’t scare me by reframing what happened this afternoon.”
“But you can’t trust me,” she said, her words fighting their way out of her throat. “You don’t trust me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t share some operational details with you. That’s different. You can’t scare me off because nothing scares me.”
“Oh, come on. How can nothing scare you? Or is this some riddle like ‘no man born of woman can kill me,’ and then the murderer was born by a C-section?” Her GED curriculum had reached Macbeth.
Micah shook his head. “Nothing scares me. I’ve seen worse. Things tire me, and some things need to be overcome or manipulated to get out alive, but nothing scares me, not even a woman who hints that she might be lying to swindle me out of small sums of money and doesn’t realize she holds my heart.”
No matter how the toddler tried to smash the butterfly, it still lived.
Micah whispered, “If you wanted me to give your friends ninety thousand dollars, you could have just said so, and I would have. I can’t deny you anything, but that’s not what happened. Instead, I saw a woman so loyal to her friends that she would walk into the line of fire for them, which in this case is Don Grande. You were going to give up finding your mother and sister because your friends needed you, even though your loyalty to both was tearing you apart, and that was tearing me apart. Maybe I would have said just about anything to make you stop crying, but instead, I told you what I didn’t realize until it came out of my mouth. You amaze me, and I have lost my heart to you.”
She held his hand more tightly, and her eyes burned. The Mediterranean Sea must have risen and flooded the Grimaldi Forum because everywhere she looked seemed underwater.
Micah pulled her over to the side and sat her down in a chair at one of the round tables ringing the dance floor, offering her a handkerchief from inside his tuxedo coat. “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “We have work to do tonight.”
She hiccuped and pressed the cotton square underneath her eyes. Gray smudged the white cotton.
“And they’re going to serve dinner,” he told her. “I’m told it will be even better than the appetizers. And the dessert is supposed to be fantastic. There’s a plated dessert and then buffet stations for different ones.”
She laughed a little at his pep talk. “I—I didn’t think I’d need to say this, but you have my heart, too.”
Micah held both her hands in his, and she crushed the handkerchief. He leaned like he was going to whisper next to her ear, but his low voice growled, “God, I wish we were alone right now.”
The slight smoke on his breath from the whiskey he’d had while she’d been busy scarfing canapés wafted over Kylie’s throat.
She squeezed his hands. “There must be someplace here we could go.”
Micah looked up at her, the aqua and turquoise shimmer in his eyes turning to blue fire. “We have things to do.”
Kylie stared into the inferno in his eyes. “I didn’t mean we should leave.”
“I want to show you.”
His wrist lying on her leg pulsed with his heartbeat. Kylie’s dress constricted around her chest, and she sipped air to breathe. “Great. Tonight. When we get back to Twist’s yacht. But I want you now.”
“I cannot deny you anything.” He stood and pulled Kylie to her feet with their linked hands, and he looked around the ballroom, the people dancing, and the edges of the room that seemed to end in a cliff overlooking the darkening sea beyond the glass walls and ceiling.
Micah said, “Come with me.”