Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

Her gaze goes toward the other room, then back to me. She bites her lower lip, smearing lipstick on her teeth. “Yes, fine, back then,” she says. “One of those times. Anyway, I stole it and got a copy made of it—but I knew he would want the real one back, even after all this time. It doesn’t make him look good not to have the real one.”

The understatement of the year. If you’re the head of a crime family, then, no, you don’t want people to find out that your most valuable possession was stolen. You certainly don’t want people to know that it was stolen years ago and you’ve been wearing a fake ever since. Especially if your most valuable possession is the Resurrection Diamond, which, according to legend, makes its wearer invulnerable; the loss of it is going to make you seem suddenly vulnerable. “Yeah,” I say.

“So I thought I would sell it back to him,” Mom says.

I forget to keep my voice down. “You what? Are you crazy?”

“It was all going to be fine.” Now she puts the cigarette to her lips and leans into the burner on the stove to catch the edge of the flame. She inhales deeply, and embers flare. She blows smoke.

The tea water is starting to boil. Her hand is shaking.

“He doesn’t care if you smoke in the house?”

She goes on without answering me. “I had a good plan. Worked through a middleman, everything. But it turned out that I didn’t have the real thing. The stone’s gone.”

I just stare at her for a long moment. “So someone found yours and switched it out?”

She nods quickly. “That must have been it.”

This is turning into one of those stories where each new piece of information is so much worse than the thing before that I don’t want to ask for more details, but I am pretty sure there’s no way around it. “And?”

“Well, Ivan might not have minded paying a little bit to get his property back, especially since he’d probably given up on getting the real thing returned to him. I think he would have just made the exchange. But when he found out the stone was a fake, well, he killed the middleman and found out I was behind it.”

“How’d he find that out?”

“Well, the way he killed the middleman was—”

I hold up my hand. “That’s okay. Let’s skip that part.”

She takes a deep drag from her cigarette and blows three perfect rings of smoke. When I was a kid, I loved those. I would try to pass my hand through them without the breeze from the movement blowing them apart, but it never worked. “So, Ivan—he was angry. Well, but he knows me, so he didn’t want to kill me right out. We have history. He told me I had to do a job for him.”

“A job?”

“The Patton job,” she says. “Ivan has always been interested in the government. He said that it was important to stop proposition two from passing in New Jersey, because if it passed in one state then it could pass elsewhere. All I had to do was make Patton renounce it, and Ivan thought the whole thing would just collapse. . . .”

I put a hand to my forehead. “Stop. Wait. It doesn’t make any sense! When did all this happen? Before Philip died?”

The kettle starts to wail.

“Oh, yes,” Mom says. “But you see, I blew it. The job. I didn’t manage to discredit Patton at all. In fact, I think I made the chance of proposition two passing better than ever. But you know, sweetie, it’s never really been my thing—politics. I know how to make men give me things, and I know how to get away before things get too hot. Patton’s nosy aides were always asking questions and looking up things about me. That’s just not the way I work.”

I nod numbly.

“So now Ivan says I have to get the stone back. Only, I have no idea where it is! And he says he won’t let me leave until I give it back—but how can I give it back when I can’t even look for it?”

“So that’s why I’m here.”

She laughs, and for a moment she’s almost like herself. “Exactly, sweetheart. You’ll find the stone for Mommy, and then I’ll be able to come home.”

Sure. She’ll be able to waltz right out of Zacharov’s apartment and into the waiting arms of every cop in New Jersey. But I nod again, trying to work through everything she’s said. “Wait. When I met you and Barron for sushi—the last time I saw you—you were wearing the ring. Had Zacharov already put you on the Patton job?”

“Yes. I already told you. But I figured that since the diamond was a fake, I might as well wear it.”

“Mom!” I groan.

Zacharov appears in the doorway, a silver-haired shadow. He walks past both of us to the stove, where he clicks off the burner. Only when the kettle stops its screaming do I realize how loud it had became.

“Are you two finished?” he asks. “Lila says it’s time for her to go back to Wallingford. If you’d like to go with her, I suggest you go now.”

“One more minute,” I say. My palms are sweating inside my gloves. I have no idea where to even start looking for the real Resurrection Diamond. And if I don’t find it before Zacharov runs out of patience, my mother could wind up dead.

Zacharov takes a long look at my mother and then me. “Quickly,” he tells us, heading back down the hallway.

“Okay,” I say to my mother. “Where was the stone last? Where did you keep it?”

She nods. “I hid it wrapped up in a slip in the back of a drawer of my dresser.”

