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Harry ignores me as she gets up and goes to her coffee station in the corner near the stairs, but she bypasses all things coffee and looks over her shoulder at me. “Open the file, Magdalena,” she says as she pours two roughshod glasses of whiskey.
It’s her drink of choice. That or rum. I like cocktails, finely crafted. But the whiskey, neat, will do in a pinch.
I take the proffered glass with my ring-free hand. It’s not lost on me, the irony that I almost never wear jewels. I own two personal pieces outside the collection that’s purely for monetary purposes; a ring on a simple gold chain with a locket.
A two in one, I guess.
My collection is ugly, tacky. Each piece is worth more sitting in a vault and never seeing the light of day than ever being worn. Not that I’d wear any of them. As I said, monetary only.
The ring and locket are worth nothing.
Except to me. And sometimes I’m not even sure why I keep them.
I’ve got money now, so does Harry, but we grew up hand to mouth, fighting for our lives on the mean streets of Delacroix City. We lived hard, survived harder, and wear the kind of scars that sing bright and deep inside.
But the money I already have? I might be fucking loaded, but I’m not loaded enough. It’s not enough. I have a goal and I won’t stop until then.
Delacroix, like New York, is a powerhouse. Not quite as flashy as the Big Apple, but it’s where the real players, the Quinate, reside and run the east and western seaboards of America. It contains more might beneath its surface than its sister city.
I like being close to that kind of power.
And Harry likes to do her thing without being bothered.
“Open. The. File.” She nods at it.
I cast her a curious look. “Harry, this close to me stealing the Rose Garden”—that’s what they call the necklace I just stole, and have since the seventeen hundreds when it was designed for a rich duke’s lover—“I don’t want to take on another high-profile job.”
“You’re getting weak in your old age. Open it.”
“Not weak, smart.” I run a finger over the pale-yellow cardstock of the file’s sleeve. “You know the score. People and law will be on high alert. They’ve been wanting me for years.”
“They think you’re a guy because they’re all egotistical, misogynistic straight dudes.” She rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. “Why you like them is beyond me.”
“I like cock?”
“Get a dildo or a woman with a strap-on.”
“Stop getting tetchy.” I put my drink down and snatch up the file. “I’m not saying I’ll take it, but I’ll look and—”
I flip over the cover.
One word is all it takes for me to shut it.
Quinate.
“No fucking way.” I shake my head. “Absolutely not.”
“Look at how much money, Lena.”
I narrow my eyes. “They can offer a billion, and I’m not getting caught up with them. They’re worse than the Mafia.”
“Theyarethe Mafia,” she says, “and you’d take a billion.”
“Point and point. But the Mafia on crack. The big five aren’t friends, but they have a system.” I shove the file at her. “Fuck one over, you fuck them all. You know this. They run this fucking town, New York, LA, Chicago… Dallas, Miami… Fucking half of Mexico and other hotbeds all over the world. No.”
She opens it and points to a number. “That’s a lot of zeros after the six.”
Shit, I look. “That’s…seven. Seven zeroes.”
