Page 6 of The Expat Affair

I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my iPad, deep in a comment thread on X when I find her. The pretty woman who was with Xander when he died, posted to the checkmarked account of someone claiming to be a Dutch journalist.

The Expat Affair: American expat Rayna D. questioned for role in Van der Vos murder & theft, millions of euros in diamonds missing #blooddiamonds #houseofprins #theexpataffair

An American expat, like me. That little tidbit gives me pause, a shiver of kinship with this woman I don’t know and have never met.

Already, the post has racked up a flurry of responses and retweets, dated only seconds ago, and I click to expand the comments.

I spot a bunch of screenshots of the same picture, one pilfered from Rayna’s Instagram page, a shot of her seated at the foot end of Xander’s bed, naked but for a collar of yellow and white diamonds and a strategically placed strip of fluffy white duvet.

It’s staggering how many people are posting this same picture, how quickly the likes and comments are ticking up, up, upward.

It occurs to me then: I’m watching this woman go viral.

The caption reads, Amsterdam looks good on me, don’t you think? W

Brigitte was wrong, though, when she called this woman pretty.

Rayna is stunning.

Big doe eyes and generous lips.

Messy, pillow-mussed curls.

I take in the slope of her freckled shoulder, the slice of lean waist, the barely-there peek of a nipple underneath a complicated necklace of marquis and pear-shaped diamonds, 196 of them in total.

I know, because it’s a copy of the most iconic House of Prins design.

I wonder if she has any idea of the significance of the piece sitting on her chest, glittering there for all the world to see, if she has an inkling of its value.

The centerpiece stone alone is worth more than €100,000—and that’s assuming it’s lab-grown, which I am, because this copy is Xander’s.

A flawless, colorless, fourteen-carat pear is not as valuable as the mined version, but still. The necklace is probably worth five times that.

My attention returns to the comments, rolling in faster than I can read them.

If this woman had any brains, she would have broken some things in the house. Roughed herself up some. Given herself a black eye or knocked herself out for a minute or two. At least then her story would be semi believable.

Rayna was there, in the penthouse, when a man was murdered in the shower. And now there are diamonds missing? Of COURSE she has them

WTF!!! SEND HER ASS TO JAIL!

I try to imagine it, tiny little Rayna climbing a naked and soaped-up Xander, managing to hold him still enough to strap a zip tie around his neck and pull it tight so she could make off with the diamonds.

If that’s what happened, then why call the police afterward? Why not scrub the place of evidence and disappear without a trace? No criminal with any sort of brains would upload a photograph putting her in the victim’s apartment the night he was murdered.

I don’t know Rayna, but I find it hard to believe she’s that careless.

Also, there’s this: I happen to know that Xander was a difficult sleeper.

He told me that once, in the same breath he pointed out all the devices in his bedroom designed around a good night’s sleep.

Triple-glazed windows to keep out any street noise.

Blackout curtains pulled tight so they don’t let in even a pinprick of light. Air conditioner he sleeps with on high because it fills the room with a frigid wind and a constant, breathy hiss of white noise.

An air conditioner that works on a timer.

I look up from the iPad and into the backyard, going very still as a wind shear rattles the trees.

Surely, Rayna knows about the timer.

Surely by now she’s realized that whatever death-throe sounds Xander might have made would have been muffled by a wall of solid concrete and the steady static coming from a machine high on the wall, one designed to mask any background noise.

Especially if his killer was worried about the people on the floor below and lowered him gently to the floor, it’s conceivable she could have slept through the whole thing.

I can’t be the only person with this knowledge.

And yet, what if I am? Then what?

My attention drags to the iPad screen, to the comments rolling in faster than I can scroll.

IDK who this #hobag is, but she is what’s wrong with the world today. Keep your legs closed on the first date, ladies, otherwise karma will come for you.

This girl is pretty, but how old is she? And why do the guys in the diamond industry always go for the barely legal types?

Barely legal.

I have to sit with that for a minute.

It’s true that I’m younger than Thomas by a whole sixteen years.

A big enough age gap that, for many months, I wondered what a forty-four-year-old heir to a diamond fortune could possibly see in me, the uneducated twenty-something waitress who ran away from home when she was sixteen.

