Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

“It’s personally important that you stay safe.” She takes another sip of her tea and smiles again.

I know that she probably says that to dozens of potential recruits, but I still like it when she says it to me.

On the way out her gloved hand touches my arm briefly. “Have you heard from your mother?”

Yulikova’s voice is soft, like she’s really concerned about a seventeen-year-old boy on his own and scared for his mother. But I bet she’s fishing for information. Information I wish I had.

“No,” I say. “She could be dead for all I know.” For once I’m not lying.

“I’d like to help her, Cassel,” she says. “Both you and Barron are important to us here in the program. We’d like to keep your family together.”

I nod noncommittally.

Criminals get caught eventually—it’s a tenet of being in the life. But maybe things are different for government agents. Maybe their mothers stay out of prison forever. I guess I ought to hope so.

From the outside the building is nondescript, a dull mediumsize concrete structure in the middle of a parking lot, its mirrored windows gleaming with reflected light from the setting sun. No one would guess that a federal agency occupies the upper floors, especially since the sign out front promises RICHARDSON & CO., ADHESIVES AND SEALANTS and almost everyone coming in and out is wearing a sharp-looking suit.

Above me the trees are mostly brown and bare, the reds and golds of early autumn faded by the cold October wind. My Benz is right where I left it, reminding me of the life I could have had if I’d accepted Lila’s father’s offer and become his secret weapon.

More and more I feel like the boy who cut off his nose to spite his face.

I drive back to Wallingford, arriving with just enough time to dump off my gym bag and grab a granola bar before I have to meet Daneca at the library. I jog up the stairs and am about to unlock the door to my room when I realize it’s already open.

“Hello?” I say as I go in.

Sitting on my bed is a girl. I’ve seen her around campus, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken. She’s a sophomore, Asian—Korean, I think, with long black hair that hangs to her waist like a waterfall, and thick white socks that come almost to her knees. Her eyes are lined with glittering blue pencil. She looks up at me from under long lashes and smiles shyly.

I’m a little flustered, I have to admit. This doesn’t happen a lot. “Are you waiting for Sam?”

“I was hoping to talk to you.” She stands, lifting her pink book bag and biting her bottom lip. Then, hesitating, she adds, “I’m Mina. Mina Lange.”

“You’re really not supposed to be in my room,” I say, dropping my gym bag.

She grins. “I know.”

“I was just about to head out,” I say, glancing toward the door. I have no idea what kind of game she’s playing, but the last time a girl turned up on my bed, everything went directly to hell sans handbasket. I’m not exactly optimistic. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mina, but if there’s something you want to tell me, you should probably do it now.”

“Can’t you stay?” she asks, taking a step toward where I’m standing. “I have a really big favor to ask, and there’s no one else who can help.”

“I find that hard to believe.” My voice comes out a little strained-sounding. I think of Daneca and all of the explaining I have ahead of me. The last thing I need is to be late and have one more thing to explain. “But I guess I could wait a few minutes if it’s important.”

“Maybe we could go somewhere else,” she says. Her lips are glossy pink, soft-looking. Her white-gloved finger wraps around a strand of her long black hair, twirling it nervously. “Please.”

“Mina, just tell me,” I say, but the tone of my voice isn’t very commanding. I don’t mind indulging in the illusion that there’s something absolutely vital that I can do for a beautiful girl, even if I don’t believe it myself. I don’t mind lingering a little while longer, pretending.

“You’re busy,” she says. “I shouldn’t keep you. I know that we’re not—I know you don’t know me that well or anything. And this is all my fault. But please, please can we talk sometime?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Of course. But didn’t you want—”

She cuts me off. “No, I’ll come back. I’ll find you. I knew you’d be nice, Cassel. I just knew it.”

She brushes past me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her body. Moments later I hear her light step in the hall. I stand alone in the middle of my room for a long moment, trying to figure out what just happened.

The air has turned from chilly to the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and lives in your marrow. The kind of cold that keeps you shivering after you’ve come into a warm room, as if you have to shudder ice from your veins. I am almost to the library.

“Hey,” someone calls from behind me. I know the voice.

I turn.

Lila’s standing at the edge of the grass, looking up. She’s wearing a long black coat, and when she speaks, her breath condenses in the air like the ghosts of unspoken words. She looks like a ghost herself, all black and white in the shadow of leafless trees. “My father wants to see you,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, and follow her. Just like that. I’d probably follow her off a cliff.

She leads me to a silver Jaguar XK in the parking lot. I don’t know when she got the car—or her license—and I want to say something about that, offer her some kind of congratulations, but when I open my mouth, she gives me a look that makes me swallow the words.

I get in quietly on the passenger side and take out my phone. The inside smells like spearmint bubble gum and perfume and cigarette smoke. A half-empty bottle of diet soda is resting in the cup holder.

I take out my phone and text Daneca: Can’t make it 2nite.

A few seconds later the phone starts ringing, but I set it to vibrate and then ignore it. I feel guilty for standing her up after making a promise to be more honest, but explaining where I am going—no less why—seems impossible.

Lila looks over at me, half her face lit by a streetlight, blond lashes and the arch of her brow turned to gold. She’s so beautiful that my teeth hurt. In psychology class freshman year our teacher talked about the theory that we all have a “death instinct”—a part of us that urges us toward oblivion, toward the underworld, toward Thanatos. It feels exhilarating, like taking a step off the edge of a skyscraper. That’s how I feel now.

“Where’s your dad?” I ask her.

“With your mom,” Lila says.

“She’s alive?” I am so surprised that I don’t have time to be relieved. My mother is with Zacharov? I don’t know what to think.

Lila’s gaze finds mine but her smile gives me no comfort. “For now.”

