She cuts me off. “No, I’ll come back. I’ll find you. I knew you’d be nice, Cassel. I just knew it.”

  She brushes past me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her body. Moments later I hear her light step in the hall. I stand alone in the middle of my room for a long moment, trying to figure out what just happened.

  * * *

  The air has turned from chilly to the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and lives in your marrow. The kind of cold that keeps you shivering after you’ve come into a warm room, as if you have to shudder ice from your veins. I am almost to the library.

  “Hey,” someone calls from behind me. I know the voice.

  I turn.

  Lila’s standing at the edge of the grass, looking up. She’s wearing a long black coat, and when she speaks, her breath condenses in the air like the ghosts of unspoken words. She looks like a ghost herself, all black and white in the shadow of leafless trees. “My father wants to see you,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, and follow her. Just like that. I’d probably follow her off a cliff.

  She leads me to a silver Jaguar XK in the parking lot. I don’t know when she got the car—or her license—and I want to say something about that, offer her some kind of congratulations, but when I open my mouth, she gives me a look that makes me swallow the words.

  I get in quietly on the passenger side and take out my phone. The inside smells like spearmint bubble gum and perfume and cigarette smoke. A half-empty bottle of diet soda is resting in the cup holder.

  I take out my phone and text Daneca: Can’t make it 2nite.

  A few seconds later the phone starts ringing, but I set it to vibrate and then ignore it. I feel guilty for standing her up after making a promise to be more honest, but explaining where I am going—no less why—seems impossible.

  Lila looks over at me, half her face lit by a streetlight, blond lashes and the arch of her brow turned to gold. She’s so beautiful that my teeth hurt. In psychology class freshman year our teacher talked about the theory that we all have a “death instinct”—a part of us that urges us toward oblivion, toward the underworld, toward Thanatos. It feels exhilarating, like taking a step off the edge of a skyscraper. That’s how I feel now.

  “Where’s your dad?” I ask her.

  “With your mom,” Lila says.

  “She’s alive?” I am so surprised that I don’t have time to be relieved. My mother is with Zacharov? I don’t know what to think.

  Lila’s gaze finds mine but her smile gives me no comfort. “For now.”

  The engine starts, and we pull out of the parking lot. I see my own face reflected back in the curve of the tinted window. I might be going to my own execution, but I don’t look all that torn up about it.

  4

  WE DRIVE INTO THE basement garage, and Lila parks in a numbered spot next to a Lincoln Town Car and two BMWs. It’s a car thief’s dream lot, except for the fact that anyone who steals from Zacharov will probably get dropped off a pier with cement boots on.

  As Lila kills the engine, I realize that this will be the first time I’ve ever seen the apartment where she lives when she’s with her father. She was quiet on the drive, leaving me with plenty of time to wonder if she knows that I followed her yesterday, if she knows that I’m being recruited for the Licensed Minority Division, if she knows that I saw her order a hit or that I have Gage’s gun.

  To wonder if I’m about to die.

  “Lila,” I say, turning in my seat and putting my gloved hand on the dashboard. “What happened with us—”

  “Don’t.” She looks directly into my eyes. After a month of being forced to avoid her, I feel stripped bare by her gaze. “You can be as much of a charming bastard as you want, but you’re never going to bullshit your way into my heart again.”

  “I don’t want that,” I say. “I never wanted that.”

  She gets out of the car. “Come on. We have to get back to Wallingford before curfew.”

  I follow her into the elevator, trying to behave myself, trying to puzzle through her words. She pushes the P3 button. I guess the P stands for “penthouse,” because soon we are whirring up the floors so fast that my ears pop. She lets her messenger bag drop off her shoulder and hunches forward in her long black coat. For a moment she looks frail and tired, like a bird huddling against a storm.

  “How did my mother wind up here?” I ask.

  Lila sighs. “She did a bad thing.”

  I don’t know if that means working Patton or something else. I think about the reddish stone my mother was wearing on her finger the last time I saw her. I think too of a picture I found in the old house, of a much younger Mom decked out in lingerie and looking like Bettie Page—a picture obviously taken by a man who wasn’t my father and who might have been Zacharov. I have a lot of reasons to worry.

