King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

“I’ll take my chances, then.” He started toward the door again, and pushed his way past me.

Nadine’s voice replayed in my head from the night before. “Give him whatever he wants. We need that crown more than we need to put away a do-gooder cat burglar.”

We’d already spent over a week trying to run down leads the usual way but had found nothing. Nadine was getting pressure from above, and the stakes were high enough to do whatever it took to get our hands on the crown.

At the risk of everything I’d worked on in four years of trying to put Le Chaton away.

“Stop,” I barked.

He stopped at the door but didn’t turn around.

I clenched my hand into a fist several times before finally forcing myself to say the words. “We will give you immunity for everything up through now with the exception of the theft of the crown,” I offered.

He turned around and considered me for several beats, long enough that I started to feel a trickle of nerves that he might not take the deal. Which would have been idiotic of him, but there was a lot about Le Chaton I’d never understood.

“I didn’t take the crown,” he finally said.

“Then you don’t need immunity for it,” I countered.

He thought about it a moment, then nodded. “Okay.” He came back, squeezing past me again and re-taking his seat.

I blinked at him in surprise. I’d honestly expected more of a fight. I’d been prepared to offer him immunity for the crown as well if push came to shove, but he hadn’t pressed for it. Either he truly didn’t take the crown, or he was that confident he hadn’t left any evidence behind. To be fair, it made sense he hadn’t taken the crown in Budapest since he’d been on record in Berlin at the time. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been involved. But if he had been, why help us find his accomplice?

I stepped toward the cockpit to speak to the pilots. “Get us in the air to Paris please.”

When I turned back to King, his eyes were focused and he seemed to have dropped his don’t-give-a-shit act. “Why Paris?” he asked.

“The rest of the team,” I told him succinctly, slipping back into the seat across from him.

He nodded. “After we pick them up we need to fly to Greece. Mykonos.”

My back bristled at his nerve in making such a demand, but it was tempered by my curiosity. “What’s in Greece?”

He hesitated a moment before responding. “The crown.”

My eyes bulged. I waited for him to laugh as though he were joking but he remained dead serious. “Wait, you know where it is?”

He shifted in his seat, looking less like the self-assured Le Chaton and more like a nervous kitten. “I have an idea where it is.”

I took that information in, turning it over in my mind. “Because you were involved?”

“I told you I had nothing to do with it.”

I shrugged. He could say a lot of things but that didn’t mean I planned to believe him. “Then how else would you know?”

The plane began moving, and he looked out the window, watching the ground slip by faster and faster until it fell away beneath us. It wasn’t until the plane had been swallowed by clouds that he said, “There’s only one person I know who wants the crown badly enough and might possibly have the skills to acquire it.”

He fell silent again, and I wanted to reach across the narrow space between us and take him by the shoulders and shake him. Did every conversation with him have to be this difficult? It felt like pulling teeth. “Who?”

His fingers drummed against the armrest, tapping out a rhythm only he seemed to know. His eyes shifted to meet mine, and I was struck again by how striking they were. “My former partner.”

I tried to hide my surprise. I’d wondered if King had had a partner, but I’d never been able to figure it out. “Partner?” I asked, hoping he might fill in more details.

A muscle twitched along his jaw. “Former partner.”

Interesting. Apparently I’d hit on a sore spot. “How long since you two worked together?”

“Not since Van Gogh.”

He couldn’t hide the hint of anger in his voice. It seemed there was little love lost between King and his former partner.

And suddenly a piece of the Kingston Wilde puzzle slipped into place. I’d always wondered how he’d ended up trapped in that room without the van Gogh. The easiest explanation was a partner who’d fucked him over, but we’d never had any evidence to support the claim. Given the way King’s body tensed at the mention of his former partner, I’d wager our hypothesis was correct.

“Tell me about Van Gogh.”

King let out a soft laugh, a dimple appearing next to his lips for only a tiny fraction of a second before disappearing again. “Nope.”