Page 8 of The Bounty
Good. Blaine trusted him, at least enough to handle being in the line of fire for him. “How much am I authorized to bid?”
“Five million US dollars.”
Wags whistled low. “Forgery is a profitable business.”
“Judging by that deposit you made recently, so is bounty hunting. Good thing too. You didn’t have much left.”
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. No use lying. Blaine had clearly seen his account’s balance. And as the car neared their destination, there were other particulars they needed to sort, including his conflicting missions. “I’m not supposed to be at this event to participate,” he told Blaine.
“What was your role?”
“To observe, then bring you in.”
“You’ll do the second.”
Wags leaned forward in his seat, eyeing the line of cars dropping off folks in impossibly finer threads than the ones he wore. “And the first?”
“Leave that to me.”
He straightened. “How?”
“I’ll get in touch with Jax. You just get me that diary.”
Seven
“Four-point-seven-five,” the auctioneer repeated from the pulpit, and as Wags lowered his paddle for the umpteenth time in less than ten minutes, he worried his pounding heart would beat out of his chest.
Four million, 750 thousand US dollars.
Phil was an interior designer. Wags had accompanied his ex to estate auctions before, but no bid for staging furniture had ever come close to the amounts being offered for Claudia Anthony’s diary.
And no estate sale they’d attended had ever been this dangerous.
Wags sat alone on a pew in one of Vienna’s oldest churches, a small Romanesque structure in Old Town. Scattered among the other pews were mobsters, mercs, and dirty politicians. Associates of Charles’s that Wags recognized from case files. One of Catherine’s minions, a snooty French woman he’d questioned last year. An abhorrent American television news personality who, Wags assumed, was there on Stewart’s behalf. High-ranking officials in the Austrian government. Representatives from the triads, the Yakuza, and the Sicilian Mafia. And on the pew across the aisle from Wags, the two Bratva soldiers from Friday night sat on either side of an older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair and a younger woman in a form-fitting black dress, her knee-high leather boots as shiny as her fall of glossy black hair.
All of them knew who he was, Wags was certain, and the inherent danger fueled the adrenaline coursing through his veins. It had been years since he’d felt this alive, and as Catherine’s stand-in raised her paddle again—4.8 million—the stakes ratcheted higher.
And higher again, the Russians bidding 4.9.
Before Wags could even lift his paddle, the American beat him to Blaine’s max—five million.
Which was eclipsed the next second by the Russians going to 5.5.
“Fuck,” Wags cursed under his breath. He yanked the burner out of his pocket, preparing to text Blaine, when the phone vibrated in his hand, a message appearing in the chat they’d started earlier.
10mil end this now
He shot his paddle into the air before he could second-guess himself or Blaine. “Ten million.”
Gasps echoed around the room, and the elder Russian leaned forward, glancing around his guard, his dark-blue eyes narrowed. Wags held his stare, meeting the challenge, blood whooshing in his ears, until the older man conceded with a nod. Smiling, the Russian straightened and laid a hand over the woman’s, holding her paddle down.
They were out. And so was everyone else. Thank fuck.
“Going once, going twice,” said the auctioneer, before announcing, “Sold to Mr. Barrow.”
Wags’s sigh of relief was interrupted by the auctioneer’s assistant appearing at the end of his pew. “Will you be bidding on anything else, sir?”
Wags shook his head. “Think I’ve spent enough,” he told the assistant, affecting the Texas drawl to match his ID.
