Page 36 of Canvas of Lies (Spruce Hill #3)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Kat

L ate Thursday night, surrounded by caffeinated beverages and a variety of snack bags, we sat huddled together in front of Nico’s desk, staring at the computer monitor.

He’d managed to hack into the auction undetected, a silent observer to dollar amounts that had my eyes rounding in shock.

Even though there was no one to hear us in the quiet apartment, we spoke infrequently and in hushed tones.

It reminded me of that night beneath the desk, just the two of us against the world.

As the clock ticked steadily toward midnight, I wondered if Nico could hear my heart thudding against my ribs.

The price was currently at fourteen million, with only two minutes to go.

It felt like some kind of alternate reality, a freaky, twisted version of my everyday life.

Though I made a living reselling my finds through online auctions and was very familiar with the pulsating thrill of watching a bidder snipe an item at the last minute, those things sold at a tiny, tiny fraction of this price.

I felt like I was going to throw up just from the nerves. All the junk food probably wasn’t helping, either.

Beside me, Nico was busy typing at lightning speed on the laptop before him, glancing up at the larger monitor every few seconds.

He’d given me a rough outline of how the evening would go, including who the major players were and where they were located, but in this final stretch, it took all of my willpower to keep from distracting him by asking for an update.

With thirty seconds left on the clock, he reached over and squeezed my knee before returning his hands to the keyboard.

“Breathe, Kitten,” he said quietly. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Easier said than done,” I muttered, struggling to draw a breath at all.

My lungs felt tight, frozen in anticipation. I trusted Nico implicitly, but if this went wrong, I was afraid he’d never be able to forgive himself—or possibly me, simply for being related to the man profiting astronomically from what he’d stolen from Nico’s family.

Then, suddenly, it was over. The screen flashed with the winning bid, a startling fourteen-point-three million, and briefly went black.

In the next second, Nico had shifted into the private messages between my father and the buyer, a man named Lucien Lavigne.

Though I’d never heard of him, Nico recognized the name.

When the auction first started, he told me Lavigne was a European dealer of rare and purportedly stolen gemstones, currently based in Portugal.

The man had been investigated at least a dozen times but never actually charged with a crime.

A perfect match for my father, really.

“Here we go,” Nico whispered, continuing to type on the laptop while the details appeared in the private messages on the monitor. “Christ, this is even better than I hoped for.”

I said nothing, simply watched the conversation between my treacherous father and a known criminal mastermind. What would’ve happened, I wondered, if I’d been there when Pierre died? Could I have prevented all this heartache and intrigue simply by bearing witness to it?

An icy claw tightened around my heart when I realized that maybe the painting was why my father hadn’t told me about Pierre’s death, why I hadn’t been informed about the funeral. He knew I wouldn’t stand for something like this if I’d been there.

Since the day I found out about Pierre’s death, I’d been angry at my father for failing to tell me about it. Now, the depth of the betrayal threatened to overwhelm me.

It felt like hours passed, but it was barely ten minutes after the auction ended that Nico finally cracked his knuckles, rolled some of the tension from his shoulders, and pushed back from the desk.

He kept his gaze on the screens to be sure he didn’t miss anything, but to me he said, “Your father will have the painting shipped tomorrow through a private courier, after its authenticity is verified by Lavigne’s designated party.

Once it’s handed over to the courier, that’s where the real work starts. ”

When he glanced over at me, I managed a weak smile, unable to drum up any true excitement.

Nico frowned at my expression and reached over to pull me into his lap.

Part of me wished he could turn off the computers to just talk to me right now, but if my father suspected any kind of monitoring, Nico said he might very well transfer over to a new conversation to pass along different details.

It was important that we keep watching until the bitter end.

“What’s wrong? What can I do?”

I dropped my head against the side of his neck and sighed, my breath whispering over his skin. “It’s okay. I’m fine. I just want this all to be behind us, you know?”

He had nothing more to type for the moment, so he ran his hand up and down my arm. “We’ll get through this. It’s almost over, I promise.”

“Is there anything I can help with?”

“Do you know anything about Perkins-Hallihan, the private shipping service?”

He must have recognized how much I hated having nothing to do during this process. His hand shifted to my hair, moving in long, soothing strokes through the loose strands. A soft sound of pleasure slipped from my throat before I answered him.

“Yes, actually. They’re a little sketchy, but we’ve used them in the past. ”

“Sketchy how?”

I wrinkled my nose. “They were accused of looking the other way while shipping stolen goods in the past, historical artifacts, that kind of thing. There was a bit of controversy around it a few years ago, but that died down. Nothing ever came of the accusation, as far as I could tell.”

