Chapter 236

Chapter 236

She pulled the fake silver piece from under her arm and tossed it a few feet away. It hit the ground and rolled twice, making a dull thud.

Footsteps stopped beside her.

Riley closed her eyes and waited.

After a long moment, she opened them. Several figures had appeared at the mouth of the alley without her noticing, standing in the shadows.

They moved fast. She heard a few short muffled sounds, like something hitting flesh hard, then a few words she couldn't understand.

Someone came over, crouched down beside her, and helped her up, one hand on her back, one on her shoulder.

"Can you walk?"

Riley looked at the blurred face in the darkness, then glanced toward the far end of the alley where everything had gone still. She recognized him as one of Winslet's people. She nodded.

He helped her to her feet, let her drape her left arm over his shoulder, and walked her toward the other end of the alley.

She moved slowly. Every step sent a fresh wave of pain through her.

When they came out of the alley, a black car was already waiting at the curb.

Someone pulled the door open. Riley was helped into the back seat, and the moment the door shut, the engine noise and wind outside disappeared.

She leaned back against the seat with her eyes closed. She heard someone beside her say, "Back to the villa."

When Riley opened her eyes again, she was looking up at a familiar wood-paneled ceiling. Light filtered through the window paper, filling the room with a soft glow.

Her right arm was wrapped in thick bandages from shoulder to wrist, neat and tight. She tried to move it. It felt heavy and wouldn't lift.

She lay there looking at the fine grain of the ceiling beams, listening to light footsteps moving around the courtyard outside. After a while the door opened, someone came in and set a bowl on the low table by the bed, then left.

Riley pushed herself up with her left hand and leaned back against the headboard, taking in the room.

She knew this place. Winslet's villa. She'd been here many times, just never lying in one of the beds.

The door opened again. This time it was Winslet.

He was wearing a dark gray shirt and carrying a coffee cup. He sat down in the chair by the bed, took a sip without saying anything, set the cup on the table, and looked at her.

"You're up."

"Yeah."

"The wound isn't bad. The bullet went clean through, missed the bone. It'll heal."

Riley nodded. "Was I always meant to be Vivian's stand-in? From the very beginning?"

Winslet didn't answer right away.

His eyes dropped to the cup. The room stayed quiet for so long that Riley thought he wasn't going to answer at all.

Then he spoke.

"I saw you once, before the surgery."

Riley said nothing and waited.

"You didn't look like Vivian yet. You were standing across the street, watching someone. That someone worked for me." His voice was calm, like he was telling a story from a long time ago. "You watched him for so long that he came back and told me there was a girl across the street who'd been staring at him for over an hour."

Riley's lashes gave the faintest flutter.

"I looked into you," Winslet said. "After that, I never reached out. The surgery was your choice. I didn't arrange any of it."

Riley looked at him and said nothing.

"But then you came to me." He picked up the coffee cup and turned it in his hands. "You said you wanted to work for me. I kept you close to Vivian because you looked like her, and because you were genuinely useful to her. Using you as a decoy was never part of my plan. Not at any point."

He raised his eyes to hers.

"The fake silver piece last night. You brought that yourself."

Riley sat against the headboard. The wound on her right arm still ached, though not like it had last night.

She looked at him, at the side of his face in the light, calm in a way that felt almost distant, and realized she had never really known him at all.

"What if I'd died last night?"

Winslet was quiet for a moment. "That didn't happen," he said simply.

He stood, put the cup on the table, and paused at the door without turning around. "Rest. Don't go anywhere until you've healed."

Then he pushed the door open and walked out.

Riley sat alone on the bed as the room settled back into silence. She looked down at her bandaged arm, then up at the window.

Then she leaned back against the headboard and looked at nothing in particular.

---

Far away in Country M, Patrick lay in a hospital bed watching the sky outside go from pale gray to dark. Nurses came in twice to change his dressing and asked each time if he was in any pain. He said no. His left arm had been re-wrapped, the bandage clean with no blood seeping through.

His phone sat on the nightstand, lighting up now and then with messages from his assistant or app notifications. He checked it a few times. Still nothing from Vivian.

He was discharged the next afternoon. The wound had closed cleanly. The doctor told him to change the dressing on schedule and keep it dry.

He changed into fresh clothes, left the bloodstained jacket in the hospital trash, and called a car.

He didn't go back to his villa in Country M, or to the place he was renting. He had the driver take him to a warehouse district near the port, got out at the curb, and walked along a street he'd been to once before until he found a corrugated metal office tucked in among the warehouses.

He spent the whole afternoon there, and left with a list of names tied to the artifact theft, sourced from an informant. He didn't act on it right away. He went back to where he was staying and started pulling the threads on his laptop.

Two days of digging, and something felt off.

The names on the list looked unconnected, but their money led to the same place, all flowing into a single offshore account. The account holder's information was fake, but the transaction records were clean, every transfer a final payment on an artifact deal. These weren't people thrown together for one job. They were a long-running operation with clear roles and fixed channels at every level.

Patrick followed the account further and turned up several names that hadn't appeared on the list, but showed up in gray-area records in the art world as guarantors on multiple disputed artifact transactions. When he put it all together, the group was bigger than he'd expected, and the artifacts involved were far more than one or two pieces.

He sat at his desk looking at the screen full of data and records, and didn't move for a long time. The sutured wound on his left arm prickled faintly now and then, like a needle pressing lightly into the skin.

Then he picked up his phone and dialed.

It rang a few times before someone picked up. The other person didn't speak, just waited. Patrick paused for two seconds. "I found something. This is bigger than either of us thought. I can't handle it alone."