  The elevator doors open into a massive room with white walls, a black and white marble floor, and what looks like a Moroccan style wood ceiling at least eighteen feet above us. There’s no carpet, so the tap of our shoes echoes as we walk toward the lit fireplace on the opposite wall, flanked with sofas, and with two people mostly hidden by shadows. Three huge windows show Central Park at night, a patch of near blackness in the shimmering city surrounding it.

  My mother sits on one of the couches. She has an amber-colored drink in her hand and is wearing a filmy white dress I’ve never seen on her before. It looks expensive. I expect her to jump up, to be her usual exuberant self, but the smile she gives me is subdued, almost fearful.

  Despite that I nearly collapse with relief. “You’re okay.”

  “Welcome, Cassel,” Zacharov says. He’s standing by the fire, and when we get close, he crosses to where Lila is and gives her a kiss on the forehead. He looks like the lord of some baronial manor, rather than a seedy crime boss in a big Manhattan apartment.

  I incline my head in what I hope is a respectful nod. “Nice place.”

  Zacharov smiles like a shark. His white hair looks gold in the firelight. Even his teeth look golden, which reminds me uncomfortably of Gage and the gun taped to the wall of my closet. “Lila, you can go do your homework.”

  She touches her throat lightly—gloved fingers tracing the marks she took, the marks that make her an official member of his crime family, not just his daughter—rage in every line of her face. He barely notices. I’m sure he doesn’t realize that he just dismissed her like a child.

  My mother clears her throat. “I’d like to talk to Cassel alone for a moment, if that’s all right, Ivan?”

  Zacharov nods.

  She gets up and walks to me. Linking her arm with mine, she marches me down a hallway to a massive kitchen with ebony wood floors and a center island of a bright green stone that looks like it might be malachite. While I sit down on a stool, she puts a clear glass kettle on one of the burners. It’s eerie, the way she seems to know Zacharov’s apartment.

  I want to grab her arm to reassure myself that she’s real, but she’s moving restlessly, not seeming to notice me.

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m so glad that you—but how come you didn’t call us or—”

  “I made a big mistake,” Mom says. “Huge.” She takes a cigarette from a silver case, but instead of lighting it she sets it down on the counter. I’ve never seen her so agitated before. “I need your help, sweetheart.”

  I am uncomfortably reminded of Mina Lange. “We were really worried,” I say. “We didn’t hear from you for weeks, and you’re all over the news, you know? Patton wants your head.”

  “We?” she asks, smiling.

  “Me. Barron. Grandad.”

  “It’s nice to see you and your brother so close again,” she says. “My boys.”

  “Mom, you are on every news channel. Seriously. The cops are looking everywhere for you.”

  She shakes her head, waving away my words. “When I got out of prison, I wanted to make some quick money. It was hard, sweetheart, inside. I spent all the time when I wasn’t planning that appeal planning what I would do when I got out. I had a few favors to call in and a few things put away for a rainy day.”

  “Like?” I say.

  Her voice goes low. “The Resurrection Diamond.”

  I saw it on her finger. She wore it once, out to lunch, after Philip died. The stone’s a pretty distinctive color, like a drop of blood spilled into a pool of water. But even when I saw it, I thought I must have been mistaken, because even though I knew Zacharov wore a fake diamond on his tie pin, that didn’t mean he’d lost the original. And it certainly didn’t mean my mother had taken it.

  “You stole it?” I mouth, pointing to the other room. “From him?”

  “A long time ago,” she says.

  I can’t believe that she’s treating this so lightly. I keep my voice low. “Back when you were screwing him?”

  After all these years I think I’ve finally shocked her. “I—,” she starts.

  “I found a photo,” I say. “When I was cleaning out the house. The guy who took it was wearing the same ring that I saw Zacharov wearing in a picture at Grandad’s place. I wasn’t sure, but now I am.”

