King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

Linney turned to Ziv with a cheeky grin on her face. “Last time King even winked at him. You should have seen Falcon’s face. I thought he was going to clench his jaw hard enough to break teeth.”

My cheeks heated. “Shut up,” I said, deliberately keeping my jaw relaxed when all I really wanted to do was grind my teeth at the memory. “This isn’t productive. Find out where he went after he walked out of the museum. I want every piece of video you can find. Check airports, metro stations, bus—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ziv said in a dry tone. “We got it.” The two of them turned back to their computers and got to work.

Our art and antiquities expert, who’d been sitting quietly at his desk in the corner, eyed me over his cup of tea. I recognized that look.

“Mouse, what’ve you got?”

His soft voice carried across the space. “Where are the coins?”

I furrowed my brows at him, but he continued before I had a chance to ask what he meant.

“Falcon, you’re talking about twenty or thirty pounds of metal. Where is he hiding them in these videos? He’s not even walking funny.”

“There are any number of ways for him to get the coins out of the building,” I explained. “It’s his presence on the same day in addition to all the other—”

Mouse held up his hand to stop me. “That’s simply another coincidence, or so his defense attorney would claim, and you know it. If we want to pin this on him, we need to link him to the actual movement of those coins, either out of the Pergamon or into the museum in Athens.”

“I understand that, but at the moment, I’m a bit short on video showing him actually reaching in and removing the—”

He held up his hand again, and Linney snorted out a laugh. It wasn’t like our quietest teammate to cut me off like this.

“Yes, I understand,” Mouse continued. “And we know the video feeds in the coin room were put on a loop during that time. But what about the loading doors or mailing room? What about the employee entrance? By walking out the front door, he got our attention so focused on him, we haven’t taken the time to look at everything else.”

Linney sighed. “He’s right, Falcon. We fell for it.”

“No we didn’t.” Ziv clicked at lightning speed on his keyboard. “I’ve already checked all those feeds and found nothing. I’m checking again.”

An alert popped up on my screen at the same time my phone started ringing with a call from my supervisor.

“Agent Falcon,” I clipped, standing up to find somewhere quieter to take the call. Before I could even step outside the large shared space of our team’s office, Nadine stopped me in my tracks.

“The Holy Crown of Hungary has been stolen.” Her clipped words sent a chill through my chest. If I wasn’t mistaken, that was a piece kept under round-the-clock guard in the Hungarian Parliament Building. It was one of the highest-profile pieces of crown jewels in the world. The kind of item that was utterly unstealable the way the Titanic had been unsinkable.

“How?” I sputtered, wondering if King Wilde had gone completely off the deep end. He was the only one we knew with the skills to pull something like that off. “When? How?”

“Yesterday. And it doesn’t matter how. Drop what you’re doing and get to the embassy so you can call me back from a secure line. There are extenuating circumstances, and it’s urgent.”

I snapped my fingers to get everyone’s attention. “Define urgent,” I said, wondering if she was getting pressure from diplomatic angles.

“It’s a matter of national security. Get there now. Also, Agent Falcon?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Berlin just called. The coins were in a museum air vent with a note explaining how he bypassed their security.”

After she ended the call, I stood there for a moment, my jaw clenched to tightly I could hear my teeth grinding. Fucking Kingston Wilde. What the hell was his game this time?

2

King

Strutting out the front door of the museum in Berlin had been the ballsiest move I’d done yet. It had put me on record at the scene of one of my crimes in a way that hadn’t happened since the Van Gogh job in Paris. What the hell had I been thinking?

It was without a doubt the stupidest move I’d ever made on a job. Well, besides having trusted Elek Kemény. But that could be explained away by my youth and naiveté at the time. What exactly explained my ridiculous desire to taunt Agent Falcon into arresting me?

The Greek coins in Berlin had been the last job, and I guessed I just wanted to go out with a bang. The only thing left on Elek’s wishlist after the coins and ingots was the Holy Crown of Hungary which was virtually impossible to steal. Since the Berlin job had been the last item on the list I could protect, I’d taken the chance of getting caught on video.