King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

I couldn’t hear her side of the conversation, but I hoped like hell she was happy with the paperwork she’d received from my office.

When the call finished, he handed me the phone, saying, “We’re all good on the immunity.” Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

I blinked at him. “What the fuck? No. Now tell me how you got into this line of work,” I sputtered. “I want some information.”

He didn’t lift his head from where it was angled on the back of his seat, but it was dark enough outside that I could see his eyes open in the reflection of the airplane window.

“It wasn’t a chick,” he said. “It was a dude. And I was the idiot who believed every damned word out of his lying, cheating mouth. And now I’m going to take great pleasure in taking the one thing he cares about most away from him.”

I stared at him in shock. Not just at the intensity of emotion in his voice, but that he’d shared so much about himself so freely. And while I should have been thinking about how this affected the mission ahead, my brain was too busy ticking frantically through everything I’d ever known about him. In five years of following his heists and two years of knowing his actual identity, never had I learned of his sexuality.

Knowing he was gay or bi shouldn’t have changed a single thing. We had a job to do. He was an asset, a tool. His purpose was to retrieve an item of utmost importance to American politics and Hungarian heritage. Whether or not he was attracted to men was completely irrelevant.

I sank into the seat across from him again and sighed.

Yeah, right.

4

King

When we landed in Paris, I insisted on going to my apartment to pick up some tools of my trade. If I was going to get a crack at Elek’s house, I needed to be prepared.

“We can get whatever you need,” Falcon grumbled. “No need to go to your place.”

“Really? Do you have a Flexy Navigator drone attachment for an XLF-360? Hm? Or an infrared motion-detector sweep that fits a broad-spectrum infiltrating cam like the YuliPro? What about a—”

He cut me off with a flap of his hand. “Fine, whatever. But I’m cuffing myself to you this time.”

Falcon clearly didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Of course, neither did I since I’d made all of those things up. But I needed several key items from my apartment regardless, and it was worth the embarrassment of being cuffed to him like a criminal.

Thankfully, the man got an important phone call while we were at my place, so he let me rifle through my supply closet untethered. I gathered everything into a duffle and slung it over my shoulder before holding out my wrist to be re-cuffed.

“Why do you need that tube?” he asked, eyeballing the painting tube I’d laid on top of the duffle.

“It has a delicate tripod in it,” I said. “To mount the infrared motion-detector sweep—”

“Fine, whatever,” he said again, yanking me into the hallway. I let out a breath and followed him back to the Uber where the driver didn’t even bat an eye at the handcuffs.

Paris was like that sometimes. It was one of the reasons I liked it so much. That and the art, of course.

By the time Falcon’s little team of busybodies joined us on the plane, my stomach was tumbling with nerves. Why had I agreed to this? Of course, I knew the answer. I’d agreed because the minute I’d left the vineyard, I’d called one of my contacts in Florence to ask what was going on in the art world that I didn’t already know about.

That’s when I’d learned that Elek’s own personal holy grail, the Holy Crown of Hungary, had been stolen right out from under the noses of the Hungarian parliament guards. It simply wasn’t possible for that to happen without him at least having knowledge of it, and it was way more likely that he’d actually managed the job himself with the help of some kind of crazy-ass risk takers.

Either way, I wanted in. There was no way in hell I could stand by and let Elek simply walk away with the Holy Crown of Hungary, a coronation relic from the year 1000. It had adorned the head of over fifty Hungarian monarchs through the years since being presented by the Byzantine emperor. It’s very image was incorporated into the Hungarian coat of arms. It had been hidden, lost, recovered, and taken abroad several times over its thousand-year history including being entrusted to the United States after the Second World War to keep it safe from the Soviet Union. President Carter himself had decreed its return to the people of Hungary in 1978 only after assessing the stability of the Hungarian government.