“Was it still there when you got out of prison? In the same exact place?”

She nods again.

My mother has two dressers, both of them blocked by huge piles of shoes and coats and dresses, many rotted through, most moth-eaten. The idea that someone went through all that and then her drawers seems unlikely—especially if they didn’t know to target the bedroom.

“And no one else knew it was there? You didn’t tell anyone? Not in prison, not at any time? No one?”

She shakes her head. The ash on her cigarette is burning long. It’s going to fall on her glove. “No one.”

I think for a long moment. “You said you switched the stone with a fake. Who made the fake?”

“A forger your father knew up in Paterson. Still in business, with a reputation for discretion.”

“Maybe the guy made two forgeries and kept the real one for himself,” I say.

She doesn’t look convinced.

“Can you just write down his address?” I say, looking toward the hall. “I’ll go talk to him.”

She opens a few drawers near the stove. Knives in a wooden block. Tea towels. Finally she finds a pen in a drawer full of duct tape and plastic garbage bags. She writes “Bob—Central Fine Jewelry” and the word “Paterson” on my arm.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I say, giving her a quick hug.

Her arms wrap around me, bone-achingly tight. Then she lets me go, turns her back, and throws her cigarette into the sink.

“It’s going to be all right,” I say. Mom doesn’t reply.

I head into the other room. Lila is waiting for me, bag slung over her shoulder and coat on. Zacharov stands beside her. Both their expressions are remote.

“You understand what you have to do?” he asks me.

I nod.

He walks us to the elevator. It’s right where other people would have front doors to their apartments. The outside of it is golden, etched with a swirling pattern.

When the doors open, I look back at him. His blue eyes are as pale as ice.

“Touch my mother, and I’ll kill you,” I say.

Zacharov grins. “That’s the spirit, kid.”

The doors close, and Lila and I are alone. The light overhead flickers as the elevator begins its descent.

We pull out of the garage and start toward the tunnel out of the city. The bright lights of bars and restaurants and clubs streak by, patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. Cabs honk. In Manhattan the night is just starting in all its smoky glory.

“Can we talk?” I ask Lila.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so, Cassel. I think I’ve been humiliated enough.”

“Please,” I say. “I just want to tell you how sorry—”

“Don’t.” She flips on the radio, adjusting it past the news, where the host is discussing Governor Patton’s terminating the employment of all hyperbathygammic individuals in government positions, whether or not they’ve been convicted of a crime. She leaves it on a channel blasting pop music. A girl is singing about dancing inside someone else’s mind, coloring their dreams. Lila cranks it up.

“I never meant to hurt you,” I yell over the music.

“I’m going to hurt you if you don’t shut up,” she shouts back. “Look, I know. I know it was awful for you to have me crying and begging you to be my boyfriend and throwing myself at you. I remember the way you flinched. I remember all the lies. I’m sure it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing for both of us.”

I press the radio button, and the car goes abruptly silent. When I speak, my voice sounds rough. “No. That’s not how it was. You don’t understand. I wanted you. I love you—more than I have ever loved anyone. More than I ever will love anyone. And even if you hate me, it’s still a relief to be able to tell you. I wanted to protect you—from me and the way I felt—because I didn’t trust myself to keep remembering that it wasn’t really—that you didn’t feel like I—Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re embarrassed. I’m sorry I embarrassed you. I hope I didn’t—I’m sorry I let things go as far as they did.”

For a long moment we are both quiet. Then she jerks the wheel to the left, tires screeching as she veers off the road, making a turn that takes us back into the city.

“Okay, I’m done,” I say. “I’ll shut up now.”

She slams her hand down on the radio, turning it on and up so that it drowns the car in sound. Her head is turned away from me, but her eyes are shining, as if wet.

We careen around another block, and she pulls up to the curb abruptly. We’re in front of the bus station.

“Lila—,” I say.

“Get out,” she tells me. Her head is turned away from me and her voice shakes.

“Come on. I can’t take the bus. Seriously. I’ll miss curfew and I’ll get expelled. I already have two demerits.”

“That’s not my problem.” She fumbles around in her bag and lifts out a large pair of sunglasses. She pushes them on, hiding half her face. Her mouth is curved down at the corners, but it’s not nearly as expressive as her eyes.

I can still tell that she’s crying.

“Please, Lil,” I say, using a name I haven’t called her since we were kids. “I won’t say a thing for the whole way back. I swear. And I’m sorry.”