“What did you ship through them?”

“I had a Smokey the Bear doll from the fifties for sale late last fall that was bought by someone overseas. His mother had Alzheimer’s and she talked about that particular toy frequently.

I guess it was something she’d bought for him when he was a baby, but the buyer had no idea where his own ended up after all those years.

He was desperate to find one before it was too late.

The regular shipping services leading up to Christmas were backlogged, so we settled on Perkins-Hallihan. ”

“Can you tell me about the shipping process?”

I nodded against his throat. “You can bring in your own authenticator, like Lavigne is doing, or they have someone on staff who will do a pre-shipping check to the buyer’s specifications.

They’ll take photos from all different angles, check that an item works properly, document a stamp of authenticity or a serial number.

Then it gets packed up in front of all parties and a barcode label goes on the package.

It’s harder for someone to steal a package meant for a specific party that way. ”

“Harder, yes, but not impossible,” he said .

“What if they find whatever your dad put in the frame during authentication? Isn’t the note on the back the proof it was done by Clément?”

Nico shook his head. “If your father didn’t find it yet, they have no reason to look at the frame itself that closely, and my father was very careful about hiding it in there.

I couldn’t even see where he’d hidden it in the wood—he told me to remove the painting and break the frame if I had to.

If it went through an X-ray, they might spot it, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it now. ”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “Okay, so what happens next?”

“Your father will send someone else to bring the package for shipment. After that interview, he can’t risk being seen doing it himself.

Whether the person he sends over to Perkins-Hallihan would recognize me or you, though, I’m not sure.

I can do everything remotely if I have to, but I was thinking that a decoy might be helpful. ”

I frowned. “What kind of decoy?”

“If your father had given me the forgery already, I’d use that.

It would’ve been perfect, really. Since he didn’t, I think it will have to be the Elvis painting.

It’s the right size and shape. If we were to ship that out around the same time, then instead of diverting the original package, I can just swap the tracking numbers.

Lavigne will still be able to track the progress of a package heading to him, it just won’t be the package he expects. ”

“You can do all that? From here?” I asked, leaning back to look up at him .

“I can.” Nico grinned. “But we’ll need to get the decoy to the shipping office without one of us being seen there. I can ask Gumby to drop it off.”

“No, let me see if Erin can do it. After that first package last year, which I took myself, we’ve sent a couple other items through Perkins-Hallihan and Erin took those over for me. They won’t think twice about her sending something as weird as that Elvis painting, believe me.”

I pulled my phone from my pocket, checked to verify that Erin was awake at this late hour, and fired off a quick text.

Though the response included a selfie of Erin holding up a giant margarita while a beautiful redheaded woman kissed her neck, my assistant agreed to take the package over for us with no questions asked.

“All right, then. Why don’t you go and get into bed? I’ll just set this up to alert me if anything happens. Otherwise, our work here is done until Elvis heads off to Europe.”

Nico kissed my temple before I slid off his lap. The plan was sound. He could do it, that part didn’t concern me, but a thread of anxiety wormed its way through me. This mess had expanded to include serious criminals and international borders. What if it all came crashing down on us?

Even though I couldn’t see a way it might come back around to implicate Nico directly—or me, which I knew would be his concern—this move would take the battle to a new level.

This was bigger than leaking a story to an ex-wife or photos to the press.

We were involving people even more dangerous than my father.

You can’t fight fair with someone who has no sense of fairness.

Those words, spoken so long ago by the same man they applied to now, bounced around inside my head like a ping pong ball. By this time tomorrow, our part would be done, and all we’d have left to do was wait. After years of heartache and regret, the course of fate would be well and truly set.

I worried about that future as I brushed my teeth, undressed, and slipped into bed to wait for Nico.

It was no fairy tale ending, but we’d never really had a fairy tale beginning, had we?

As much as he’d joked about my role of princess in The Castle as children, we both knew that life in the little cottage he and his father shared had been far more idyllic than my own.

A short while later, Nico settled himself behind me, drawing my weary body back against his chest.

“I love you, Kitten,” he whispered against my shoulder blade.

Though I was barely awake, I snuggled into his embrace and twined my fingers with his before drawing his hand from my hip to clasp it between my breasts.

“I love you, Nico,” I murmured.

Within minutes, his comforting warmth washed away the anxiety that had blossomed inside my chest throughout the evening. Like every other hurdle we’d come across in our own separate lives, we would vault our way over this one and move forward.

Together, this time.