King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

It was like he put me into some kind of trance, one I couldn’t admit to my team may have come from how beautiful and vulnerable he looked whenever I was around him. It was humiliating as hell, and I hated him for it.

“So… what?” I asked my teammates, shaking off the memory of the beguiling cat burglar. “The idea is that he’s heading straight to Athens to give them these ancient coins? Or is this another case with a note?”

Ziv spoke up. “No note at the scene.”

For some reason, the thief we referred to as Le Chaton had begun leaving judgy little notes at the scenes of some of his thefts. And, well, they weren’t actually thefts either. The notes in these particular cases were always the same:

I was here despite your “security measures.” You need to step up your game. Here’s how I got in.

—The Cat

And then it would be followed by a list of security weaknesses and how he’d bypassed them all. Like he was doing them a service by telling them exactly how to beef up their security systems to protect against thieves like him.

There was no rhyme or reason for which jobs had the note and which ones had a missing piece of art instead. We’d spent hundreds of hours trying to figure it out despite my boss, Nadine, telling me to get a life and let it go. Since those cases were technically simple breaking and entering or trespass cases, they didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. Not like when high-value art pieces were actually stolen.

But I couldn’t let it go. Because with so many other details about Kingston Wilde, it didn’t make sense, and I needed to figure it out.

Linney shrugged. “Athens is definitely where he’d think they belonged. Fits his MO. Why not beat him there and catch him in the act? It’s either the National Historical Museum or the architectural one he’ll return them to. We can put a response team at each.”

Ever since the Van Gogh job, Le Chaton’s focus had seemed to change. Originally, the pieces he’d stolen had ended up on the black market, usually sold to the highest bidder and never to be seen again. But now he tended to zero in on previously stolen items. The “heist,” if you could call it that, was him sneaking into a place to return the piece to the person or museum he thought was the rightful owner. We’d kept that detail from the media so far because god only knew how the press would jump on our new “Robin Hood” figure.

And the asshole was still on the hook for a two-hundred-million-dollar missing Van Gogh among plenty of other things. Also, stealing from unlawful owners was still theft. Even if everyone and their brother thought they deserved it.

“Play it again,” I said over my shoulder. Ziv hit Play and the video started from the beginning. The image was clear as day. King’s longish dirty-blond hair flopped over to one side, and my fingers twitched down by my thigh like they wanted to rake the hair back from his face or grab hold of it to shake some sense into him.

Or shove the man to his knees.

I blinked and cleared my throat, trying to focus.

“That face,” Linney murmured. “Hell, I’d give him the Mona Lisa if he asked nice.”

“Amen,” Ziv added under his breath.

They were right. Kingston Wilde was beautiful. There was no denying the outside package was pristine and distracting. But we were after what was on the inside. Specifically, the knowledge of locations of the countless works of art this sophisticated thief had absconded with from wealthy residences around the globe, including a Cézanne from a pharmaceutical CFO in Boston, a Degas ballerina from a real estate mogul in Florence, and an Andy Warhol from a lesser royal in Saudi Arabia. And how the hell had he continued to get away with it when we’d had our best team on the case for almost five years?

The only lead we’d had at first was a strange, repeated recounting of a shadow climbing through the trees on some of the properties he’d hit early on in Paris when his escapades had just become problematic enough to justify creating the task force.

The first witness to recall the creature in the trees had called the thief “Le Chat Sauvage” which had driven me so crazy, I’d suggested changing it to Le Chaton just to take some of the power out of it. Besides, the man was no “wildcat” even though his identity had continued to elude us for years until we’d finally caught the break with the video feeds.

But now he was straight-up taunting us.

“Maybe you should pay him another visit,” Ziv suggested.

“You know I can’t do that,” I snapped. “I look like an idiot every time I question him.”