“God, I hate you,” she says. “So much. Why do boys think that it will be better to lie and tell a girl how much they loved her and how they only dumped her for her own good? That they only tried to rearrange her brain for her own good? Does it make you feel better, Cassel? Does it? Because from my perspective, it really sucks.”

I open my mouth to deny it but then remember I promised not to talk. I just shake my head.

She pulls away from the curb suddenly, the force of acceleration enough to throw me back against the seat. I keep my eyes on the road. We’re quiet all the way back to Wallingford.

I go to sleep tired and get up exhausted.

As I pull on my uniform, I can’t stop thinking about Zacharov’s cold vast apartment where my mother is now imprisoned. I wonder what it’s like for Lila to wake up there on a Saturday morning and wander into that kitchen for coffee.

I wonder how long she’s going to be able to look at my mother before she tells Zacharov what Mom did to her. I wonder if each time Lila sees her, she remembers what it was like to be forced to love me. I wonder if each time, she hates me just a little bit more.

I think of her in the car, her head turned away from me, her eyes filled with tears.

I don’t know how to even start to make Lila forgive me. And I have no idea how to help Mom. The only thing I can think of—aside from finding the diamond—that might keep Zacharov pacified is if I agree to work for him. Which means betraying the Feds. Which means giving up on trying to be good. And once I start working for the Zacharovs—Well, everyone knows that paying off a debt to the mob is impossible. They just keep piling on interest.

“Come on,” Sam says, scratching his head and making his hair stand straight up. “We’re going to miss breakfast again.”

I grunt and head to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I shave. When I sweep back my hair from my face, I grimace at the redness of my eyes.

In the cafeteria I make a mocha with coffee and a packet of hot chocolate. The sugar and caffeine wake me up enough to finish up a couple of problems due for Probability & Statistics. Kevin Brown glowers at me from across the room. There’s a bruise darkening his cheekbone. I can’t help it; I grin at him.

“You know, if you did your homework at night, you wouldn’t have to do it in your other classes,” Sam says.

“That would also be true if someone would let me copy their answers,” I tell him.

“No way. You’re on the straight and narrow now. No cheating allowed.”

I groan and get up, shoving aside my chair. “See you at lunch.”

I sit through morning announcements, resting my head on my arms. I turn in my hastily done homework and copy down new problems from the board. As I come out of third-period English and trudge through the hallway, a girl falls into step beside me.

>

Her gaze goes toward the other room, then back to me. She bites her lower lip, smearing lipstick on her teeth. “Yes, fine, back then,” she says. “One of those times. Anyway, I stole it and got a copy made of it—but I knew he would want the real one back, even after all this time. It doesn’t make him look good not to have the real one.”

The understatement of the year. If you’re the head of a crime family, then, no, you don’t want people to find out that your most valuable possession was stolen. You certainly don’t want people to know that it was stolen years ago and you’ve been wearing a fake ever since. Especially if your most valuable possession is the Resurrection Diamond, which, according to legend, makes its wearer invulnerable; the loss of it is going to make you seem suddenly vulnerable. “Yeah,” I say.

“So I thought I would sell it back to him,” Mom says.

I forget to keep my voice down. “You what? Are you crazy?”

“It was all going to be fine.” Now she puts the cigarette to her lips and leans into the burner on the stove to catch the edge of the flame. She inhales deeply, and embers flare. She blows smoke.

The tea water is starting to boil. Her hand is shaking.

“He doesn’t care if you smoke in the house?”

She goes on without answering me. “I had a good plan. Worked through a middleman, everything. But it turned out that I didn’t have the real thing. The stone’s gone.”

I just stare at her for a long moment. “So someone found yours and switched it out?”

She nods quickly. “That must have been it.”

This is turning into one of those stories where each new piece of information is so much worse than the thing before that I don’t want to ask for more details, but I am pretty sure there’s no way around it. “And?”

“Well, Ivan might not have minded paying a little bit to get his property back, especially since he’d probably given up on getting the real thing returned to him. I think he would have just made the exchange. But when he found out the stone was a fake, well, he killed the middleman and found out I was behind it.”

“How’d he find that out?”

“Well, the way he killed the middleman was—”

I hold up my hand. “That’s okay. Let’s skip that part.”

She takes a deep drag from her cigarette and blows three perfect rings of smoke. When I was a kid, I loved those. I would try to pass my hand through them without the breeze from the movement blowing them apart, but it never worked. “So, Ivan—he was angry. Well, but he knows me, so he didn’t want to kill me right out. We have history. He told me I had to do a job for him.”

“A job?”