  Her gaze goes toward the other room, then back to me. She bites her lower lip, smearing lipstick on her teeth. “Yes, fine, back then,” she says. “One of those times. Anyway, I stole it and got a copy made of it—but I knew he would want the real one back, even after all this time. It doesn’t make him look good not to have the real one.”

  The understatement of the year. If you’re the head of a crime family, then, no, you don’t want people to find out that your most valuable possession was stolen. You certainly don’t want people to know that it was stolen years ago and you’ve been wearing a fake ever since. Especially if your most valuable possession is the Resurrection Diamond, which, according to legend, makes its wearer invulnerable; the loss of it is going to make you seem suddenly vulnerable. “Yeah,” I say.

  “So I thought I would sell it back to him,” Mom says.

  I forget to keep my voice down. “You what? Are you crazy?”

  “It was all going to be fine.” Now she puts the cigarette to her lips and leans into the burner on the stove to catch the edge of the flame. She inhales deeply, and embers flare. She blows smoke.

  The tea water is starting to boil. Her hand is shaking.

  “He doesn’t care if you smoke in the house?”

  She goes on without answering me. “I had a good plan. Worked through a middleman, everything. But it turned out that I didn’t have the real thing. The stone’s gone.”

  I just stare at her for a long moment. “So someone found yours and switched it out?”

  She nods quickly. “That must have been it.”

  This is turning into one of those stories where each new piece of information is so much worse than the thing before that I don’t want to ask for more details, but I am pretty sure there’s no way around it. “And?”

  “Well, Ivan might not have minded paying a little bit to get his property back, especially since he’d probably given up on getting the real thing returned to him. I think he would have just made the exchange. But when he found out the stone was a fake, well, he killed the middleman and found out I was behind it.”

  “How’d he find that out?”

  “Well, the way he killed the middleman was—”

  I hold up my hand. “That’s okay. Let’s skip that part.”

  She takes a deep drag from her cigarette and blows three perfect rings of smoke. When I was a kid, I loved those. I would try to pass my hand through them without the breeze from the movement blowing them apart, but it never worked. “So, Ivan—he was angry. Well, but he knows me, so he didn’t want to kill me right out. We have history. He told me I had to do a job for him.”

  “A job?”

  “The Patton job,” she says. “Ivan has always been interested in the government. He said that it was important to stop Proposition 2 from passing in New Jersey, because if it passed in one state then it could pass elsewhere. All I had to do was make Patton renounce it, and Ivan thought the whole thing would just collapse.…”

  I put a hand to my forehead. “Stop. Wait. It doesn’t make any sense! When did all this happen? Before Philip died?”

  The kettle starts to wail.

  “Oh, yes,” Mom says. “But you see, I blew it. The job. I didn’t manage to discredit Patton at all. In fact, I think I made the chance of Proposition 2 passing better than ever. But you know, sweetie, it’s never really been my thing—politics. I know how to make men give me things, and I know how to get away before things get too hot. Patton’s nosy aides were always asking questions and looking up things about me. That’s just not the way I work.”

  I nod numbly.

  “So now Ivan says I have to get the stone back. Only, I have no idea where it is! And he says he won’t let me leave until I give it back—but how can I give it back when I can’t even look for it?”

  “So that’s why I’m here.”

  She laughs, and for a moment she’s almost like herself. “Exactly, sweetheart. You’ll find the stone for Mommy, and then I’ll be able to come home.”

  Sure. She’ll be able to waltz right out of Zacharov’s apartment and into the waiting arms of every cop in New Jersey. But I nod again, trying to work through everything she’s said. “Wait. When I met you and Barron for sushi—the last time I saw you—you were wearing the ring. Had Zacharov already put you on the Patton job?”

  “Yes. I already told you. But I figured that since the diamond was a fake, I might as well wear it.”

  “Mom!” I groan.

  Zacharov appears in the doorway, a silver-haired shadow. He walks past both of us to the stove, where he clicks off the burner. Only when the kettle stops its screaming do I realize how loud it had became.

