Most of them had been dazed and tearful, many of them older women who weren’t suited for sex work but were still trafficked in their own country.
It made Molly happy to think they’d be going home, but at the same time, she hoped they werefaraway from these warehouses before dawn.
If their crew did their job, they’d take out an entire branch of Kadjic’s drug business.His cocaine operation would be completely defunct, and since he employed almost all local help, unless Kadjic was willing to move to Colombia, endure the heat and the humidity, and rebuild the machinery—from trafficked workers to hired muscle to actual infrastructure—he was going to have to kiss a third of his profits goodbye.
And thanks to Leon’s shipping business, Hunter, Carl, and Chuck had plans for the shipment of opium from Afghanistan that was another third of Kadjic’s drug empire.
And once those were up in flames, they had a list of suppliers to send Nick, Josh’s friend in the police department, who could take advantage of Kadjic’s distraction and take out his meth distribution system entirely.
And when Molly and Grace had been on their way to Colombia, they’d gotten word from Julia that Kadjic’s last known location had been Paris.
It was going according to plan—they were sending doppelgängers of each other across the globe until Kadjic was sure Lightfingers had accomplices everywhere, but he couldn’t find themanywhere.
Stirling, still in Europe and doing the research with Danny while the rest of them did the jobs, was currently ferreting out Kadjic’s human trafficking operation in Czechia, while Danny put the finishing touches on the Lightfingers caper that would bring Kadjic to them in Prague just in time to see the destruction of the third branch of his empire.
It was a dangerous operation, but the ultimate goal was to lure Kadjic into the open in such a state of mind that he finally led them to his own den, where his most prized stolen art pieces resided.
And once he was there, nail him to the legal wall.
Daring?Yes.
Risky?Oh, definitely.
But Molly loved daring and risky—and she was having the time of her life.
Except for this whole cocaine everywhere thing.
While not as foolhardy as Grace, Molly had experimented with illicit drugs as a teenager.She’d been lucky.Her foster mother had called her on it almost immediately and had said all the right things: Molly was smart and beautiful and most importantly, loved, and adolescence may have hurt (because italwayshurt), and Molly—abandoned as a toddler and in the foster system until she was eleven and Stirling was ten, had baggage that even her lovely foster parents couldn’t lift—shouldn’t risk throwing away the good things no matter how painful the bad.
Molly may still have gone Grace’s way, which had almost killed him, except for Stirling, who had overheard Stella’s conversation and stalked into her room after Stella had left.
Then he’d called her a selfish fuckheaded asswipe.
And then he’d cried.
And boom, Molly didn’t have a drug problem anymore.
But she still remembered cocaine, because that had been the most fun.It had let her dance all night and get good grades and keep up with Josh and Grace and Stirling, who all seemed to have metabolisms of pure rocket fuel.
In the following months, she’d learned—mostly from Josh’s subtle hints—that they got that way frompractice, all the timepractice, and that’s when the ultracompetitive dance practices with Josh and Grace had started.
And she’d never been tempted, not once, to do drugs like she’d done as a teenager, but she still remembered cocaine.
She didn’t want a grain of it up her nose.She didn’t want it thundering through her bloodstream.She’d taken her adulthood and made ithers,and yes, there’d been a few romantic decisions she wished she hadn’t made—nobody ever found true love on a club floor, or if they had, she’d never met that person—but drugs hadn’t been part of any of it.
She wanted to keep it that way.
Unbidden, Robert Craig’s earnest face passed behind her eyes.She’d had some time to talk to Liam’s younger brother, and she’d been struck by the decency in him, the quiet strength of his family, gathering together, the support they gave Liam in spite of how far from his roots he’d gone.
The night Liam and Josh had arrived in England, she and Grace and Liam’s siblings had stayed up talking, exchanging stories and such, and she realized how much of Liam’s time with the Salingers had made it home to the East End.
She’d been asked everything, from how many bad guys she could beat up (from Liam’s youngest brother) to whether she really did make her own clothes (from Liam’s older sister) to a wistful request to see her and Grace dance (Liam’s youngest sister).That last request they’d agreed to, putting on an impromptu exhibition to Grace’s favorite classic rock song—“Come Out and Play” by Offspring.
Grace had gotten his own fair share of questions, and the whole time they’d answered, bantering back and forth like the siblings they’d become, Robert had sat there, eyes on her face, large and blue like Liam’s, and a thoughtful expression, as though life had somehow surprised him.
That night Robert offered to show her to her room in his mother’s big house, which was partially paid for by her children, who had moved her out of the tiny flat they’d grown up in.She now watched her grandchildren, and her youngest two grown children still lived at home, but they had “guest rooms enow,” Robert said broadly and then smiled.Molly was pretty sure his accent wasn’t that deep, and he’d been being playful.
When they’d gotten to the doorway, he’d done the most unexpected thing.
