Chapter Eleven
The Cubs beat the Reds, six to one. Adam took his earbuds out and slowly climbed the stairs to the apartment where Henry, his usual hacker, lived. Henry refused to deliver his reports via phone or email, which drove Adam nuts. But he’d never found anyone as thorough or skilled, so he made the trek to Henry’s Uptown condo with a minimum of complaint.
The last time he’d seen Henry was right before he surprised Jess at AJ Hudson’s. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Hell, anything before Vegas seemed like a lifetime ago. Probably because he couldn’t get that day with Jess out of his mind. Jesus, they’d been insatiable. He’d taken her again and again—on the bed, floor, in the shower. He’d never forget that day as long as he lived. He’d probably be daydreaming about it when he was ninety years old.
He hadn’t wanted her to go. When the limo driver called to announce that he was on his way to take her to the airport, they’d clung to each other and kissed like it was the last kiss of their lives.
Which it was. The last kiss between them anyway. The moment Jess walked out the hotel door, Adam knew he was dissolving their partnership. Further, he was going to be a coward about it. He wasn’t going to tell her it was over, he would just disappear. Jess was a smart girl; she’d know.
Sure, he felt like a complete ass for pulling the disappearing act. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. It made him sick to his stomach to think about her feeling betrayed. But he didn’t feel conflicted about his choice. To keep Jess involved in this game any longer was to put her in danger—of jail or worse. He’d already lost the most important person in his life because of his own idiocy and bad decision-making. He wasn’t losing her.
If that meant he never saw her again, so be it. If that meant she hated him, he deserved it.
Rounding the last flight of stairs, he shook his head. If only he could be sure that she’d stay out of it. But she was so goddamn stubborn and insistent on proving her innocence. And he’d made another mistake—he’d given her the recording of Knoll and Sedarno talking in the golf cart. Idiot. But he’d handed it over before they fell into bed together and after he was too dazed to even remember that she had it.
He’d listened to the recording of Knoll and Sedarno so many times he had it memorized. It started with some chit chat about Sedarno’s wife, his tango-dancing mistress, some ongoing renovations to his vacation home in Lake Tahoe, the cost of Knoll’s divorce attorney, what Jess’s ass looked like as she bent over the tee. They didn’t start talking business until the eighth hole.
“My couriers will be returning with your merchandise sometime in May,” Knoll said. “Once I consolidate, I’ll be ready for the hand-off. Where should I bring them? Tahoe?”
“No, I’ll come to you.” Sedarno’s words, while innocuous, had sounded vaguely threatening. “I have to trust you to get the goods to Chicago, but I’ll be taking possession almost immediately thereafter.”
“Fine!” Knoll managed to laugh heartily while still sounding scared. Adam always enjoyed the thread of fear in his voice. “Sweet home Chicago, it is.”
It was May. The diamond-smuggling fake-exchange students would fly home any day now and sometime soon after, Knoll would collect the diamonds and Sedarno would arrive in the city to pick them up.
He could act on this information because of his contact on Knoll’s staff. But Jess would be stuck. There wasn’t any way she could find out the actual logistics of the diamond transfer...could she? His stomach started to hurt. There’s only so much you can do. Just stay away from her.
He knocked on Henry’s door. Rolled his eyes when Henry whispered, “Identify yourself,” as though he didn’t have security cameras tracking every visitor’s movements.
“Thomas Paine.” When Henry opened the door, he handed over his wallet without comment, and let him do whatever paranoid bullshit made him feel better.
“You said you had something on Knoll?” Adam had commissioned Henry to watch for anything unusual on Knoll’s accounts. Now that he was finally in his sights, he didn’t want Knoll fleeing the country or anything. Which would be the smartest course of action to escape Sedarno’s wrath if something fell through with the diamonds. Since things seemed to be progressing fine with his Ignatius University plan, he didn’t expect unusual activity from Knoll, but he hadn’t lived this long and successfully as a thief without a lot of double-checking.
