Chapter 2 TWO HANDS, ONE DISPLAY CASE.

The temperature inside the room was glacial. The AC was set to preserve century-old oil paintings, but it chilled me to the bone right through the thin fabric of the dress.

The place was a sanctuary of absurd opulence. Marble sculptures that cost more than my entire life, hideous tapestries ripped straight out of a medieval castle, and bulletproof glass display cases lit by faint overhead spotlights.

My eyes scanned the space until locking onto the exact center of the room.

There was the target.

It wasn't a hundred-carat diamond. It wasn't a Van Gogh painting. It was, no exaggeration, the ugliest thing my eyes had ever had the misfortune to witness.

The Trophy. The untouchable Vanderbilt-Hayes family relic. A gaudy ceramic funerary urn, painted with twenty-four-carat gold and crowned with a hyper-realistic sculpture of a pug. A pug with fake ruby eyes that seemed to glare at you with disdain from the afterlife. According to my contact, that monstrosity held the ashes of matriarch Eleanor's first dog. It was absolutely worthless on the black art market, but there was an eccentric underworld collector willing to pay me forty grand just to emotionally torture the Vanderbilts.

Forty thousand dollars. Tommy's debt wiped clean and plenty of money left over to vanish.

I approached the white acrylic pedestal, muffling my steps. No spy-movie laser sensors, just a simple weight scale under the urn. The plan was simple: swap the urn for a sandbag of the exact same weight tucked inside my right thigh garter. Crude, street-level, and effective.

I dipped into a slight squat to pull out the sandbag. My pulse was a deafening drum. I raised my right hand toward the urn, ready to make the swap in one fluid motion.

Right as my fingers brushed the cold ceramic of the pug's snout, I saw movement.

On the other side of the pedestal, emerging from the shadows cast by a medieval suit of armor, an arm appeared. An arm stuffed into a tuxedo sleeve that, frankly, was too broad in the shoulders for him. A pale hand, with long fingers and perfectly manicured nails, closed over the base of the urn at the exact millisecond I grabbed the lid.

Time stopped.

I looked up. Through the gloom and the illuminated glass of the adjacent display, I met a pair of wide, terrified eyes.

It was a guy. Tall, with slicked-back brown hair and the stiff posture of a cheap store mannequin. His face shifted from absolute concentration to pure panic the second he saw me.

My brain short-circuited. Who the hell was this idiot and why was he touching my retirement fund?

We couldn't speak. We couldn't yell. Any sound above a whisper would bring security down on us in seconds.

I shot him a murderous glare, narrowing my eyes, and yanked the urn toward me.

He frowned, pressed his lips into a hard line, and yanked the urn toward him.

Is this a sick joke? I screamed at him with my eyes, tightening my grip until my knuckles turned white.

The guy shook his head, stubborn, and planted his feet on the floor, using his body weight for leverage. His rental tuxedo creaked at the seams.

I let out an inaudible snort through my nose. I took a step forward, rounding the pedestal, and drove an elbow straight into his floating ribs. I wanted to knock the wind out of him so he'd drop the relic. But the stiff saw it coming. He let go of the urn with one hand, blocked my elbow with a clumsy but surprisingly firm swipe, and shoved my shoulder.

I stumbled backward. My defective heel slipped on the polished parquet.

To keep from falling on my back, I flailed my arms, clawing for support. My fingers found the edge of another pedestal situated right behind me. My full weight crashed onto the acrylic.

I felt the shift before I heard the sound.

The pedestal wobbled. In slow motion, I watched a hideous, toddler-sized 18th-century porcelain shepherdess slide across the flat surface.

The guy in the tux opened his mouth, forming a perfect "O" of pure horror. He reached out with his free hand, trying to catch the figure mid-air. His fingers just grazed the shepherdess's porcelain dress, shoving it even harder toward the precipice.

The statue smashed against the hardwood floor.

The crash was apocalyptic. It sounded like a glass bomb detonating inside an empty church. A thousand shards of porcelain shot out in every direction, pinging against my calves like shrapnel.

For one second, there was dead silence. Just the echo of the disaster hanging in the freezing air.

And then, all hell broke loose.

A shrill, piercing alarm shattered the museum's calm. The dim overhead lights snapped off, replaced by red strobe flashes that started spinning in the corners of the ceiling, washing the room in a bloody, pulsing glare.

Shit, shit, shit!

The security guard's voice echoed in the hallway, barking something into his radio. They were coming this way. Multiple boots.

I let go of the stupid pug urn. The tux guy dropped it too, like it had suddenly caught fire. We looked at each other. The hostility in his eyes matched my own. He had just ruined the score of my life. If we weren't five seconds away from getting arrested, I would have gouged his eyes out.

We heard the heavy thud of footsteps sprinting across the marble out in the hall.

No exits. No windows.

I spun around, frantically searching for any hole to crawl into. At the back of the room, hidden between two massive tapestries, was a narrow, unmarked door. A maintenance closet.

I bolted for it without thinking. The stiff had the exact same damn idea. We collided in the doorframe, wedging our shoulders together. He dug his elbow into my chest; I stomped his foot with my stiletto heel. He let out a hoarse, muffled grunt, but we managed to stumble through.

I pulled the door shut the exact second the oak double doors of the main room were kicked open.

The maintenance closet was a dark, suffocating box. It smelled of cheap bleach, ammonia, and damp rot. It wasn't more than three feet square. I tripped over a mop bucket and went pitching forward, but the guy's body broke my fall. We were squashed chest to chest, trapped between metal racks loaded with chemicals and a mop handle scraping my cheek.

The darkness was absolute. His ragged breathing crashed directly against my forehead. He smelled of cheap lavender, dry-cleaning starch, and the cold sweat of pure stress. He was trembling. I was too, but I'd rather swallow my own tongue than admit it.

Outside, the guards' shouts ricocheted off the gallery walls.

"Check the exits! Somebody smashed the French porcelain!"

I tipped my chin up. In the pitch-black closet, I couldn't see the guy's features, but I felt the rigid tension of his jaw millimeters from my nose. I wanted to shove him away, give my crushed ribs some breathing room, but any movement would rattle the metal shelves.

We were trapped. Breathing the same stale air, hating each other with a visceral intensity. He was a useless amateur. And I was an idiot for not securing the perimeter.

The sound of slow, cautious footsteps approached our location. Boots crunched over the broken porcelain shards, coming to a dead stop right on the other side of our flimsy wooden door.

The tux guy's breath hitched. My own heart skipped a beat, hammering wild in my throat.

A stark, powerful beam of white light bled through the bottom crack of the door, illuminating our sneakers dusted in porcelain powder.

The brass doorknob of the closet let out a faint metallic squeal, slowly turning to the left.