Heist Royale (Thieves’ Gambit #2)

Chapter Thirty-Two

Thirty-Two

“I want you all to know, if we lose this final phase, I’m going to use every remaining scrap of influence in my arsenal to have each of you completely and thoroughly obliterated.”

I sighed and took a sip of my water. Ross Quest was already dead, if only in soul, if we lost. Count could get in line.

Taiyō dropped a message into the Wi-Fi group chat. Despite it being 2024, being thirty-two thousand feet in the air still means you have to keep your phone in airplane mode. How the hell is that still a thing?

Taiyō

Overstated threats are often the sign of desperation.

so much energy that could be redirected.

Oh, the messages weren’t to the entire chat. Just me.

I typed back.

Are you wondering if Baron would’ve been reacting better?

Across the slender jet aisle, Taiyō flicked his watch so efficiently I couldn’t believe he was done typing until I got the text.

Doesn’t matter, we’re not on his team.

But that doesn’t help Count’s case.

He and I locked eyes. Was that a question I saw in his?

“We plan on succeeding, Count,” Noelia promised, hands folded in her lap next to me. Her posture was surprisingly less taut than I would have guessed. Since my bluff with her dad, maybe she felt more confident having even a teensy bit of leverage in her family. How nice it was to be able to give that kind of hope to someone else, even if my situation was about as hopeless as you could get.

“We’d planned on winning the last phase too,” Mylo muttered, shuffling an arc of cards. If only Kyung-soon were here to kick him for me.

But Taiyō, feeling the same, glared harshly enough at Mylo that he messed up his next shuffle. A dozen cards fluttered into his lap. He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Mom sipped a glass of what was probably ginger ale, if I knew her. “We all did our best last phase. Of course, it amounted to jack all, but sure, kudos to us for playing it straight and doing our best.” She hoisted her glass, cheers-ing an invisible nobody.

“There’s no need for the salt, Mom.”

She didn’t respond, just took another sip. Scratch that—gulp. Mom winced, and I realized that was something a lot stronger than ginger ale. The tremor of the glass in her hand gave away exactly why she needed it.

My heart dropped to my stomach, but I filed the feeling away. I couldn’t think about how precarious the situation was and keep a clear mind at the same time.

Maybe I needed a drink.

“It’s here.” Count stopped midpace in the aisle, eyes zigzagging over her tablet. With a swipe of her finger, two screens at the head of the cabin glowed to life.

“Wonderful.” Count let out a breath. “Something you should be able to do without being duped by a nineteen-year-old.”

“Such faith she has in us,” Mylo muttered. I looked close at the screens. On one of them, a picture snapped in the dark. A modern, reflective glass building. I’d have guessed luxurious vacation home, but it was just a touch too large and not quite sleek enough for that. Not to mention an inconvenient location. The angle didn’t reveal much, but it looked like I was spying a snapshot on the edge of some sort of elevation. Wires from a distant cable car and the hint of city lights backlit by the horizon.

“This isn’t another lab, is it?” Mylo asked.

Count crossed her arms. “It’s a visual artists commune. One hosting a very prestigious vintage film collection.”

“Quite a swanky retreat,” Taiyō noted.

“I’m sure there’s some very swanky things stored inside,” I said. “Where is this? Given the trees and the cable car, it has to be somewhere warm but with a bit of a mountainous terrain. Big city? Uh…South Africa.”

Count nodded. “Just outside of Cape Town.” Count turned to face us. “There shouldn’t be any Kiah Hart–like situations available to manipulate here. The manager of the facility is already a friend of the organization.”

Noelia scoffed. “Then why is this necessary at all?”

“He’s soon to be a former friend, unbeknownst to him.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because I asked him to hand over a certain film reel a few weeks ago. What he handed over was a fake.”

So we were stealing an actual old-school film reel, then. How retro.

“What’s on the film?”

Count threw us a bone. “Footage relating to an assassination, and a hint that maybe it wasn’t perpetrated by the person conventionally thought to have committed it.”