Henry handed his wallet back and gestured for Adam to follow him to his command center at the back of the apartment. He did this every time Adam stopped by, gesturing to the lines of code on his screens as though Adam could understand any of it.
“Not Knoll. Nothing weird there. He’s just living his normal, extravagant life.” Henry sniffed.
Adam stifled the flare of annoyance. “So why did I make the trip up here?”
“The chick—the one you asked me to electronically surveil the last time you were here—I found weirdness on her.”
Adam’s stomach flipped all the way over. He’d almost forgotten he asked Henry to look at Jess’s electronic profile. He’d known almost nothing about her when he made the request. “What is she doing that’s unusual?”
“Nothing.” Henry gave him a Cheshire smile.
“Henry.” Adam’s tone was soft but dangerous, and Henry dropped the act.
“Chick’s not doing anything odd,” Henry explained. “But I’m not the only one watching.”
Adam went cold all over. “Elaborate.”
“Someone else set up bots to watch her—her financial accounts, social media, email. Everything. She’s not doing anything weird, but whatever she’s doing online is being tracked.”
Adam thought about Jess’s custom encryption programs, her hacking prowess, her easy entry to the Dark Web. Somehow he doubted that everything she was actually doing was being tracked or Henry would have commented on it. But just the fact that someone was looking was enough to change this entire game.
“Can you tell who’s tracking her?”
One side of Henry’s mouth quirked up. “Think so. Shitty-ass programmer. Leaves his ugly fucking footprints on everything.”
Adam took a deep breath. “Some sort of law enforcement?” Maybe the police had never stopped looking into her after the scandal at the University. Christ, she’d been innocent then. But she was slightly less innocent now. Please God, let her have been good enough to cover her tracks.
Henry laughed. “No way. No cop. This dude is a private hire. Can’t be sure, but I think he mostly does work for the families.”
If Adam thought he’d been cold before, now his blood felt like solid ice. The families. Sedarno. “Fuck.”
* * *
It only took him a few minutes to silently disengage her locks. Jess’s apartment was pitch black at 3:00 am. While he’d wanted to run screaming straight from Henry’s, he played it smart and waited. He doubted Sedarno was physically surveilling her as well, but if so, he certainly didn’t want to be seen.
He passed the kitchen and saw a doorway on the right—her bedroom. Now he had to figure out how to wake her up without scaring her.
But Jess always managed to surprise him. “I know you’re here,” she said from the bedroom. Her voice was quiet and even in the still apartment. He wondered if it was the intense physical awareness between them that woke her up. His own body was completely rigid and cognizant of every breath she took.
He took a step forward and hovered in her doorway. “Hello, Blondie.”
She climbed out of the bed wearing purple pajama pants and a long-sleeved, gray thermal shirt. Her hair was mussed on one side and there were lines from the blanket on one of her cheeks. Adam had never seen anything as gorgeous in his entire life.
Her voice was cold as she walked by. “Back to Blondie, am I?”
Oh, she was pissed. Pissed enough to not even bother with her poker face. Not that he could blame her. And, since he was about to inform her that her life as she knew it was over, she was going to be more upset before he was done. “We’ve got a big problem,” he started.
“Really?” She laughed. He followed her down the hallway, watched as she grabbed a Gatorade from the fridge and took a long sip. “We have a problem? I wasn’t aware that there was any we, not anymore. I have a problem. In fact, I have multiple problems.” She took another drink. “I’m almost broke because I haven’t had a paycheck in eight months and no one will hire me because of the scandal. I’ve applied to seventy-eight jobs—nothing—I’m a pariah.”
She paused for a moment. Oh God, was she crying? But when she spoke again, her voice was angrier than ever. “Let’s see, what else? Oh right, I used to send a third of my paycheck to my dad. He had a little health scare the other day, had to go to the hospital. Turns out he let his health insurance lapse because he can’t afford it without me.”
