Page 4 of The Wrong Idea (The Kinky Bank Robbers #2)

“Not so fast,” Zeus piped up from the laptop.

“The good news is that facial recognition software has a hard time factoring in age progression. The accuracy goes way down. The bad news is that ZOX has all the time in the world to find you. They could narrow their pool of possible Isis’s down to a few thousand and take years to investigate each and every one. ”

“And they’d do that?” I asked.

“Yeah. Especially the guy assigned to our case—Agent Denko. He’s ruthless. The man never sleeps.”

“Oh.”

Odin gripped my arm. “Here’s the good news. The first thing the ZOX analysts will do is exclude people who were dead at the time that the photo was taken. Massive waste of time for dead people to show up in the final results.”

“How is that good news?” I asked. “I wasn’t dead at the time.”

“But what if you had been dead at the time?”

“Is this why I needed coffee? Are we getting into parallel timelines?”

“Not actually dead, but what if people believed you’d died beforehand?”

It took me a while to comprehend all of this. “So…fake my death? Retroactively?”

“ Melinda ’ s death, not Isis’s,” Zeus said from the laptop.

Thor said, “We’d fake the death of Melinda, the hostage we took. We’d arrange it so that your long-dead body turns up. It would be convincing.”

“How?”

They outlined their plan.

I listened in stunned silence.

Apparently Zeus’s CIA contact had access to a burnt female corpse with the right characteristics to pass for dead Melinda.

Whoever this was, she’d been shot while sitting in a car in the desert, and then her car had been set on fire.

The estimated time of death was a week before Zeus and I had been captured.

Zeus had already broken into my dentist’s computer records, guessing correctly that I went to the only dentist in Baylortown. He’d passed my records to the CIA guy, who was already modifying the dental X-rays of the corpse to match up.

“I don’t know about this. I mean, let my sisters think I got shot and burned to death in the desert? I don’t know if I can do that.”

Zeus swore under his breath.

Not okay with this plan.

Odin focused grimly on something out the window.

Thor regarded me sadly.

Right.

There wasn’t a choice. I was in the same position as Venus—I could never go home again.

“I get it,” I said.

“We never wanted you to be forced into staying,” Thor said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” Zeus growled. “It’s not at all okay.”

“But I want to stay,” I said. “You know I do. And I’m the one who got involved when you told me to disappear. I share the blame on this. It’s just…how can I put them through believing…how could I do that to them?”

Nobody said anything.

Thor settled onto the couch on the other side of me and set a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“I mean, a burnt corpse?” I said. “There has to be another way. Maybe we let them know it’s fake?”

“It has to be real to them,” Zeus said. “There’s so much media involved with your disappearance, so many cops and detectives sniffing around. Your sisters have to think it’s real. They can’t be playacting.”

“But maybe after?” I tried.

“The truth puts them in danger,” Thor said. “Your sisters are young. Do you really want to ask them to keep a secret that puts them in the position of aiding and abetting internationally wanted fugitives? Not to mention the danger from ZOX if one of them slipped up?”

This was happening too fast. Staying with the guys is what I’d wanted—desperately—but not like this.

“I’d never be able to see them again,” I said.

“Never’s a long time,” Odin said. “Never say never.”

“But it’s what we’re looking at right now,” I said numbly.

Nobody said anything. We all knew it was true.

Could I do it?

But I didn’t have a choice, now. “Wait, could I keep buying the Paris Hilton quilts?” I asked. “And leaving little messages? It would give them hope. Like maybe, just maybe—”

“This is not a game,” Zeus barked. “You can’t be sending them messages.”

“We can keep buying the quilts once in a while. But no more messages,” Odin said. “At least for the foreseeable future.”

“Okay,” I said. “No, I get it.”

Thor straightened my bathrobe lapels. “How are you doing?”

Conflicting feelings swirled through me. I didn’t want to leave my guys, but how could I never see my sisters again? How could I cause them such pain?

“I know it's not what you want,” Zeus said darkly.

“I want to stay here—that part’s not the question.”

“Saying you want to stay and being forced to stay are two very different things,” Zeus said. “Nobody wants to be told they can never go home again.”

Zeus was talking about himself as much as me—I knew that deep in my bones.

And there was something else I knew deep in my bones.

I stood and gave Zeus a long, hard look, and then Odin, and then Thor.

“I need you guys to hear this once and for all. If door number one is staying here and never seeing my sisters again and door number two is everything going back the way it was—I stay back at the farm, never knowing you all, never knowing this life, you know what door I’d pick? Can you guess?”

Thor sucked in a silent breath. Zeus watched me slow and steady. Odin pressed his hands together, waiting.

They needed to hear it from me.

“I’d pick door number one. This door. The one we’re walking through. I’d pick it over and over.”

Zeus said nothing, but I could feel his relief like a physical thing—the weight of it, the gravity of it.

Odin’s eyes sparkled.

“For real?” Thor asked hopefully.

“Every day of the week,” I whispered.

“You’ll miss them,” Thor said.

“You’ll help me,” I said. “We’ll all help each other.”

Zeus gave me a wary look, still unsure.

Odin crossed his legs and sat back like an elegant man of leisure. “It’s natural to want to stay, of course. After a couple days with us, what woman wouldn’t want to choose this? We live in the most luxury. We give the most fucking-g pleasure.”

“We have skills,” Thor said. “As you know. Utterly unmatched.”

“Plus, humility.” I leaned back on Thor’s shoulder, enjoying being in this illegal nest with my Peter Pans.

Odin scowled. “And you’ll have to continue to obey our rules and perform the duties.”

I smiled. “Would the duties be erotic?”

“Very,” Thor whispered.

“And the punishment would be severe, yet exquisite,” Odin said.

“So we kill Melinda,” I said. “And maybe we can find a way to fix this thing in the end. You can’t live your lives as bank robbers forever. It’s not who you are.”

Zeus’s gaze went diamond-hard. “You think we haven’t tried to fix this thing? There are some problems you can’t solve.”

I bit my tongue. Even the vague hope of changing his circumstances seemed to annoy him.

And he still wasn’t sure of me. He was still stung from Venus, and one night of weird role-playing while roasting in a railcar hadn’t changed that.

Right then and there, I vowed to prove myself to him. To all of them.

They thought I was just a farm girl, but we were in this together. Maybe we could get out of it together.

Maybe we could all go home.

Thor turned my face to his and kissed me. Odin smiled his devilish smile.