Page 19

H E DROPS ONTO THE CHAIRLIFT, PULLING THE LAP RESTRAINT INTO place over all of us. His petty prisoners.

“Shouldn’t you be with Mia?” I demand as we’re lifted into the sky.

Tom ignores my irritation. “Skiing here bores her,” he replies, as if he finds her estimation perfectly reasonable. My family’s Alpine resort not doing it for you, Knight? “She said after this week I have to come with her to Zermatt.”

“Why wait?” Jackson grinds out. “You could go now. We’d miss you oh so much.”

“Am I intruding?” Tom returns innocently.

Jackson stares forward. “Yes.”

The chairlift levels out, ferrying us over the slopes. Tom evaluates our frozen vantage. While he’s using non-family rented skis, I notice the rest of his winter outerwear is designer, undoubtedly from family vacations to Vail, Aspen, or upstate New York.

If Jackson’s gaze warmed me, Tom’s grimace could chill glaciers. “Making out on the chairlift? Really? Surely, you have better moves than that, Jefferson,” he chastens Jackson. “It’s just so… common.”

“Nothing is common with Olivia,” Jackson replies.

Impatience flashes in Tom’s glare.

“ Oh-kay ,” I drawl, not wanting this little conversation to come to fisticuffs on the chairlift with me literally in the middle. “As fun as this is, Tom, I’m guessing you joined us for a reason? Not just to third wheel?”

“Can you third wheel within a love triangle?” Tom ponders out loud.

“There’s no love triangle,” Jackson growls.

“I wonder,” I say loudly. “Would I survive if I jumped right now? I can accept some broken bones to escape this .”

The boys look duly reprimanded. Tom clears his throat.

“Mia wants to sneak into Leonie’s quarters tonight,” he informs me. “We’ve embarked on a salacious game of truth or dare. My dare tonight is to sneak in with her.”

“Wow, fun,” I indulge the urge to reply. “Enjoy hooking up in my grandmother’s bed. Personally, I prefer more common locales.”

Tom hmph s impatiently. “I mean to say,” he returns, “I don’t know what her objective is, but I think there’s an angle to the dare. Spying on Leonie? Searching her possessions?”

Instantly, I drop my petulance. Of course.

“Leonie’s wedding ring,” I say. “Mia’s looking for her wedding ring.”

His gaze narrows. “What makes you say?”

“My aunt and uncle,” I reply. “I got them to share that instead of a wedding anniversary, my grandmother—the romantic—had her vault combination engraved in her wedding band.”

“She doesn’t wear her wedding ring,” Jackson interjects.

I nod. “Good observation,” I say. “She does not. It has to be somewhere nearby. Obviously”—I look to Tom—“we can’t let Mia find it.”

“So we’re stealing the combination now?” Tom follows my logic. “Should I tell Grace to scrap her vault plans?”

“No,” I reply. “We need contingency plans. Ideally, we get the ring first. But if no one finds the ring, we need to be prepared to drill the vault the way we planned.”

Tom nods. He gazes out on the white mountainside in front of us, following our lift’s gently swaying climb upward.

While he offers no further questions, I notice something lingering in his calculating eyes. “Yes?” I prompt him.

He opens his mouth, then hesitates. “It’s nothing.” He demurs. “It’s just a hunch.”

“I’m interested in all your hunches,” I say.

He eyes me. “Careful, King,” he says. “Flattery like that will get you everywhere with me.” Despite his grin, his pleased performance rings hollow.

I glare, annoyed—and not entirely with him. Jackson sits silently on my other side. “ Tom ,” I say.

He relents. “I think Mia… got the tip on the wedding ring from someone here. I didn’t get his name, but I can point him out when I see him.”

I swallow. “Mia is working with other family members,” I postulate. Unfortunate.

“Or she manipulated them into telling her what she needed to know,” Jackson points out.

Just like I did with my aunt and uncle , I don’t say. “How do you know she was conspiring with someone?” I ask Tom instead.

“Last night, while I had to leave to change out of my wet clothes—” Tom begins.

My eyebrows rise. Wet clothes?

“My first dare was to streak through the courtyard. I rose spectacularly to the challenge, naturally. Had to leave my clothes in the snow.”

