“But I should know better.”
“So it’s okay if I get taken?”
She could tell she’d hurt him, and she hadn’t even tried. “You wanted to leave, Hale. You tried to get me to leave.”
“Um…can someone please tell me what happened?”
When Kat turned back to Simon, his face was oozing and covered with cream.
“We stole the Cleopatra Emerald,” Gabrielle said simply, and Simon’s face turned an even deeper shade of crimson.
“You stole the…You stole the…You stole the…How? Why? How?”
“Alice in Wonderland,” Gabrielle said simply. “Kitty here swapped the real for a fake and zoomed right out the rabbit hole without anyone suspecting a thing.” She smiled at her cousin as if she were finally starting to approve. “It was beautiful.”
“No.” Kat shook her head. “It wasn’t.”
“But…” Simon’s eyes were wide. His voice was cracking. “But Uncle Eddie says that the Cleopatra Emerald is—”
“It’s not cursed,” Hale said, but Kat couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t so sure. Cleopatra jobs always end badly.
She fingered the card in her pocket and took her place at the table. “They said Romani sent them,” Kat explained. “They said they were the stone’s rightful owners and that Romani had sent them, and I…”
“What are you saying, Kat?”
She laughed at the joke that wasn’t funny at all. And then Katarina Bishop, teen wonder thief and criminal It Girl finally told them, “I got conned.”
The world didn’t end when she said it. Kat had been expecting the brownstone’s walls to crumble, the old kitchen table to crack in two beneath her palms. But what followed was nothing but an eerie, empty quiet, and Kat knew the girl she’d been two hours before was dead.
“So what?” Hale said after what felt like an eternity. “So we messed up. We learned. And it’s over.”
“No.” Kat stood and put Romani’s card on the table. She saw the three of them stare down at it, felt something in the room shift, the kitchen come alive as she whispered, “It’s only just beginning.”
CHAPTER 14
It took almost an hour for Hale and Gabrielle to tell Simon the full story, and when they were finished, Kat didn’t allow herself to think of all the things she did not know. She kept her mind centered, focused, trained on the thing that mattered most.
“How many people know the name Romani?”
“You mean besides everyone who heard about the random mystery man who broke into the Henley last fall and left his calling card? Twice?” Simon asked.
“Yeah. How many people know Romani is a Chelovek Pseudonima—one of the sacred names?”
Hale backed away from the table, knowing he was out of his range, his depth, leaving the kids who had been born into Uncle Eddie’s kitchen to ponder.
“Twenty?” Gabrielle guessed. “Fifty?”
But Simon was shaking his head. “There’s no way to know.”
“Uncle Eddie would know,” Kat murmured.
“No,” Hale snapped. “Don’t even think about telling Uncle Eddie about this. Not yet. No.” He shook his head as if changing his mind. “Not ever.”
“This is Uncle Eddie’s world, Hale. We’ve got to tell him. He’s the only person who can help us,” Kat said.
“There’s got to be some other way. Look at me.” Hale’s eyes were warm and soft and comforting. He couldn’t have been farther from the boy in the limo when he told her, “We will find some other way.”
“Are you sure you guys have never seen this woman before?” Simon asked, trying to process all the facts.