EMMA

Monte Carlo breathed excess.

The clink of crystal glasses, the whirl of roulette wheels, and the soft rustle of money changing hands blended into a kind of symphony, one you stopped noticing after a while if you lingered in it long enough.

I was twenty-three, dressed in silk that shimmered like liquid silver, my heels clicking against marble as I moved through the casino floor. The air reeked of champagne, cigar smoke, and arrogance. The scent of marks who thought themselves invincible.

They didn't know Laverna was in the room.

It was at the height of my legend then. Europe whispered my name like a dare, half in awe, half in frustration. Interpol knew me only through shadows and aliases. The tabloids occasionally hinted at me in hushed, speculative pieces, painting me as a ghost, a femme fatale who drifted through cities and vanished before dawn. And I played into it, because there was nothing more intoxicating than being untouchable.

I was there for a French industrialist that night. He was red-faced, sweating at the baccarat table, his glass of Bordeaux trembling in one hand as he lost more than the GDP of a small nation in a single hour. The watch on his wrist alone could have fed a neighborhood for a year.

I had already mapped my way in. His patterns, his tells, even the mistress he had hidden in a corner suite upstairs, while his wife stayed oblivious in a mansion somewhere.

My fingertips drifted over the padded velvet edge, feigning innocence as I leaned closer to the cards. But then I felt it. Eyes on me.

Not the usual greedy stares I had grown used to evading on the job, but sharper ones. Eyes that sharpened my sixth sense, assessing, dissecting.

I let my gaze slide sideways, careful not to spook my mark. And that was when I saw him.

He stood at the edge of the table, posture relaxed in a way that was too practiced, a glass of scotch hanging carelessly from his hand. He had neatly styled dirty blond hair, and his eyes, hazel but threaded with flecks of gold that caught and held the light, were fixed on me. The look in them was amused, curious, like he had been waiting for me all night.

He smiled and approached me carefully. When he spoke, it was low, smooth, with a British accent that I assumed turned heads without even trying.

"You'll never get him alone while he's losing this badly."

I didn't flinch, though my heart skipped a beat. He knew what I was. A con. And it took one to know one.

I should've looked away, slipped out, put as much distance between us as possible. He could ruin everything. But something in the way he kept watching pulled me in, and before I knew it, I was looking straight back at him.

"And you think you can do better?" I asked softly.

He smiled faintly, like someone who had already seen the last card. "Not better. But together, darling? Unstoppable."

I had never partnered with a stranger in my life. My cons worked because I controlled every detail, and I trusted only Eric. This man was an unknown variable, and unknowns got you caught.

But then he leaned a fraction closer. I caught the faint trace of his cologne, woody and warm, and noticed the precision in his movements. Not fumbling, not desperate. He carried himself like someone who had already read the room, and every player in it, including me.

And damn him, he was charming.

"I work alone," I said, sharp enough to cut.

"So do I." His eyes gleamed as he raised his glass in a mock toast. "But exceptions can be made... for the right company."

Our gazes turned when the mark slammed down his cards, cursing under his breath. The stranger, Adam Blake, as I would later learn, brushed my hand when he reached for his chips, the touch deliberate, sending a spark through me. And for the first time in years, I thought about letting someone else into my game.

By the end of the hand, we were moving as if we had rehearsed it. The mark was distracted, his wallet thinning by the minute, while I, against my better judgment, was already slipping into the gravity of Adam Blake's orbit.

It should have ended there. A job, a stranger, nothing more. But when the chips were down and he turned those golden-flecked eyes on me with a crooked smile, I knew I was already falling...

The industrialist left the casino red-faced and lighter by half a million euros, too drunk to realize what had happened. Adam and I drifted out minutes later, neither of us needing to say much. The con had flowed like music, effortless, seamless, as if we had done it a hundred times before.

Again, I told myself I should leave it there. Walk away, count my share, disappear like I always did. But instead, I found myself following him through the revolving doors of the Hôtel de Paris. His stride was unhurried, and his confidence was like a magnetic pull I couldn't shake.

He booked us a suite without hesitation. The kind with marble floors, velvet drapes, and a terrace that opened onto the lights of the harbor where yachts gleamed like stars in the dark.

He poured two glasses of champagne and slid one toward me. "To chance encounters," he said, raising his glass.

I should have resisted. I was already cataloguing escape routes, rehearsing excuses. I didn't trust strangers, especially not charming ones. But when I touched my glass to his, the fizz sharp on my tongue, his smile widened as if he had just won a bet.

"You knew I was a thief," I said finally, leaning back against the couch. "From the moment you saw me."

"Of course," he replied, utterly unbothered. "The way you watch a room, the way you never let anyone stand at your back, the way you pretend to laugh just enough to blend in. Amateur eyes wouldn't notice. But I did."

I met his hazel eyes and caught the way he was studying me, taking me apart piece by piece. And yet, there was something almost flattering in the precision of it.

"You're observant," I said dryly.

"I have to be," he answered, voice softening. "Where I grew up, not noticing got you killed."

And just like that, he shifted the ground under me, from suave to vulnerable in a single breath.