“Hold on,” I say, “Go back—”

“To the part where I was in nothing but my underwear? Gladly. Calvin Klein, if you’re inter—”

“Obviously, I’m not,” I interrupt, darting a glance to Jackson, who looks as if he’s plotting his own leap down the mountain. “Who all is involved in this game?”

Tom smirks, adjusting his poles in his lap.

“Finn, Sofia, Mia, and myself. When I returned from changing, Mia was leaving a conversation without the rest of your cousins. I heard her say Leonie’s rooms, you think?

And then later that night she gave me a dare involving that same location.

It was just her speaking with this man—older, European. ”

“Well, that narrows it down,” I remark. Despite my pessimism, my mind is humming with focus.

It is, put mildly, not fun combined with the exhaustion headache my morning coffee couldn’t cure.

I expected Mia would conspire with her crew of cousins, like during the wedding heist. Instead, she’s receiving important information from an older man Tom didn’t recognize.

… “Point out Mia’s contact when you see him,” I say. “Anything else we need to worry about?”

“When it comes to Mia?” Tom replies. “Everything.”

“Job too hard for you, Knight?” Jackson asks.

My other seatmate frowns. “We can’t all be paid for the pleasure of Olivia’s company,” he snaps. “Oh, wait. I was. Last heist.”

“Let’s keep this conversation productive,” I demand, “or neither of you is getting paid for anything .”

While Jackson looks unmoved, he restrains himself. Thomas’s demeanor, on the other hand, changes completely when I invoke our heist’s monetary component. “Okay,” he ventures, refocusing, “what if instead of stealing it, Jackson just gets close enough to Leonie to ask for the ring?”

I turn to him, encouraged he’s returned to planning instead of innuendo. I don’t hate the idea, either.

“She trusted him enough to show him the vault, didn’t she?” he points out.

“Yes,” I say, headache easing, heart pounding.

There’s an appeal to this proposal I don’t mention.

If Jackson descends deeper into deceit, my grandmother’s prophecy is closer to realization.

If, however, he obtains the ring using his kindness, his companionability, his powers of winning people over…

Well, where’s the ruin in that? “It might work,” I say. “Leonie does like him.”

“Why?” Jackson’s shoulders square with incredulous disdain, as if I’ve just said I saw him rooting for West Coventry’s soccer team. “I was never trying to get her to like me.”

His defensiveness is heartbreakingly sweet. Of course, I hear what he’s really saying. Where his mind is. I would never endear myself to the family who mistreated you. He wants it on record—the record of my heart.

Fortunately for us, I’m not worried for my heart. I’m worried for my plan. “Exactly,” I say. “I know you weren’t. She knows you weren’t. You don’t like her because you love me. She sees that. She told me you’re too good for me.”

Tom laughs.

I round on him. “ Don’t ,” I say.

From the way Tom’s expression flickers, I know he’s never heard the lethality in my voice. Few have. I summoned it from memories of my father.

“No, for once,” Jackson cuts in, “I’m with him. That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not,” I say firmly.

My tone is so stony, neither boy disputes me.

“Maybe you’re the only one who could ask for the ring because you’re the only one who would never scheme for it,” I elaborate.

“But I am scheming for it,” Jackson objects. “Literally, in this very moment.”

“Only because Olivia is asking you to,” Tom points out, kicking his skis over nothing below us.

“I mean, you play your cards right, Jacques, and you could end up Leonie’s heir.

What’s better for pissing off the family you hate than burying yourself with your fortune?

Giving it to the random poor kid who showed up on your doorstep.

No offense,” he finishes with the utmost insincerity.

Jackson’s jaw clenches. He says nothing.

“That wouldn’t be a problem for you, would it, Olivia?” he continues. “Of course you’d trust Jackson to divide up the money as planned.”

He watches, leaning back in our seat. His demeanor holds relaxed dominance. The power of making leisure look like… well, power.

“I trust Jackson with everything,” I reply.

“Do you?” Tom presses. “A couple of months ago, you didn’t even trust him to remain faithful.”

Jackson voice slices through the cold. “Shut the fuck up.”

Right then, without warning, our chairlift lurches hard and grinds to a halt.