Before I came along, though, there were others.

Of course there were.

Blue-eyed beauties with blond hair and patrician noses, leggy brunettes with thin lips and serious eyes.

They were nothing like me, and far better suited for life as a Prins than I am, but they weren’t young.

Thomas didn’t have a constant parade of pretty young things he collected in bars and on dating apps like Xander, and they stuck around for a lot longer than just one night.

Thomas is very different from Xander in that way.

In a lot of ways, actually.

I see what Xander saw in Rayna, though.

She’s exactly his type.

The online gossips are right about another thing.

The necklace is not a good look for her.

Especially now that Xander’s dead and there are reports of diamonds missing—not from the police, at least not that I’ve seen, but that doesn’t stop the trolls from shouting fully formed opinions of guilt in the comment sections, ticking up likes and views on every social media platform.

#americandiamondthief #theexpataffair #blooddiamonds.

Everywhere I look, Rayna is trending.

My phone buzzes on the table, an incoming text from Thomas.

Dreadful news. Don’t wait up.

I follow the link to a news site, a brief report that tells me absolutely nothing new. Xander is dead. Diamonds are missing. An American expat is involved. The story is developing.

I fire off a reply that’s filled with platitudes. I’m so sorry. Here for you however you need.

But I don’t ask if he’s seen the picture of Rayna in that necklace. If he hasn’t, he will soon enough.

I cringe when I think of what his sister, Fleur, will say, their father, Willem.

Neither is completely on board with the lab-grown line—or rather, they’re on board, but only if the line rakes in the projected profits, which so far it hasn’t done.

Thomas is the one who championed the new line. He’s the one who swore it would save the House. He’s been working his ass off for more than a year now, but he hasn’t quite managed to deliver.

One of Willem and Fleur’s stipulations from the very beginning, though, was that the lab-grown pieces have a drastically different look and style, so there’s no crossover with the natural diamond line.

No one wants to drop a hundred thousand on a piece of jewelry featuring mined stones only to learn that there’s a lab-grown equivalent for one-tenth of the price.

That necklace hanging on Rayna’s neck, the lab-grown twin to the House’s most famous design? Willem and Fleur will see it for what it is: a giant middle finger from Xander.

What the hell was he thinking? Not just that he let Rayna upload that picture to Instagram but that he made the necklace in the first place, that he had it just ...

lying around his apartment. It was a foolish, cocky move—which now that I think about it, was exactly Xander’s problem. He was always too damn cocky.

For Rayna, though, that necklace is a real problem.

That picture of her is still gaining speed on social media, still chugging closer and closer to the wrong screen.

If the killer has that necklace, he’ll see her as a witness. If he doesn’t, he’ll see her as a target. Neither scenario is good news for Rayna.

A travel writer, according to a link I find buried in the comment section.

I follow the link to her website, a landing page filled with pictures, links to articles she’s written (only a couple dozen at most), invitations to connect on her socials (which she’s since set to private), but it’s too late.

Whether she meant to be or not, Rayna is already Out There, a bell that can’t be unrung.

My iPad buzzes with an incoming text, and I flip from the news app to the message string.

The unread text at the top is from a Dutch cell, a string of numbers my phone doesn’t recognize.

I tap the message with a finger.

Where are the diamonds? You promised.

My head whips up, and I look around the empty kitchen, half expecting the sender to be standing on the other side of the steel and glass windows.

But except for the swaying trees, the backyard is empty.

I don’t think too long or hard about it. I tick out a reply.

Who is this?

The dots bounce around almost immediately. Two seconds later, a reply hits my phone.

Don’t fuck with me, . I can bury you. And if you don’t bring the diamonds to me, I will.

A tingling spreads through my body, visceral and intense, not just at the threat, but at the fact it was sent to this number.

To this device—an iPad stuffed with Sem’s games and that everyone in the house knows the passcode to.

Ditto for my phone, and as the two devices are synced, I’m guessing the messages landed there, too.

This is why people have burner phones, to intercept messages like these.

I think about my next move.

Play dumb? Delete the text string, block the number, wipe both from my memory banks? Then again, what will that accomplish? And while we’re at it, which diamonds?