Mylo sat up, gripping his armrests. “Whose assassination? JFK? RFK? MLK?”

“Americans really do think the world revolves around them.” Noelia cocked her head. “Don’t you know any assassinations of world leaders that aren’t from the States?”

Mylo scratched his head. “John Lennon?”

Taiyō actually laughed.

“The contents of the film are irrelevant.” Count clasped her hands in front of her. “Whoever’s the first to acquire it and bring to a yet undisclosed rendezvous location wins this phase. Whoever doesn’t win this phase—”

“We know the math,” I said.

Do or die. Literally.

“How’d you let a fake get handed over in the first place, Count?” Mom folded her arms. “Sloppy work.”

Count turned around slowly. “I’ve been a little busy in recent weeks.”

“Whatever you say, dear.” Mom nodded at me. “As for the job, I’ll be—”

“Running coms. I know.”

Count swiped her tablet up and retreated toward the plane’s private cabin. “Brief me in a couple hours.”

I barely felt her brush past me.

Mom tilted her head back and closed her eyes. There was a quiver in her eyelids as she closed them. She was certainly more nervous than I was used to seeing her, but not as much as she could have been either.

Noelia received a ding on her smartwatch, which prompted her to rummage in an overhead bin for the tablet Mom had handed off to her days ago. Honestly, I’d forgotten she had it.

Noelia gave a cursory look back toward Count’s cabin and its closed door before hooking a finger at me. I followed her toward a set of seats at the other side of the plane, which just so happened to be adjacent to where Mom was sitting.

With the tablet in her lap, Noelia cleared her throat and whispered. “Cousin Freare got back to me about the private chat on the tablet, the one you asked about on the freighter? I owe him quite a pretty penny now, but you can repay me later.”

I pursed my lips at her.

“Kidding,” she promised. Mom’s eye cracked open, and I had no doubt she was eavesdropping. “He was able to get into the encrypted server they use. I asked him to filter for anything mentioning you or your family especially. He didn’t find much in the chat itself, but he was able to isolate what he thinks is Baron’s IP address and then dove into that.”

“Are we getting to a point here?” I asked. Mom wasn’t even feigning lack of attention now.

Noelia huffed. “Correspondence with Diane.”

“Is that super unusual? She’s been working for him for a while now.”

“It originated from Baron,” Noelia said slowly. “But it was redirected through your family’s black box.”

Oh.

Oh.

It was clicking. If Diane thought she was getting messages from my family, I was sure exactly who they were supposedly to be coming from, and what kind of content was in those messages.

“When do they track back to?” I asked.

“Half a year?” Noelia said. “Just after the end of the Gambit.”

When Diane would undeniably have been at her lowest. And when it would have made the most sense for Mom to come seeking retaliation after Diane’s failed hit on us. Baron had picked the perfect opportunity to stir the pot.

“This…this could be good,” I whispered. “I mean, it’s not good, but if we have proof that Baron was the one who threatened her family, then maybe we can talk Diane out of the last phase.” I was on the edge of my seat now, focused on Mom. “You could, like, apologize—”

“No, thank you.”

Just like that, Mom laced her fingers and leaned back, going to sleep.

“Mom!” I stage-yelled, glad for the drone of the plane covering my voice.

“Who cares now? She hated me before those messages. Getting on my knees and saying sorry isn’t going to save us now. Winning will.”

“It’s not about saying sorry. God, why can’t you ever have any empathy ever ? Then we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“We also wouldn’t be in this situation if you’d won the Gambit. But that’s where your empathy got us, hm?”

I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of her seat. Mom didn’t say anything. I ignored whatever Mylo or anyone else was saying behind me as I dragged Mom into the next cabin and clicked the door shut.

Mom rubbed her arm, as if I’d really hurt her. “Such a grip—”

“I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“You made that clear over the last six months, baby girl.”

