Then let’s hope that’s good enough. Now, take that shit back into the room. I’ll bring you some bags. I will personally take care of whatever needs to be disposed of. We’re clear?

Absolutely.

And Marcelline survived long enough to shine him on, get strong, and steal his fucking car.

She’d vanished with a thoroughness that could only have been professionally mediated. Or else she’d died before she could slip up. He would have found her if she’d made a mistake.

He got the car back, eventually, but it never felt the same.

Owen couldn’t remember the last time any of the Anningers had specifically brought up the lost money or this particular void in their art collection, but he also couldn’t remember the last time a Do you think you can handle this? sneer wasn’t attached to everything they asked of him.

Now, after years of looking and nothing but dead ends to show for it, the painting was on the wall in that video of a little girl kicking some shithead in the face. Charlie had played it for him three times.

Over the intervening four years, he’d read everything he could find about the painting. He had seen it over and over in articles, and, of course, once briefly in real life. The one in the video could have been a print, but why bother? Who would? It was nothing special to look at, by a guy no one had ever heard of, a half curiosity that it was even taken in the first place.

But it was the first clue he’d had to Marcelline in years—through an accident, by the pestering of a ditzy woman who was all too happy to be out of whatever hidey-hole she called home.

The last place you looked wasn’t ever the end of anything. Found was always a beginning, whether it was your car keys or a lost art treasure. Find it and you start the thing you’d been kept from.

When they landed, Owen convinced Charlie to have a drink with him. It turned into two and a half glassfuls as she chirped and giggled and flattered him until he had to fuck her against the wall of a private room nestled away in the labyrinth of the VIP lounge. She seemed unhurtable, though he tried a little, driving up and into her with a force that knocked her head against the doorframe.

She was flustered and glowing when he was done, chewing the corner off a nervous smile as he zipped up. She was unfathomable, delighted again, with her unmentioned wedding ring and her pristine luggage and her newly mussed hair. He saw the approving up-and-down glance she gave to her reflection in the long mirror on the wall.