Till Con Do Us Part, A Last Con Gone Wrong

Sienna

I was supposed to con the billionaire. One last job, one file copied from his computer, and then I would take back my real name and never wear anyone else’s again. Instead, he turned on the light and found me at his desk, and he did not reach for his phone to call the police. He offered me a choice I should have refused: prison, or ninety days wearing his ring as his fiancée. I said yes, and I told myself it was because I had no other way out. But I have spent nine years lying for a living, and I have never been very good at lying to myself. It all began at an airport carousel, with a stranger and a suitcase that wasn’t his.

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Sienna Sinclair had three rules for a final job, and a stranger at carousel six broke all of them in under four minutes.

Rule one: arrive forgettable. Rule two: never make a scene. Rule three: never, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.

At 11:42 p.m., Ravenhurst International had the stale, over-caffeinated hush of an airport at the tail end of a bad-weather day. Rain hammered the terminal glass. Flight 418 from Denver had landed ninety minutes late, and the crowd around the carousel had curdled into a tight-lipped huddle of people who wanted their beds.

Sienna stood at the edge of it in a gray cardigan and a pair of thin silver glasses she did not need, holding herself the way Natalie Reeve would: shoulders slightly rounded, slightly apologetic, a woman from Dayton who said sorry to furniture. She had been Natalie for eleven hours. She had practiced the flat Ohio vowels on the plane, murmuring to the window until the man beside her stopped pretending not to listen.

She was also counting, because she could not make herself stop. Four cameras. Two exits. One off-duty officer eating pretzels beside the vending machines. A man in an airline vest who kept checking his phone instead of the belt, which meant the belt would not be fixed soon, which meant everyone here would be angrier in ten minutes than they were now.

Her phone buzzed against her hip.

Car at door four. Don’t dawdle, darling. Last one.

Sienna read it twice, once more than she needed to. Helen had called other jobs the last one before, after the second and again after the third, but this time Sienna had done the math. Nine years of being other people. One more name to wear, and then she would take her own back and never set it down again.

She typed Almost out and put the phone away before the warmth of Helen’s approval could finish spreading through her chest. That warmth was a leash. She knew it was a leash. She still liked how it felt.

The carousel shuddered, and bags began to tumble down the chute. Hers came around on the fourth pass: black, hard-shelled, one wheel slightly crooked, and identical to roughly half the luggage on the belt. She stepped in, hooked the handle, and pulled.

A hand closed over the handle an inch from hers.

“I believe that’s mine.”

The voice was low, unhurried, and absolutely certain, the voice of a man who had never been contradicted at carousel six or anywhere else. Sienna looked up past a rain-dark charcoal overcoat, a loosened tie, and a jaw that could have cut glass, and into gray eyes that were appraising her the way a buyer appraises a used car.

Natalie Reeve smiled apologetically. “Oh, sorry. I think there’s been a mix-up. This one’s mine.”

“It has your hand on it,” he agreed. “It also has mine. Which of us do you think the airline will believe?”

Sienna’s smile stayed exactly where it was, which cost her something. “Whichever of us isn’t arguing with a stranger over luggage.”

“I haven’t raised my voice.”

“You haven’t had to. You’re doing it with your whole face.”

Something happened at the corner of his mouth, there and gone. “Let go of the bag.”

“You first.”

“It’s black, hard-shell, with a bad wheel. It’s mine.”

“That’s every bag. Look around, half this carousel is your bag.” She tugged. He did not move. “You’re tired, I’m tired, so why don’t you go find your own and—”

“I’m not going anywhere until it’s been checked.”

“Checked for what? You don’t even know what’s in it.”

“Neither do you,” he said, “if you’re willing to hand it to the first person who asks.”

That was when the officer arrived. He had abandoned his pretzels and crossed the terminal with the unhurried menace of a man who had waited all night for something to do. His name tag read DUNNE.

“Problem, folks?”

“This woman has my bag,” said the man.

“This man,” said Sienna, “has his hand on mine.”

Dunne looked at them, then at the suitcase, then sighed through his nose. “You got a claim stub, ma’am?”

She produced it from her coat pocket. Number 4471, matching the tag looped through the handle, with Reeve, N. — Dayton scrawled across the back in the gate agent’s cramped hand.

“Sir?”

“My assistant handles that,” the man said.

Of course he did. Something in Sienna went bright and smug. “Then your assistant should be here to identify it.”

“Then we open it,” said Dunne. “Both of you say what’s inside, and whoever’s right keeps it.”

Her stomach dropped, briefly and professionally. Behind the lining, under a seam that had taken her an hour to stitch, were two passports, a burner phone, and a roll of tools no schoolteacher from Dayton would own. Dunne would never find them unless he cut the fabric. But he would look, and the man beside her would look harder.

Fine. Every job Helen had ever sent her on began with the same lesson: the top layer of a suitcase is a stage, not a bag. Nobody searches deeper than a story they already believe.

She unzipped it herself and let Natalie Reeve spill out. A second gray cardigan, because Natalie owned two. A travel pillow printed with tiny owls. A phone charger frayed at the neck. A plush rabbit with a bent ear (“for my niece, Maddie, she’s six”). And a paperback novel with a bookmark pressed about halfway through.

“Well,” Dunne said, “that’s you, ma’am. Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

“Wait.”

The man had not glanced at the cardigan or the rabbit. He picked up the paperback and thumbed it open at the bookmark. “What page are you on, Ms. Reeve?”

“Two hundred twelve.”

“Who’s the letter from?”