“Listen to me!” I took a breath. This needed to be said calmly. It wasn’t a decision I was making in the heat of the moment. It was logic. It was what was best for me. “Mom, I love you, but I am never coming home to you. I…I respect you, but I don’t want you to rub off on me anymore.”

Mom gave up on nursing her fake injury. She examined me as if I were some oddity. Like I didn’t make sense. “Just because you think you have friends now—”

“I do have friends. And I’ll keep them, because that’s where my priorities are. Your way works, but being ruthless isn’t the only way, and sometimes it’s not even the best way, and I don’t want to think like that anymore.”

Mom’s eyes stopped analyzing me. She looked like…I broke her.

“You don’t mean that.” Her voice was heartbreakingly weak.

“I do. I love you…but I also kind of resent you. And…” I flexed my hands at my sides, fighting the urge to turn away. “If we’re about to die, I feel like…like my life might have been healthier without you in it.” I shook my head, trying to jostle my thoughts into some comprehensible order. “I hate that if I don’t have any time left, you took all of my opportunities away from me, and I don’t know if I can forgive you for that. If we do get out of this, I can’t let that happen again. You need to leave me alone. If you don’t, then I’m going to start actively fighting you. You did this to us, and don’t try to spin it on me like you did with all that crap last year. We both know it’s not the first time you’ve driven your family to this.”

Mom’s chin wobbled, staring out into the clouds. “I thought I was going to be alone forever after they cut ties with me. They didn’t let Jaya start visiting until she was a teenager. When you were born, I suppose I thought it was like adopting a puppy. They never leave.” She turned back to me and smiled sadly. “I can’t just let you go. I don’t have anything else without my baby girl. You’re the only distraction I have from how—” She cut herself off. How what?

How she’d pushed everyone else away? How she deserved it? How lonely she was?

“From?” I pressed.

Mom rolled her lips, giving me a sad smile. “You’re the only one I have, Rossie. I refuse to put my emotions on display for anyone, even someone like Diane. I can’t trust anyone with that kind of ammunition. Except you…” Mom cupped my face. She was…crying. Smiling through it, but actually crying. “Who else could I let see me cry and not have to kill them afterward? Who else is going to lift me up when I get caught up thinking about how alone I am? Who else is going to let me babble on a plane about how hard expressing emotions is?” She laughed humorlessly, and used her shoulder to shrug off the tears, turning away for a second. Despite just telling me that I was the one person she could sometimes bear to be vulnerable with, I could tell she was having trouble even now going all in.

Being vulnerable was being human. I wouldn’t want to let go of the only person I thought I could be even a little human with either.

“I can’t be your everything forever, Mom,” I said. “That’s not healthy for either of us.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

She knew, but she still couldn’t stop herself from trying to tether me to her.

Mom cleared her throat. “How can I let you go when I’m so excellent at momming too?”

I scoffed. “No offense, but you’re better at a lot of other things than you are at momming.”

“Oh?” She gestured for me to go on.

“Let’s see. Grand theft auto, grand larceny, wire fraud.”

“Dime-a-dozen skills, baby girl.”

“Intimidation, espionage, emotional manipulation, orchestrating kidnappings.”

“I guess those are a little more impressive. But what have those gotten me besides a killer reputation? A reputation isn’t tangible, it doesn’t fill your days. I refuse to be left with absolutely nothing, Ross. I’ll die, without someone or something.”

Even when I wasn’t bolstering her emotionally, being a mom was a perfect distraction—even if being a mom was the opposite of a job she was best suited for.

In a jolt of motion, I peeled Mom’s hands off me and stepped back. Mom cocked a brow. “You don’t need me. I’ve found you something better than me. Something that would be so all-encompassing and time-consuming, you’d never have time to think about your pesky little emotions.”

Mom chuckled. “Really?”

I nodded. “Promise if I deliver, you’ll let me go. Give me the distance I want.”

She was skeptical. Hell, I was skeptical. It had only been an idea until now, but it made sense, and I hope she would give me a shot, if nothing else.

Mom crossed her arms. “I’m listening.”