  “Are you two finished?” he asks. “Lila says it’s time for her to go back to Wallingford. If you’d like to go with her, I suggest you go now.”

  “One more minute,” I say. My palms are sweating inside my gloves. I have no idea where to even start looking for the real Resurrection Diamond. And if I don’t find it before Zacharov runs out of patience, my mother could wind up dead.

  Zacharov takes a long look at my mother and then me. “Quickly,” he tells us, heading back down the hallway.

  “Okay,” I say to my mother. “Where was the stone last? Where did you keep it?”

  She nods. “I hid it wrapped up in a slip in the back of a drawer of my dresser.”

  “Was it still there when you got out of prison? In the same exact place?”

  She nods again.

  My mother has two dressers, both of them blocked by huge piles of shoes and coats and dresses, many rotted through, most moth-eaten. The idea that someone went through all that and then her drawers seems unlikely—especially if they didn’t know to target the bedroom.

  “And no one else knew it was there? You didn’t tell anyone? Not in prison, not at any time? No one?”

  She shakes her head. The ash on her cigarette is burning long. It’s going to fall on her glove. “No one.”

  I think for a long moment. “You said you switched the stone with a fake. Who made the fake?”

  “A forger your father knew up in Paterson. Still in business, with a reputation for discretion.”

  “Maybe the guy made two forgeries and kept the real one for himself,” I say.

  She doesn’t look convinced.

  “Can you just write down his address?” I say, looking toward the hall. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  She opens a few drawers near the stove. Knives in a wooden block. Tea towels. Finally she finds a pen in a drawer full of duct tape and plastic garbage bags. She writes “Bob—Central Fine Jewelry” and the word “Paterson” on my arm.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” I say, giving her a quick hug.

  Her arms wrap around me, bone-achingly tight. Then she lets me go, turns her back, and throws her cigarette into the sink.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say. Mom doesn’t reply.

  I head into the other room. Lila is waiting for me, bag slung over her shoulder and coat on. Zacharov stands beside her. Both their expressions are remote.

  “You understand what you have to do?” he asks me.

  I nod.

  He walks us to the elevator. It’s right where other people would have front doors to their apartments. The outside of it is golden, etched with a swirling pattern.

  When the doors open, I look back at him. His blue eyes are as pale as ice.

  “Touch my mother, and I’ll kill you,” I say.

  Zacharov grins. “That’s the spirit, kid.”

  The doors close, and Lila and I are alone. The light overhead flickers as the elevator begins its descent.

  * * *

  We pull out of the garage and start toward the tunnel out of the city. The bright lights of bars and restaurants and clubs streak by, patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. Cabs honk. In Manhattan the night is just starting in all its smoky glory.

  “Can we talk?” I ask Lila.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so, Cassel. I think I’ve been humiliated enough.”

  “Please,” I say. “I just want to tell you how sorry—”

  “Don’t.” She flips on the radio, adjusting it past the news, where the host is discussing Governor Patton’s terminating the employment of all hyperbathygammic individuals in government positions, whether or not they’ve been convicted of a crime. She leaves it on a channel blasting pop music. A girl is singing about dancing inside someone else’s mind, coloring their dreams. Lila cranks it up.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” I yell over the music.

  “I’m going to hurt you if you don’t shut up,” she shouts back. “Look, I know. I know it was awful for you to have me crying and begging you to be my boyfriend and throwing myself at you. I remember the way you flinched. I remember all the lies. I’m sure it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing for both of us.”

  I press the radio button, and the car goes abruptly silent. When I speak, my voice sounds rough. “No. That’s not how it was. You don’t understand. I wanted you. I love you—more than I have ever loved anyone. More than I ever will love anyone. And even if you hate me, it’s still a relief to be able to tell you. I wanted to protect you—from me and the way I felt—because I didn’t trust myself to keep remembering that it wasn’t really—that you didn’t feel like I— Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re embarrassed. I’m sorry I embarrassed you. I hope I didn’t— I’m sorry I let things go as far as they did.”