“The Patton job,” she says. “Ivan has always been interested in the government. He said that it was important to stop proposition two from passing in New Jersey, because if it passed in one state then it could pass elsewhere. All I had to do was make Patton renounce it, and Ivan thought the whole thing would just collapse. . . .”

I put a hand to my forehead. “Stop. Wait. It doesn’t make any sense! When did all this happen? Before Philip died?”

The kettle starts to wail.

“Oh, yes,” Mom says. “But you see, I blew it. The job. I didn’t manage to discredit Patton at all. In fact, I think I made the chance of proposition two passing better than ever. But you know, sweetie, it’s never really been my thing—politics. I know how to make men give me things, and I know how to get away before things get too hot. Patton’s nosy aides were always asking questions and looking up things about me. That’s just not the way I work.”

I nod numbly.

“So now Ivan says I have to get the stone back. Only, I have no idea where it is! And he says he won’t let me leave until I give it back—but how can I give it back when I can’t even look for it?”

“So that’s why I’m here.”

She laughs, and for a moment she’s almost like herself. “Exactly, sweetheart. You’ll find the stone for Mommy, and then I’ll be able to come home.”

Sure. She’ll be able to waltz right out of Zacharov’s apartment and into the waiting arms of every cop in New Jersey. But I nod again, trying to work through everything she’s said. “Wait. When I met you and Barron for sushi—the last time I saw you—you were wearing the ring. Had Zacharov already put you on the Patton job?”

“Yes. I already told you. But I figured that since the diamond was a fake, I might as well wear it.”

“Mom!” I groan.

Zacharov appears in the doorway, a silver-haired shadow. He walks past both of us to the stove, where he clicks off the burner. Only when the kettle stops its screaming do I realize how loud it had became.

“Are you two finished?” he asks. “Lila says it’s time for her to go back to Wallingford. If you’d like to go with her, I suggest you go now.”

“One more minute,” I say. My palms are sweating inside my gloves. I have no idea where to even start looking for the real Resurrection Diamond. And if I don’t find it before Zacharov runs out of patience, my mother could wind up dead.

Zacharov takes a long look at my mother and then me. “Quickly,” he tells us, heading back down the hallway.

“Okay,” I say to my mother. “Where was the stone last? Where did you keep it?”

She nods. “I hid it wrapped up in a slip in the back of a drawer of my dresser.”

“Was it still there when you got out of prison? In the same exact place?”

She nods again.

My mother has two dressers, both of them blocked by huge piles of shoes and coats and dresses, many rotted through, most moth-eaten. The idea that someone went through all that and then her drawers seems unlikely—especially if they didn’t know to target the bedroom.

“And no one else knew it was there? You didn’t tell anyone? Not in prison, not at any time? No one?”

She shakes her head. The ash on her cigarette is burning long. It’s going to fall on her glove. “No one.”

I think for a long moment. “You said you switched the stone with a fake. Who made the fake?”

“A forger your father knew up in Paterson. Still in business, with a reputation for discretion.”

“Maybe the guy made two forgeries and kept the real one for himself,” I say.

She doesn’t look convinced.

“Can you just write down his address?” I say, looking toward the hall. “I’ll go talk to him.”

She opens a few drawers near the stove. Knives in a wooden block. Tea towels. Finally she finds a pen in a drawer full of duct tape and plastic garbage bags. She writes “Bob—Central Fine Jewelry” and the word “Paterson” on my arm.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I say, giving her a quick hug.

Her arms wrap around me, bone-achingly tight. Then she lets me go, turns her back, and throws her cigarette into the sink.

“It’s going to be all right,” I say. Mom doesn’t reply.

I head into the other room. Lila is waiting for me, bag slung over her shoulder and coat on. Zacharov stands beside her. Both their expressions are remote.

“You understand what you have to do?” he asks me.

I nod.

He walks us to the elevator. It’s right where other people would have front doors to their apartments. The outside of it is golden, etched with a swirling pattern.

When the doors open, I look back at him. His blue eyes are as pale as ice.

“Touch my mother, and I’ll kill you,” I say.

Zacharov grins. “That’s the spirit, kid.”

The doors close, and Lila and I are alone. The light overhead flickers as the elevator begins its descent.

We pull out of the garage and start toward the tunnel out of the city. The bright lights of bars and restaurants and clubs streak by, patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. Cabs honk. In Manhattan the night is just starting in all its smoky glory.

“Can we talk?” I ask Lila.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so, Cassel. I think I’ve been humiliated enough.”

