Behind her, Kat heard Hale throwing open cabinet doors. “Where’s the microwave?”
“Uncle Eddie doesn’t have a microwave!” the cousins snapped in unison, but neither of them smiled. Neither girl joked. They kept staring at each other across the scarred wooden table that had seen the rise and fall of almost every major heist their family had ever done.
It seemed as fitting a place as any for Gabrielle to say, “You don’t want to do this, Kat. You do not want to forget that the Cleopatra Emerald is the most heavily guarded gem on the planet. It hasn’t even seen the light of day in thirty years.”
“I know,” Kat told her.
“Anybody with any sense would know that Constance Miller is an old recluse who’s almost out of money.” Gabrielle looked her shorter, paler cousin up and down. “And she must be especially desperate if she’s coming to you.”
“Thanks,” Kat said.
“And, most of all,” Gabrielle went on, “we real thieves know that the Cleopatra Emerald has been cursed ever since Cleopatra took the biggest emerald in the world and, in all her wisdom, decided to split it down the middle and give half to Marc Antony. Then he went off to battle the Romans—”
“And died,” Hale chimed in from behind them.
“Cleopatra kept the other half,” Gabrielle went on.
“And died,” Hale said again.
“And until the two stones are together again, they will bring nothing but death and destruction to whoever holds either one,” Gabrielle finished. She stood and stepped closer to her cousin. “So any good thief would know it’s cursed, Kat.”
“There’s no such thing as curses,” Kat tried to retort, but the taller girl was already crossing her arms and looking down in a way that made Kat feel especially small.
“Then how do you explain what happened when Uncle Nester went after it in ’79?”
“Lasers burn things, Gabrielle. It’s not the emerald’s fault Uncle Nester was sloppy with his fingers.”
“And what about the Garner Brothers in 1981?”
“Hey, anyone who thinks a non-military–grade rappelling cable can support the weight of two grown men and a miniature donkey deserves to fall off a cliff.”
“And that Japanese team in 2000?”
“You should always take a backup defibrillator if you’re gonna try the Sleeping Beauty. Everybody knows that. Besides, Uncle Eddie didn’t care when he went after it in ’67,” Kat tried.
Gabrielle’s glare turned icy. “He cares now.”
“What happened in ’67?” Hale asked, but neither girl seemed to hear nor care.
Gabrielle eased forward, silent and deadly as a snake. “The most important thing I know, Kitty Kat, is that Uncle Eddie—arguably the world’s greatest living thief—says that the Cleopatra Emerald is not to be stolen. I know that whatever happened in ’67 was enough to scare Uncle Eddie, so I believe him when he says that Cleopatra jobs end badly. Kat, they always end badly.” She dropped into her chair and crossed her long legs. “I don’t know what sob story Constance Miller gave you, or how a woman who supposedly hasn’t left her house in years managed to find you, or why—”
“Visily Romani,” Kat heard herself whisper, and she watched Gabrielle’s eyes go wide. “They knew the name Romani. They said Visily Romani sent them.”
It was easy to forget that there were some things with more history than Uncle Eddie’s kitchen table, but at the sound of the ancient name, Gabrielle’s hands went to the scarred wood, and two words filled Kat’s mind: Chelovek Pseudonima.
Alias Man, Uncle Eddie had translated for her once, and so Kat sat there thinking about the old names, the sacred names. Names used for hundreds of years, but only by the best thieves, and for only the most worthy causes. Kat trembled, knowing those causes now included the Cleopatra Emerald.
“He’s still out there,” Kat said. “This man who calls himself Romani—whoever he is—he’s still out there, and he sent me these people because I can help them. He thinks I can do this. I can—”
“Not you, Kat. We.” Hale dropped into a seat at the head of the table. He didn’t look at her. “If you do this, then we do this.”
“Of course. Yeah. We. But it’s not like it matters anyway,” Kat told them with a shake of her head. “The Cleopatra is supposed to be locked up somewhere in Switzerland. And even if we could find it…What? What are you staring at?”
Gabrielle looked at Hale, who shook his head, leaving Gabrielle to shuffle through the stack of mail that sat unopened on the end of the table.
“You’ve been gone, Kitty Kat.” Gabrielle slid the newspaper across the table, the headline blaring out for all to see that the Kelly Corporation was finally going to bring its most prized possession home.
Home.
New York.
Kat felt her heart beat faster as she looked first at Gabrielle and then at Hale.
“So…what?” Hale asked slowly. “I guess now we steal an emerald?”
There was a room at the top of the stairs that had white eyelet curtains and two twin beds with matching quilts. There was a small dresser, a wicker hamper, and a bookshelf full of dusty, fraying Nancy Drews. That room had never belonged with the rest of the house, Kat had always thought. Stepping inside was like walking into another world—one with a pink rotary telephone and a music box. A tiny alcove in a man’s world, a place made entirely for girls.
Someone, sometime had embroidered the name Nadia on a pillow, and Kat held it in her arms as she lay, staring up at the ceiling but not sleeping. She felt too small, lying on her mother’s bed, still trying to fit inside her footsteps.
“So, Hale…”