The engine starts, and we pull out of the parking lot. I see my own face reflected back in the curve of the tinted window. I might be going to my own execution, but I don’t look all that torn up about it.

CHAPTER FOUR

WE DRIVE INTO THE basement garage, and Lila parks in a numbered spot next to a Lincoln Town Car and two BMWs. It’s a car thief’s dream lot, except for the fact that anyone who steals from Zacharov will probably get dropped off a pier with cement boots on.

As Lila kills the engine, I realize that this will be the first time I’ve ever seen the apartment where she lives when she’s with her father. She was quiet on the drive, leaving me with plenty of time to wonder if she knows that I followed her yesterday, if she knows that I’m being recruited for the Licensed Minority Division, if she knows that I saw her order a hit or that I have Gage’s gun.

To wonder if I’m about to die.

“Lila,” I say, turning in my seat and putting my gloved hand on the dashboard. “What happened with us—”

“Don’t.” She looks directly into my eyes. After a month of being forced to avoid her, I feel stripped bare by her gaze. “You can be as much of a charming bastard as you want, but you’re never going to bullshit your way into my heart again.”

“I don’t want that,” I say. “I never wanted that.”

She gets out of the car. “Come on. We have to get back to Wallingford before curfew.”

I follow her into the elevator, trying to behave myself, trying to puzzle through her words. She pushes the P3 button. I guess the P stands for “penthouse,” because soon we are whirring up the floors so fast that my ears pop. She lets her messenger bag drop off her shoulder and hunches forward in her long black coat. For a moment she looks frail and tired, like a bird huddling against a storm.

“How did my mother wind up here?” I ask.

Lila sighs. “She did a bad thing.”

I don’t know if that means working Patton or something else. I think about the reddish stone my mother was wearing on her finger the last time I saw her. I think too of a picture I found in the old house, of a much younger Mom decked out in lingerie and looking like Bettie Page—a picture obviously taken by a man who wasn’t my father and who might have been Zacharov. I have a lot of reasons to worry.

The elevator doors open into a massive room with white walls, a black and white marble floor, and what looks like a Moroccan style wood ceiling at least eighteen feet above us. There’s no carpet, so the tap of our shoes echoes as we walk toward the lit fireplace on the opposite wall, flanked with sofas, and with two people mostly hidden by shadows. Three huge windows show Central Park at night, a patch of near blackness in the shimmering city surrounding it.

My mother sits on one of the couches. She has an amber-colored drink in her hand and is wearing a filmy white dress I’ve never seen on her before. It looks expensive. I expect her to jump up, to be her usual exuberant self, but the smile she gives me is subdued, almost fearful.

Despite that I nearly collapse with relief. “You’re okay.”

“Welcome, Cassel,” Zacharov says. He’s standing by the fire, and when we get close, he crosses to where Lila is and gives her a kiss on the forehead. He looks like the lord of some baronial manor, rather than a seedy crime boss in a big Manhattan apartment.

I incline my head in what I hope is a respectful nod. “Nice place.”

Zacharov smiles like a shark. His white hair looks gold in the firelight. Even his teeth look golden, which reminds me uncomfortably of Gage and the gun taped to the wall of my closet. “Lila, you can go do your homework.”

She touches her throat lightly—gloved fingers tracing the marks she took, the marks that make her an official member of his crime family, not just his daughter—rage in every line of her face. He barely notices. I’m sure he doesn’t realize that he just dismissed her like a child.

My mother clears her throat. “I’d like to talk to Cassel alone for a moment, if that’s all right, Ivan?”

Zacharov nods.

She gets up and walks to me. Linking her arm with mine, she marches me down a hallway to a massive kitchen with ebony wood floors and a center island of a bright green stone that looks like it might be malachite. While I sit down on a stool, she puts a clear glass kettle on one of the burners. It’s eerie, the way she seems to know Zacharov’s apartment.

I want to grab her arm to reassure myself that she’s real, but she’s moving restlessly, not seeming to notice me.

“Mom,” I say. “I’m so glad that you—but how come you didn’t call us or—”

“I made a big mistake,” Mom says. “Huge.” She takes a cigarette from a silver case, but instead of lighting it she sets it down on the counter. I’ve never seen her so agitated before. “I need your help, sweetheart.”

I am uncomfortably reminded of Mina Lange. “We were really worried,” I say. “We didn’t hear from you for weeks, and you’re all over the news, you know? Patton wants your head.”

“We?” she asks, smiling.

“Me. Barron. Grandad.”

“It’s nice to see you and your brother so close again,” she says. “My boys.”

“Mom, you are on every news channel. Seriously. The cops are looking everywhere for you.”

She shakes her head, waving away my words. “When I got out of prison, I wanted to make some quick money. It was hard, sweetheart, inside. I spent all the time when I wasn’t planning that appeal planning what I would do when I got out. I had a few favors to call in and a few things put away for a rainy day.”

“Like?” I say.

Her voice goes low. “The Resurrection Diamond.”

I saw it on her finger. She wore it once, out to lunch, after Philip died. The stone’s a pretty distinctive color, like a drop of blood spilled into a pool of water. But even when I saw it, I thought I must have been mistaken, must have misunderstood, because even though I knew Zacharov wore a fake diamond on his tie pin, that didn’t mean he’d lost the original. And it certainly didn’t mean my mother had taken it.

“You stole it?” I mouth, pointing to the other room. “From him?”

“A long time ago,” she says.

I can’t believe that she’s treating this so lightly. I keep my voice low. “Back when you were screwing him?”

After all these years I think I’ve finally shocked her. “I—,” she starts.

“I found a photo,” I say. “When I was cleaning out the house. The guy who took it was wearing the same ring that I saw Zacharov wearing in a picture at Grandad’s place. I wasn’t sure, but now I am.”