Adam wanted to reach for her. God, this mess was so fucked up. She put the Gatorade back in the fridge and glared at him. “The one thing that can solve all my problems is clearing my name so I can work again, so I can help my family again. But then you decided that we were done being partners.”
He exhaled. She wasn’t wrong, but... “You always knew we had different end games, Blondie.”
She glared at him. “Understood. But we were supposed to work together until Knoll had the diamonds. That was our deal.”
He knew he had no business being angry with her, but he felt the flame of temper anyway. “I was trying to protect you.”
“Oh really?” She jabbed him in the shoulder. “You were protecting me by vanishing?”
“Yes!” he shouted down at her, a little shocked at the volume. But God, he was tired of doing the right thing. “Do you think I wanted to stay away from you? Fuck, no.” He raked his eyes over her body, wanted his hands to follow suit. “If I could have, I would have been inside this apartment and inside your body every goddamn night of the past few weeks.”
Her lips formed a perfect “oh” and her gaze roved between his eyes and lips. “Then why—?”
He settled back against the wall of the hallway and crossed his arms over his chest. “It didn’t work, but I was trying to keep you out of trouble, you ungrateful little amateur.” The sting of his words was mitigated by the note of exhaustion in his voice. “If you’re associated with me and something goes wrong...at best, you’ll be linked to a thief, a criminal, for the rest of your life. You could go to jail, Jess.”
The words were only a whisper now and he broke their eye contact. “I couldn’t survive being responsible for that happening to someone else I care about.”
After a long pause, Jess lifted her hand to his chin and forced him to meet her eyes again. Now she looked more curious than angry. “Why do you blame yourself for what happened to Tony? It wasn’t your fault, Adam. You know it was Knoll’s.”
His mouth dropped open. How did she keep blindsiding him?
Jess just gave him a ghost of a smile. “I’m nosy, okay? You refused to talk about why you wanted Knoll’s diamonds so badly when it’s completely out of your normal behavior. You didn’t want to talk about Tony either. Ta da—turns out they’re linked. I may have hacked into Tony’s court case.”
Adam sank to the ground, put his head in his hands. “Jesus, Jess, you’ve got to stop doing shit like that. Breaking into law enforcement databases? What the fuck’s gotten into you?”
She lowered herself next to him. “You,” she said, so simply it broke his fucking heart. She shrugged. “I know it’s illegal, but it doesn’t hurt anyone for me to look at old case files. Just like it doesn’t hurt anyone when you rob rich, insured assholes.” He almost smiled; he couldn’t argue with that.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
Well, why not? If he didn’t, who knows what the hell she’d do next? “Knoll was one of Tony’s regular employers,” he said. “For years. Knoll’s old-school Chicago. He likes to portray this whole venerable, honorable businessman deal, but he figured out a long time ago how to walk the line between legitimate business...and other stuff. Tony would be muscle, he’d steal for him, whatever. Tony worked for him on and off for more than a decade. At one point, I think Knoll decided that Tony knew too much about him, so he decided to clean house. He tempted him with a huge job, and...”
“It was a setup,” Jess finished. “He was caught red-handed in the robbery. It wasn’t his primary address, but Knoll owned the property where Tony was caught.” She narrowed her eyes. “But why would you blame yourself?”
He felt the familiar sickening waves of guilt, hated to relive the night it all went to shit. But to make her understand, he would.
“Tony came to me, all excited about bringing me into this big job. Knoll said he wanted to steal a necklace from a business rival, humiliate him, show him who was boss. From one of those big estates on the North Shore.” He remembered Tony showing him a picture of the jewels. “It was a Harry Winston Diamond Riviere Necklace, worth half a mil. Knoll told Tony he could keep it; he just wanted to teach his rival a lesson.” He snorted. “We should have known right then it was a set-up. Knoll would never not take a cut.”
