The Collector
Page 117

She rooted through her little section of closet, tried out the cropped white jacket Julie had talked her into. “This is better. Is it better?”
He crossed to her, took her face, kissed her. “It’s going to be fine.”
“I know. I’m in full believe-it mode. But I want to look appropriate. I need to be dressed correctly to start the takedown of thieves and murderers. I’m nervous,” she admitted. “But I’d be crazy not to be. I don’t want him to think I’m crazy. Greedy or slutty or vengeful. But not crazy.”
“Sorry, you look fresh, and pretty, and appropriately on edge.”
“That’ll have to do. We need to go, don’t we?”
“Yeah. I’m going to go get the car, then I’ll come back, pick you up. No reason for you to walk in those shoes,” he pointed out. “If anyone’s watching the loft, they’d think the same. Twenty minutes.”
It gave her time to pace, to practice cool, an-eye-for-an-eye stares in the mirror. And to ask herself one last time if she could just walk away.
She opened the dresser drawer she’d taken as her own, then the travel kit she’d put inside. She brushed a finger over the letters she’d tucked into it.
Better to believe they’d never be opened, that she’d come back with Ash, both safe and sound and done. She’d tear them up, and she’d say what she’d written in them, face-to-face, because some words shouldn’t go unsaid.
But she felt better knowing she’d written them, knowing the written word had power, and love would shine through it.
When Ash pulled the car in front of the lot, she stepped out.
The answer was no. She couldn’t walk away.
In her mind she imagined the FBI tracking them through downtown traffic. Vasin might have them tracked as well. She’d be glad when she could feel alone again, really alone.
“Should we practice?” she asked him.
“Do you need to go over it again?”
“No, not really, and I know it’ll seem rehearsed and staged if we go over it all again and again.”
“Just remember. We have what he wants.”
“And let you take the lead because that’s what he expects. It’s a little annoying.”
He touched a hand to hers briefly. “Be yourself. Engage him. It’s what you do.”
“I can do that.” She closed her eyes a moment. “Yes, I can do that.”
She wanted to say more, found she had all sorts of personal things to tell him. But besides tracking them, the authorities would be listening.
So she kept the words in her head, in her heart, as they drove across the East River.
“After you kill her, we should go somewhere fabulous. I’m in character,” she said when he glanced at her.
“Okay. How about Bali?”
“Bali?” She straightened in her seat. “Really? I’ve never been there.”
“Neither have I, so we’ll be even.”
“Bali. Indonesia. I love the food. I think they have elephants.” She dug out her phone to look it up, stopped. “Are you in character or do you actually want to go to Bali?”
“It can be both.”
“Maybe over the winter sometime. My house-sitting business slows down in February. That’s not in character—what do I care about house-sitting when I’ve got the shiny fish? House-sitting is so over. Bali in the winter—with maybe a trip to Switzerland for some skiing. I’ll need to be outfitted, of course, for both. You’ll take care of that for me, won’t you, baby?”
“Anything you need, sugar.”
“I hope you’d really hate having a woman say that, but reverting to character, if you could arrange a credit line for me at Barneys, maybe Bergdorf’s, too, I could surprise you. A girl wants to give her man a few surprises.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I’m channeling an adult Sasha—my spoiled, greedy werewolf girl. Kaylee’s nemesis. She’d take you for everything she could, get bored, then rip your throat out. If I can think like her, I can pull this off.”
Lila huffed out a breath. “I can think like her. I created her. I can pull this off. You’ll be like you are when you’re really pissed off, and we’ll rock this meeting.”
“Lila, I am really pissed off.”
She gave him a sidelong look. “You seem really calm.”
“I can be both. Just like Bali.”
He drove along a high stone wall, and she caught the blink of the red eye of security cameras. “This is it, isn’t it?”
“The gate’s just ahead. You’ll do fine, Sasha.”
“Too bad it’s not a full moon.”
The gate spanned wide enough for two cars to pass through and gleamed silver in the afternoon sun. A bas-relief of a griffin with sword and shield centered the gate.
The moment they stopped, two men stepped out of a doorway in the thick brick columns that flanked the gate.
Here we go, Lila thought as Ash rolled down his window.
“Step out of the car, please, Mr. Archer, Ms. Emerson, for a security check.”
“Security check?” Lila tried for a sulky look as one of the guards opened her door. On a little huff of breath, she slid out.
They checked the car top to bottom, running scanners over it, then running what she thought must be a camera on a pole under it.
They opened the hood, the trunk.
“You’re cleared to enter.”
Lila slid back in, thought like Sasha. She took out a purse mirror and freshened her lip gloss. But she watched over the glass as she caught glimpses of the house through thick groves of trees.
Then the long drive turned, and she saw it in full.
It was massive and gorgeous, a wide U of golden stone, with its center curve rising above the legs. Windows that shot back beams of sun, giving no hint of what lay behind them. A trio of onion domes topped it, their bases ringed with circular balconies.
A rose garden, with its thorny bushes of abundant blooms, ran in rows of military precision while the vast lawn rolled, green and lush.
A pair of stone griffins with sword and shield guarded the carved double doors of the entrance. Their eyes, like the light of the cameras, gleamed red. Two more security men stood in front of statues, still as the stone itself. Lila clearly saw the sidearm of the one who stepped to the car.