The ones dangling from my neck and ears? The ones upstairs in the vault? He’s already got plenty of diamonds, and now he wants more?

After Xander, I know what he’ll do to me if I don’t deliver.

The front door swings open, ushering in Martina on a gust of frigid wind.

I flip the iPad cover closed and try to adopt the pose of someone who isn’t losing her shit, someone who doesn’t have tension rolling off her like an electrical field, but my muscles are steel under my skin.

I stare at a couple of pigeons huddled on a branch outside the kitchen window and force myself to breathe.

Martina bustles down the hallway, a commotion of squeaky shoes and crinkling shopping bags.

“I picked up a lovely piece of halibut for dinner.

I hope that’s okay.”

I twist around in my chair.

“Halibut sounds delicious.

Thank you.”

“I thought I’d make that Jamie Oliver recipe that—”

She stops at the island, her gaze sticking to my face. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

I wave a hand in the general direction of my iPad and sigh. “I was reading the news about Xander. It’s just so awful. I can’t stop picturing him.”

She heaves the bags on the marble with a commiserating sigh. “I talked to some of the neighbors earlier, and everybody’s spooked. Let’s just hope the police do their job and find the person who did this. We’ll all feel better when that monster is behind bars.”

“I know I will.”

I push up from the chair and do my best to shake it off—a problem to deal with later, when I’m alone. “Here, let me help you unpack the groceries.”

November 17th, 10:27 p.m.

“Madame.”

I stare up at Xander standing in the open passenger’s door, and he really is handsome. Backlit from above, the overhead lights hitting his thick hair, broad grin, sparkling brown eyes fringed with impossibly long lashes. He wriggles the fingers on the outstretched arm like he’s an actual gentleman, when we both know he’s anything but.

I drop my hand into his and let him haul me out of the cocoon of his Bentley and into the cool parking garage under his building. A smelly space of cement and fluorescent lighting that, as far as I can tell, seems to be devoid of humans, which is good. The last thing we need is for someone to spot me here.

“This way,”

Xander says as soon as I’m upright. He takes off toward a set of double glass doors at the far end. A man on a mission.

I follow behind as quickly as I can in this pencil skirt and five-inch heels, my soles clicking on the cold concrete floor. I catch up to him at the bank of elevators, one of them waiting to whisk us upstairs.

“I have a wine cellar in the basement.”

Xander searches through his keys for a fob, a round gray thing he holds against a sensor by the buttons. It beeps once, and the top button lights up. PH, for penthouse floor. “I could send down for a bottle of Cristal if you’d like.”

“A wine cellar, huh? Sounds fancy.”

“There’s also a catering kitchen for whenever I need a private chef. I’ll have to have you and Thomas over sometime.”

“Do you even hear yourself? No one needs a private chef, Xander, or a wine cellar for that matter. When did you become so bougie?”

“Twenty years ago, when I made my first million. And you’re one to talk. Isn’t your chef named Marina?”

“It’s Martina, and she works for Thomas, not me.”

He cocks a sure she does brow, and I laugh and lean a hip against the side wall. Xander and I only talk like this when it’s just us two, and always out of earshot of a Prins. Even Thomas. Especially him. For Thomas, my and Xander’s mutual climb out of poverty puts us on the same team, makes us co-conspirators in a game Thomas doesn’t want or know how to play. He’d see our back and forth as, at best, shutting him out, and at worst, flirting, but Thomas would only be partially right.

Yes, Xander and I have a lot in common. Yes, we both clawed our way into a life most people dream about. But mostly, what we like to do is push each other’s buttons. Depending on the day, our exchanges are a volley of either affectionate teasing or snarky exasperation.

I jut my chin at a round object in the corner of the ceiling. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t work. Well, the camera works, but the footage isn’t saved, just streamed to a screen behind the concierge desk downstairs. Joop sees it, but Joop is cool.”

Xander waves at the camera. “Trained in the art of discretion.”

“In other words, Joop is used to watching you sneak strange women up to your apartment every night.”

“Not every night. But he might have seen it once or twice.”

The doors ping open, and the lights in the foyer turn on, almost as if by magic. He sweeps an arm at the gleaming space.

“After you, gorgeous.”