His stomach started to hurt, and his voice went hoarse. “I didn’t want to do it. I was on my own by then, following my own rules. But Tony assured me that it would be easy. The place was going to be empty, and Knoll gave him the codes to the alarm system. All I needed to do was scale the wall to the estate to bypass the security guards, and then walk right in the back door and disable the alarm with the codes. Hell, I wouldn’t even need to hurry.”
“Why didn’t Tony just do it himself?”
“He didn’t advertise it to his employers, but he had pretty bad arthritis in his wrists and knees by then.” Adam picked up one of her hands, held it in his lap. “He drove me there, parked down the road from the estate and waited. The codes were crap, of course. As soon as I entered them, the alarm went off.
“I fucked up then.” He’d never said it aloud before. It hurt and felt good at the same time. “I fucked up so bad. If I’d run out a different door, I could have gotten away. But I panicked and ran out the same door I came in. I didn’t know it then, but the chime of the alarm was different depending on which keypad the code was entered into. So when it went off, the security guards had a pretty good idea what door I’d be coming out of. When I ran out of the house, they had guns on me.”
He still remembered the sharp blast of fear, the knowledge in his bones that his life was over.
“When he heard the alarm and I didn’t appear, Tony should have driven away. Instead, he somehow got onto the property. The guards didn’t know where he came from and assumed he’d been inside with me. We were both arrested.”
He squeezed her hand. “That’s why my prints are in the system.”
“But you weren’t convicted?”
“Tony pled guilty on the condition that I got off. He spun up some story about how I had no idea what we were doing, that I thought we were visiting a friend.” He shrugged. “Tony had priors and I didn’t. I’m sure the DA didn’t buy it, but he got a bad guy and avoided a trial.”
He leaned over and smelled Jess’s hair one more time. Lilacs and vanilla. Then he gently pulled away. She probably wouldn’t like what he was going to say next and he couldn’t bear to feel her stiffen against him.
“Tony gets parole in September. Knoll’s smuggled diamonds are for him.” His throat tightened. “He’s practically an old man now, an ex-con, with no money.”
He refused to look back at Jess, to see the disapproval he knew would be on her face. She didn’t say a word, but he went on the defensive anyway. “He’s the only family I have, Jess. He’s spent the last eight years in prison because I fucked up. He saved me as a kid. I can’t make up for the jail time, but I can make sure Knoll pays his price too. Sedarno will make his life a living hell when those diamonds go missing. And with those diamonds... I can see that Tony spends the rest of his life in safety and luxury.”
She still didn’t say a word. His voice rose, “It might sound stupid to you—”
“It doesn’t sound stupid at all,” she said.
He whirled to face her. Was she fucking with him? But no, she was just looking at him with understanding and sympathy in those big brown eyes.
“Does he blame you?”
He blinked, unable to process her simple acceptance. He’d known it already, but the woman was really too good to be true. Or at least, too good to be his. “How could he not?”
A line formed between her eyebrows. “You haven’t visited him? Written him?”
He let out a harsh bark. Was she insane? “In prison? Of course not. I’m sure he hates me. I’d be the very last person he’d want to see or hear from. It’d be like taunting him with my freedom.”
She blew out a long breath. “I think you’re wrong, Adam.” Her voice was low and serious. “You should go see him.”
She always managed to surprise him. He thought she’d argue with him over the diamonds and instead she wanted to talk about this? “He’s never written me either.”
“Probably because he’s exactly like you,” she said dryly. “Did you ever consider the possibility that he feels like he fucked up? That he brought you into that idiotic job and got you arrested? Maybe he thinks that you hate him.”
No. There was no way Tony didn’t blame him. But he couldn’t deny that her words created a tiny pinprick of hope in the heavy cloak of guilt that always hung over him.
But as she gazed at him, he realized he had no time to be hopeful. He’d wasted valuable minutes talking about unchangeable facts. He wanted to kick himself for taking comfort in her—again—when he needed to focus on getting her safe.
He stood up. “I need to tell you why I’m here, Jess. You’re in serious trouble.”