Page 141 of Stealing Blinds

“We’re positioned on the nearby terrace,” Zara tells us. “Prepared to move in.”

Axel piggybacks that with a demand. “Get Little Bandit out of here. Now.”

“The helicopter is waiting,” Ty informs us. “The tender is docked where discussed, and there’s a rescue vessel waiting near the reef.”

“Take her on the chopper,” Wells orders. “Gage is cleanup. Ty on overwatch. Everyone else to the tender.”

Cash pecks Tessa’s temple and starts to lead me away, but Maddox stops him, pulling me back.

He grips the sides of my face and kisses my forehead. “A goddamn queen,” is all he chokes out, but every morsel of his poignant appreciation coils around me.

Tessa wipes a tear from the corner of her eye, nodding at me and reiterating her earlier claim. “Sisters.”

The heartwarming exchange solidifies inside me, as frozen as the cryogenic brain. God, that’s sick. I’m freaking sick. But I’ll have to dwell on that later.

Cash drags me away. Jax closes in on my other side. And we bolt for the helicopter with Kratos’s treasure trove tucked in my backpack and the hope that we can outrun them.

SYLVIE

We cross the resort grounds at a brisk yet leisurely pace, Cash and Jax flanking me. It’s then that I have a sense of belonging that is both unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and also nostalgic. Maybe it’s due to the high that surges through my veins at the completion of a heist. There’s nothing quite like it—an intoxicating on-top-of-the-world sort of ebullience. But even in our haze to disappear into the afternoon radiance, I know it’s more than that.

About a year after my father was murdered, when I was in the thick of my spiraling and at the height of my thieving days, Luella came to visit me. It was rare for her to seek me out apart from my mother, and yet she’d been like a guardian angel while my father was in prison—one person outside our home who we could trust. She showed up in her put-together former-model elegance, but her whole being was set on a mission.

She claimed I needed something to fight for, and I insisted I was fine.

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” she quipped.

It was cheesy, but she’d lost her husband to alcohol poisoning after years of living with his addiction, and Al-Anon had become her safe place.

I rolled my eyes, unwilling to give credence to any of that self-help bullshit. “The Nile was plagued with blood. Surely, you can come up with something more hopeful for someone whose father was brutally murdered.”

“When was the last time you laughed?” she pressed, steamrolling over my brattiness. “Really laughed.”

I couldn’t remember, and in the years that followed, that often stuck with me. Even when things were better, they still didn’t feel whole. Jubilation was in short supply because grief and anguish were relentless, knocking me down every time I managed to get firmer footing.

But now, even on this island that is the setting of our hoodwinking expedition and my stomach-turning execution of a guard, I can still hear the melody of joy.

“What happened to Tatum?” I ask Jax, indulging in the idle chitchat we need to appear to be having so our evacuation seems natural.

The golden hue of history paints the land, the distant clamor of social butterflies breaks on the wind, and faith lies in the swirling rotary wings singing about our imminent retreat.

Jax flashes his lazy grin, as if this were any other day. “I carried him into the lobby of the main resort, dropped him in the elevator, and … told him to pick a floor and I’d try to find him.” He pauses, but it’s laden, requesting that we wait for it. “He was into it.”

An unbidden chortle flees from me as I cast a sidelong glance at Cash. “You guys really like the movie Serendipity, huh?”

Jax snickers. “It was one of our mom’s favorites, so Rena obsessed over it as a teen.”

Suddenly, the weight of that reference slipping out the first time Cash and I met holds profound significance. It’s a connection to the woman who raised him, but couldn’t stay, and the beloved sister they’re all trying desperately to keep with them. It’s like something inside him believed we were inevitable, even though I know his insistence at the time was mostly a line.

Cash is fully focused on our surroundings, leery to breathe freely yet, but he squeezes our woven fingers to reveal that I’m not alone in that epiphany.

“It was definitely fate, you and me,” I tell him as we pass the final gathering of people on our way to the helicopter pad.

We tromp across swaying blades of the greenest grass to cruise toward the secluded precipice that will deliver us, and I drink in the salty breeze.

“Of course it was.” His lips curl into that haughty grin that twists my insides and makes my knees wobbly. “I knew you’d come to my side. Every trick we ever pulled was so that I could swipe your mask and you could blackmail me with my wallet. Soulmates.”

“Kismet,” Jax adds, the word laced with humor.