He told me about London, about the rough neighborhood he grew up in, about a father who walked out and a mother who died too young. About a mentor who taught him to fight and steal before teaching him to read. About betrayal, about debts, about survival. It was the kind of story that cracked open defenses, designed to make you see him as more than a thief.

I should've known better. But I was young, and he told it well.

"So that's why you do it?" I asked, my tone half-teasing. "Robbing men who never earned their fortunes? A Robin Hood of some kind?"

He tilted his head, the corner of his mouth tugging. "I like to think of it as... balance. The world's crooked, love. We just tip it back, even it out a little."

It was a lie. I could see that now. But in that moment, with the champagne, the harbor lights, and his hand brushing against mine like a promise, I wanted to believe it.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn't just the clever con who could make people fall for her on command. I was a woman who could be seen, understood, maybe even loved. And that was exactly how Adam Blake began to unravel me.

What began as a chance partnership in Monaco stretched into weeks, then months. Adam Blake was like a storm that swept me up before I knew how to resist it.

We lived like shadows in high society. Florence, one week, slipping into a gala beneath frescoed ceilings. Vienna, the next, ducking behind opera curtains while tuxedos and diamonds glittered all around us. Paris rooftops, Rome piazzas, Prague alleyways where the cobblestones echoed with our laughter.

He was magnetic in a way I had never seen before. When Adam walked into a room, people parted without realizing why. He played the gentleman thief to perfection—holding doors, pouring champagne, whispering wicked little observations about the powerful and corrupt. He made me feel like we were rewriting the rules of the world.

And for a while, I believed him.

The cons came easily, smoother even than anything I had pulled with Eric or our crew. Adam knew how to improvise, how to charm, how to weave himself into a lie so seamlessly that the mark didn't realize he had been cut until the bleeding started. He would glance at me mid-job, and I would know exactly what he meant without a word. It was intoxicating, being understood like that.

But not everyone was charmed.

Eric met him in Paris, and the tension was instant. My brother took one look at Adam, shook his hand, and afterward pulled me aside with a scowl carved deep into his face.

"He's bad news, Em," Eric said. "He's not like us."

I rolled my eyes, defensive. "You don't even know him."

"I don't need to," he shot back. "I see it. We take risks, sure, but him? He's different. I can smell a special kind of rot on him."

Heat flared under my skin because Adam hadn't laid a hand on me, hadn't even raised his voice at me. If anything, he was tender, gentler than anyone I had ever been with. He made me laugh; he made me feel alive. I didn't want to hear Eric's warnings.

"You're just jealous I found someone who can keep up with me," I said, words sharper than I intended.

Eric's jaw tightened. "Or maybe I'm the only one willing to say what you don't want to hear."

I walked away before he could say more, back into the hotel suite where Adam was uncorking a bottle of Bordeaux, his smile softening as I slipped into his arms.

For a long time, I clung to the version of him I wanted to believe in—the charming partner, the man who shared stolen secrets with me under foreign stars. But beneath the laughter, the champagne, the rooftops, and silk sheets, cracks had already begun to show, and I chose not to see them.

At first, it was small things. Easy to brush off, easy to excuse.

A night in Brussels when he vanished for hours, leaving me at the hotel bar with half a bottle of wine and a growing knot in my stomach. He came back before dawn, smelling of smoke and whiskey, his smile too sharp and eyes gleaming with the kind of euphoria that came after a big victory.

When I pressed, he only kissed me and said, "Trade secret, love."

Or the time in Madrid when a waiter spilled wine on his sleeve. Adam's eyes went cold, flat, before he laughed it off, but his grip on the man's wrist lingered a beat too long, tight enough to make the waiter pale. When the man hurried away, Adam chuckled like nothing had happened, but I couldn't shake the image of his fingers digging into bone.

And then there were the absences. Days when he simply wasn't there at all. No explanations, no calls, just a note scribbled on hotel stationery. Back soon. The first time, I told myself it was part of the life. The second time, I convinced myself he was running his own jobs, separate from ours. By the third, I stopped asking questions altogether, because I wasn't sure I wanted the answers.

Eric never let it go. "He disappears for days, Em. Deep down, you know that's not just the job. He's hiding something bigger."

I snapped at him again. "Not everyone plays by your rules, Eric. You don't like him; I get it. But that doesn't make him guilty of anything."

Eric's eyes were tired and sad when he answered. "One day, you'll see it. And when you do, I just hope it's not too late."

But I didn't want to see. I wanted the Adam who read me like a book across a crowded room, who made me laugh until my stomach hurt, who kissed me like the world might burn down tomorrow. I wanted the thrill, the fire, the part of me that still believed in fairy tales dressed up in diamond heists.

So I told myself the rest didn't matter. That the shadows in his eyes, the way he sometimes looked right through me, the smell of smoke and gunpowder clinging to his jacket were nothing more than the cost of loving a man who lived on the edge.

But the truth was... I never felt safe with Adam. Not really. He swept me into a haze, made me feel like I was living faster than anyone else. But being with him was like balancing on the edge of a blade, sharp and glittering, beautiful until the moment it cut.

And the cracks were already spreading. I just kept patching them over with denial... until the day denial went up in flames.