Sienna’s pulse made one hard, clean beat. She had read the back cover on the plane, and the first chapter. She had not read page two hundred twelve, because there was no reason on earth for anyone to ask. She said, in Natalie’s gentlest voice, “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

“Spoil it.”

“Marianne burns it,” she said, and held his gaze. “Obviously.”

He read the page. It took him a long moment. Then he closed the book, ran his thumb down its spine, and held it up so only she could see it: smooth, glossy, and uncreased, the spine of a book that had never been opened further than its first chapter.

“She burns it,” he told Dunne, without looking away from her. “She was right.”

“I read it on my phone first,” Sienna said, “and bought the paper copy for my shelf. Some of us like a book twice.”

“Mm,” said the man.

Behind them, the carousel gave one last groan and delivered a final black, hard-shelled suitcase with a bad wheel. Dunne checked the stub in his hand against its tag. “That one yours, sir?”

The man looked at it for a moment. “Apparently.”

Sienna let the silence stretch. “I’d love to hear the apology, whenever you’re ready.”

“You’ll hear it.” He handed her back the paperback. “You grabbed that bag with the handle and your whole forearm. Most people who’ve been burned by a stranger do.”

“And you,” she said, because she had never been able to leave a point lying on the floor, “took hold of it like a man who’s never had to learn where the weight sits. People who carry their own luggage take the handle. People who don’t take the bag.”

For one second he looked genuinely, unguardedly surprised, and then he laughed, a single short sound as if it had been surprised out of him. It changed his entire face. It was the most inconvenient thing she had ever seen.

“I was wrong about the bag, Ms. Reeve,” he said.

“Say it again. Slower.”

“I was wrong about the bag.” He collected his own suitcase from the belt, and then paused with his hand on the handle. “Dayton,” he said, as if tasting the word. “Funny. You don’t sound like you’ve ever been there.”

Then he was gone, a dark coat cutting through the crowd toward the doors, a phone lighting in his hand. She caught the glow of the screen before he silenced it: A — 7 missed calls.

Sienna stood very still with her own suitcase and the rain hammering the windows, and her heart beating like it was trying to leave.

She had been called a liar by experts. Nobody had ever been right about it so lightly.

And she hated, with a clean and total hatred, that she had noticed how his voice dropped when he was about to be right. She hated that she had noticed his eyes. Most of all she hated that she had enjoyed it. Out of every man in Ravenhurst, why did it have to be that face, the one her brain refused to put down?

Rule three. She would be fine. She would never see him again.

Helen’s townhouse on Alder Row looked like a place where nothing bad had ever happened, which was why it was useful.

She was waiting in the study, in cream cashmere, with a glass of white wine she would not finish and a manila folder on the desk in front of her. Forty-seven years old, and she looked as though she had stopped counting at thirty-nine. When Sienna came in, dripping, Helen’s whole face softened.

“There’s my girl.”

It was ridiculous what that did to her. Nine years, and Sienna still stood a little straighter.

Helen studied her for a moment. “You’re rattled.”

“I’m tired.”

“You tuck your left hand into your sleeve when you lie, darling. You have since you were fourteen.” Helen smiled. It was a kind smile, and it was the worst thing in the room. “Sit. Tell me, or don’t. But after tonight you’ll want to hear this first.”

She slid the folder across the desk. Sienna opened it.

The man from carousel six looked up at her from the photograph. He wore a charcoal suit instead of a wet overcoat, and he was not smiling, and his face held the exact expression he had worn while holding up the spine of her book. Beneath the photo, in Helen’s upright handwriting: KADE BLACKWELL. CEO, Blackwell Logistics. 28. Unmarried. Trusts no one.

The room tilted by about two degrees.

“There’s a file,” Helen was saying, from somewhere very far away. “The Meridian Protocol. It lives on his personal computer and nowhere else. I want it. Then you’re free, Sienna. Truly.”

Sienna closed her left hand around the edge of the folder, so that her sleeve could not take it. “I met him.”

Helen’s pen, which had been moving, stopped. “When?”

“Forty minutes ago. Carousel six. He thought I had his suitcase.” A short, strange laugh escaped her. “He asked me what page I was on. He told me I didn’t sound like I was from Dayton.”

She watched Helen’s face. She watched it very closely, because she had spent nine years learning to read it, and she wanted to see the alarm come.

It did not come. Helen sat quite still, and what crossed her face was not fear. It was the look of a woman who had been holding a coin in the air and had just watched it land on the side she wanted.

“Then Natalie Reeve is finished,” Helen said. “Aurora Jett begins tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? He saw my face. He’ll know me.”

“Then he’ll see it again, and you’ll make sure it’s a different one.” Helen turned a page in the folder, and a second photograph slid into view: a woman in her mid-thirties, neat and unsmiling, standing in front of a glass door. “Roseline Wilbur. Kade’s assistant for six years. She resigns tomorrow morning at nine.”

Sienna looked at the photograph, then at the clock, which said twenty-five minutes past midnight. “Does she know that?”

“No,” said Helen pleasantly. “Not yet.”

Somewhere in Ravenhurst, a woman was asleep with no idea that her life was about to be rearranged by someone she had never met. And Sienna, who had been taught long ago never to ask Helen a question she was not ready to hear answered, closed the folder and said nothing at all.

Author's note:

Sienna broke all three of her rules in under four minutes, and the man at carousel six noticed every one of them. Which rule would you have broken first? And be honest: would you have let go of the suitcase?

Tell me in the comments. I'm reading and replying to every one.