“Look, detective, I just want to know if there’s been any–” I snapped my teeth together as he cut me off, talking to me in a patronizing voice that made me want to put my fist through something.

“Now, son, I understand that you and your mother are frustrated. It’s awful, having these con-artists take you for a ride…” Detective Mercer talked on and on, his voice droning until it just became one meaningless rumble in my ear.

It was enough to make me want to take an ice pick to said ears just to dig the annoying sound out.

Finally, the droning paused, and I cut in.

“Have you made any progress with my mother’s case?” I demanded, gripping the phone tighter.

“Well, see…we get a lot of these, and not many of them ever go anywhere,” Mercer said, laughing a little.

Like it was funny.

Like it was funny that fake psychics conned people like my mother out of their money and got away with it.

“Is this amusing to you, detective?” I asked without thinking about it.

Dumb move.

“Now, listen here, son–”

“I’m not your fucking son,” I bit off. “It’s nice to know you give a flying fuck about that so-called serve and protect bullshit you cops bleat out.”

I hung up and spun around, two seconds from throwing my phone against the wall.

I managed to stop myself.

Barely.

It had been two days.

Two fucking days and apparently all the cops were doing was sitting on their collective asses.

It was a complete joke, but I wasn’t laughing.

As a matter of fact, I was done sitting around and waiting for them to stop laughing.

If they weren’t going to do jackshit, I would.

The traffic sucked and a drive that should have taken thirty minutes took over an hour, but that was Los Angeles for you.

By the time I pulled into the parking garage attached to the condos where Mom lived, I had something of a plan in mind.

Chances were, the woman who’d done this was betting on my mom not figuring out the truth. And if she did…well, she would count on my mom feeling stupid. Too stupid to make much of a fuss.

She wasn’t wrong. Typically, when my mom felt like she’d been fooled, she kept quiet over it. It was a dignity thing. Whoever had scammed my mother was a good judge of people.

But one thing hadn’t occurred to her.

While my mom hated to be made a fool of, she hated even worse to think about people being hurt. That made her mad. And now that she’d found her mad, she wasn’t going to sit by idly and just pretend nothing happened.

A lot of people might do that.

People like my mom had the kind of money to do that.

But this chick wasn’t counting on me.

I was going to find out who she was, where she’d set up her little scheme and track her down.

Yeah, Mom had said she’d gone by there, but chances were, the woman was just laying low. I could be patient. And it was entirely possible the woman had been at the house the whole time. They just hadn’t felt inclined to get her for my mother.

They’d be a lot more inclined to listen to me, especially once I told them we were going to the cops.

Con artists wouldn’t appreciate cop attention.

They didn’t have to know the cops weren’t paying us much attention at all.

“It will work,” I told myself softly. It would work just fine.

I found my mother sitting on the balcony of her condo, sipping her coffee and staring down at the gardens a few levels below.

“Don’t you have to be at the garage today?” she asked, giving me an absent frown.

“I’ve got a mom to take care of today,” I told her, bending to kiss her on the top of the head.

She caught my hand and squeezed it. “You don’t need to take care of me, baby. I got myself into this mess. I’ve already called the detective. I’ll keep calling him too.”

“Has he been helpful?” I asked in a neutral tone.

Her eyes slid away.

“Yeah, that’s about how helpful he was with me.” Sitting down in the seat next to hers, I braced my elbow on the table and waited for her to look at me. When she finally did, I held out my hand. She took mine and twined our fingers. “The cops aren’t taking this seriously, Mom. You know that, right?”

She huffed out a little sigh. “Yes. Yes, I know that. And that just pisses me off,” she said, her voice sharp. “What do they think we pay them for?”

“We probably just ended up with an asshole,” I said, lifting a shoulder. “But that doesn’t mean we’re going to just sit around and let them watch this just disappear. Where did you meet this woman at?”

“Why?” She pursed her lips, studying me.

“Because I plan on going to talk to her.”

“Oh, honey…” She got up, shaking her head. Taking her coffee, she turned to go inside the condo.

I followed her, watching as she went to the coffee pot and poured herself another cup. “Do you want one?” she offered.

I got myself a cup and poured it, taking a sip as I waited for her to work through whatever was going on in her head.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to go out there,” she said softly. “What if they don’t like it? What if they take it as a threat?”

“It is a threat,” I said flatly. “They conned you out of thousands. I want the money back.”

It took some coaxing, but I finally managed to talk my mother into turning over a rather battered looking business card. Barely giving it a glance, I shoved it in my pocket to deal with later.

Giving her a kiss on the cheek, I lingered a few more minutes and finished my coffee.

“You’ll be careful, won’t you?” she asked for the third time as she trailed me to the front door.

“Mom, do you think your psychic is going to beat me up when I go confront her?” I asked, crooking a smile at her.

She didn’t smile back.

“I’m not worried about her beating you. But…she was so good at it.”

Frowning at her, I tugged the card out of my pocket and slid a glance over it, not really seeing anything on it as I did so. “Mom, that’s why con-artists are called artists. They are good at it. They wouldn’t be worth much if they sucked, would they?

I don’t know what had me glancing back at the card.

But I did, and my gaze lingered on the address.

I had to read it twice before it clicked on why it seemed so familiar.

I’d been there this week – twice, actually. Just last night, to drive by the place, but it was dark.

Still, I had to be reading it wrong.

“Is this…the address on the card, Mom. Is that where you went to see her?”

Say no, please say no, I thought as I studied the swirling, stylized font used to spell out the psychic’s name.

The Mysterious Sirene, Fortunes Untold

I shook my head. I was seeing things because I was thinking about her so much.

“Kian?”

I glanced at my mother again, forcing a smile. “Ah, what did she look like, your so-called psychic?”

“Oh.” She huffed out a breath as she stood there, eyes squinted in thought. After a moment, she glanced at me and offered a rueful shrug. “It’s hard to believe she’s been doing this long enough to be so good at it, honey. She’s younger than you! She barely looks old enough to drink. Long dark hair, very curly. Short, really cute and curvy.”

A picture of Suria formed in my head as I slid the card back into my pocket.

It could be anybody, I told myself.

Anybody.

But did two people fitting that description live in the very same fucking house?

I was having a hard time believing that.

In a rush, a hundred questions she’d asked came rushing back at me. Questions not just about me either. She’d been slick at it too.

That’s why they’re called con-artists, Mom…

No shit, I thought sourly.

Bile churned in my throat, and I looked back at my car. “I gotta go, Mom,” I said, although I was more reluctant to leave now. If I went over there and found out it was really her…

How in the hell was I going to tell my mother that the woman who’d conned her had probably used me to do it?

Something in my chest crumbled a little, withered and blew away as I realized that was exactly what happened.

Suria had fucking used me.