“Please,” I say. “I just want to tell you how sorry—”

“Don’t.” She flips on the radio, adjusting it past the news, where the host is discussing Governor Patton’s terminating the employment of all hyperbathygammic individuals in government positions, whether or not they’ve been convicted of a crime. She leaves it on a channel blasting pop music. A girl is singing about dancing inside someone else’s mind, coloring their dreams. Lila cranks it up.

“I never meant to hurt you,” I yell over the music.

“I’m going to hurt you if you don’t shut up,” she shouts back. “Look, I know. I know it was awful for you to have me crying and begging you to be my boyfriend and throwing myself at you. I remember the way you flinched. I remember all the lies. I’m sure it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing for both of us.”

I press the radio button, and the car goes abruptly silent. When I speak, my voice sounds rough. “No. That’s not how it was. You don’t understand. I wanted you. I love you—more than I have ever loved anyone. More than I ever will love anyone. And even if you hate me, it’s still a relief to be able to tell you. I wanted to protect you—from me and the way I felt—because I didn’t trust myself to keep remembering that it wasn’t really—that you didn’t feel like I—Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re embarrassed. I’m sorry I embarrassed you. I hope I didn’t—I’m sorry I let things go as far as they did.”

For a long moment we are both quiet. Then she jerks the wheel to the left, tires screeching as she veers off the road, making a turn that takes us back into the city.

“Okay, I’m done,” I say. “I’ll shut up now.”

She slams her hand down on the radio, turning it on and up so that it drowns the car in sound. Her head is turned away from me, but her eyes are shining, as if wet.

We careen around another block, and she pulls up to the curb abruptly. We’re in front of the bus station.

“Lila—,” I say.

“Get out,” she tells me. Her head is turned away from me and her voice shakes.

“Come on. I can’t take the bus. Seriously. I’ll miss curfew and I’ll get expelled. I already have two demerits.”

“That’s not my problem.” She fumbles around in her bag and lifts out a large pair of sunglasses. She pushes them on, hiding half her face. Her mouth is curved down at the corners, but it’s not nearly as expressive as her eyes.

I can still tell that she’s crying.

“Please, Lil,” I say, using a name I haven’t called her since we were kids. “I won’t say a thing for the whole way back. I swear. And I’m sorry.”

“God, I hate you,” she says. “So much. Why do boys think that it will be better to lie and tell a girl how much they loved her and how they only dumped her for her own good? That they only tried to rearrange her brain for her own good? Does it make you feel better, Cassel? Does it? Because from my perspective, it really sucks.”

I open my mouth to deny it but then remember I promised not to talk. I just shake my head.

She pulls away from the curb suddenly, the force of acceleration enough to throw me back against the seat. I keep my eyes on the road. We’re quiet all the way back to Wallingford.

I go to sleep tired and get up exhausted.

As I pull on my uniform, I can’t stop thinking about Zacharov’s cold vast apartment where my mother is now imprisoned. I wonder what it’s like for Lila to wake up there on a Saturday morning and wander into that kitchen for coffee.

I wonder how long she’s going to be able to look at my mother before she tells Zacharov what Mom did to her. I wonder if each time Lila sees her, she remembers what it was like to be forced to love me. I wonder if each time, she hates me just a little bit more.

I think of her in the car, her head turned away from me, her eyes filled with tears.

I don’t know how to even start to make Lila forgive me. And I have no idea how to help Mom. The only thing I can think of—aside from finding the diamond—that might keep Zacharov pacified is if I agree to work for him. Which means betraying the Feds. Which means giving up on trying to be good. And once I start working for the Zacharovs—Well, everyone knows that paying off a debt to the mob is impossible. They just keep piling on interest.

“Come on,” Sam says, scratching his head and making his hair stand straight up. “We’re going to miss breakfast again.”

I grunt and head to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I shave. When I sweep back my hair from my face, I grimace at the redness of my eyes.

In the cafeteria I make a mocha with coffee and a packet of hot chocolate. The sugar and caffeine wake me up enough to finish up a couple of problems due for Probability & Statistics. Kevin Brown glowers at me from across the room. There’s a bruise darkening his cheekbone. I can’t help it; I grin at him.

“You know, if you did your homework at night, you wouldn’t have to do it in your other classes,” Sam says.

“That would also be true if someone would let me copy their answers,” I tell him.

“No way. You’re on the straight and narrow now. No cheating allowed.”

I groan and get up, shoving aside my chair. “See you at lunch.”

I sit through morning announcements, resting my head on my arms. I turn in my hastily done homework and copy down new problems from the board. As I come out of third-period English and trudge through the hallway, a girl falls into step beside me.