A Brilliant Deception Read Online Free Page A

out, his sneakers squeaking faintly on the polished floor.
    “Do you need anything, Mom?” I asked, pulling up the blanket that was rumpled at the foot of her bed and tucking it around her. “Are you okay?” I wasn’t talking about physically, and we both knew it. “How do you feel?”
    She sighed and took a few deep breaths. “Well, I feel rather stupid, for one thing. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    “Templeton told me what happened,” I said.
    “I thought I could reason with the thief,” she confessed.
    I looked down at the bandage covering her left shoulder. I cringed, thinking of a bullet ripping through my mother’s flesh. Templeton had filled me in on what had happened, exactly, as I’d raced to the airport in LA.
    My mom had been at a museum after hours, helping clean up after a benefit dinner, when someone detected a break-in. Instead of calling the police, like normal people would do, she went to investigate, and see if she could stop it.
    In the process, the perpetrator shot her.
    “Who was it?” I demanded of Templeton. My first thought was someone with Caliga Rapio, the ruthless organization of unscrupulous, violent thieves. The thought of it made my stomach curdle.
    But it was worse than that. Much worse.
    “He was one of ours,” Templeton said. “He works with AB&T.”
    “ What? ”
    “Apparently it was self-defense. He was startled. You might have done the same thing, Catherine.”
    Those words echoed in my ears now, looking down at my mom in the hospital bed. It was a punch in the stomach. A small part of me wondered—was it true?
    I was a criminal, too. I was part of the underground world that produced people who shot unarmed fifty-nine-year-old women who interrupted their crime-in-progress.
    Being a thief was the one thing in the world that made me feel truly special. It was my unique talent in the world, and it made me feel alive. And I had always justified my choice of profession by keeping a set of ethics—my Thief’s Credo. Besides, I was merely playing a role in what I call the Secret Sport of Kings. Stealing one another’s goodies has long been a pastime of the überrich. Right or wrong, it’s part of the fabric of our society.
    But now—well, that justification felt rather thin.
    “Why would you do it, Mom? Didn’t you think of the danger?”
    “No, Catherine. I didn’t.”
    I was desperate to understand. Why would she take such a risk? One possibility had occurred to me, and it was gnawing away at my insides. Had she grown overconfident in the past year, because of her involvement in my line of work?
    The trouble was, my mom considered herself my business manager, which probably made her feel overconfident, like she was part of the criminal world. I had allowed this little fiction because she seemed to get so much pleasure from it, and it gave her something to do. I imagine she felt like she knew criminals. She understood burglars, and how they worked.
    But while I’m aware of the dangers in my chosen profession, I’m not sure if my mother is. Or was. Maybe I hadn’t done enough to warn her of the very real risk. I didn’t routinely carry a firearm, but there were many thieves and criminals who did. Had I neglected to make sure she knew that?
    It all added up to one inescapable truth. This incident was my fault.
    The world tilted and my head swam as the guilt threatened to overwhelm me. I hadn’t protected my mom from this. I’d let her become involved with my little underworld. It was careless and stupid.
    I gazed away from my mother to stare at the bleeping machines next to her, pretending to study the lights and the flow of fluid through the IV tubes.
    “There’s something more,” my mother said. A cloud of worry and unhappiness moved across her face.
    “It’s okay, Mom, we don’t need to talk about this stuff right now. You need some rest.”
    “No. This is important.”
    I put my hand on hers. Her skin felt cool, her bones delicate and thin