Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

the second handhold, an uneven block. It hurt to let them take her bodyweight.

“Don’t do this to me, Talia. Tyler will blame me if you fall, fair dinkum.”

“Yes, he will. Fair dinkum.” She let out an indelicate grunt and kicked a toe into another crack. “And then the team will have two funerals on their hands.”

She heard him moving above, grumbling to himself as he worked closer. “Of all the pigheaded, obstinate little dingbat . . .” He stopped complaining and started coaching. “Right. Here we go. Move your right inward. No. Farther inward. Up a little. There. That’s the one.”

So it went. Talia navigated two more handholds and two more footholds before the ledge and Finn were within arm’s reach. Except they weren’t. Her fingernails scraped the stone a full inch below her goal.

“Close. Give it another go. You’ve gotta really commit.”

“Like I’m not fully committed already.” She tried again, and in the effort, her right foot slipped. “Finn!”

He caught her wrist. “Gotcha.”

His strength surprised her, despite everything she’d seen him do in the past. Kneeling on a lip of stone less than twice the width of his knee, the thief lifted Talia to the ledge. She sat beside him, back pressed into the wall, breathing hard.

“That was stupid.” Finn turned to sit beside her.

“No argument here.”

“Then why take the risk?”

“You looked like you needed some company.”

Neither spoke for a long while. Finn seemed to have no inclination. Talia needed the time to lower her heart rate. Frogs chirped in the reeds below. A fish splashed in the river.

When she finally spoke, Talia kept her eyes forward. Any movement might spoil her balance. “It could have happened to any of us.”

“But it happened to me. I should’ve listened to Tyler’s warning. I wasn’t prepared for everything the job could throw at me.”

“None of us are ever fully prepared. Wasn’t that his point? That’s why we have each other. And don’t listen to Val. She’s only trying to get under your skin—the whole grifter–cat-burglar rivalry. You’ll have the next laugh.”

Finn laid his head back. “You only got in the way. Those words. They . . .”

“They what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Men. The Farm had given Talia the world’s best training in information extraction, whether through coercion or conversation. Yet here, she was at a loss. “Look. I almost fell to my death getting up to this ledge. The least you can do is tell me why you’re taking this so hard.”

“The problem isn’t Val, okay? It’s Tyler and this whole do-gooder plan of his.”

Talia took the risk of rolling her head to look at him. “You don’t like doing good?”

“No . . . Yes.” Finn sighed. “You don’t understand.”

“Then help me get there. Draw me a map.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m afraid.”

What an insane thing to say while sitting two stories up on a ten-inch ledge. “A week ago you fought a bar full of Russians. A few days after we met, you jumped from a weather balloon in the middle of a mesospheric electrical storm with rockets strapped to your legs.” Both to keep me safe, she didn’t say. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

“Heights and explosions become commonplace with enough practice. Other fears aren’t so easy to bury.” He paused for a few heartbeats. “My dad died when I was young, like yours. I never told you. Know what he died of?”

She expected him to say a parachuting accident or in a shootout with the police.

“Shame, Talia. My old man died of shame. Night guard. Janitor. Bricklayer. He couldn’t hold a job. We wound up in a trailer park on the south side of Melbourne. He drank. So did Mom. At ten years old I started shoplifting to help put food and booze on the table.”

Ouch. “I’m sorry, Finn.”

“The cops came to the house once a week. Dad and Mom fought like tazzies about it, until one night she didn’t come home. I ran off too. Did my first B’n’E. A condo in a rich beach neighborhood.” Finn lowered his head, bending so far forward Talia worried he might fall. “I filled my pockets with every scrap of coin, cash, and ice I could lay my hands on and brought it home to Dad the next night to show him my big score.”

“What did he say?”

“Mom was still gone, out with the super, I think. The lights wouldn’t come on, so I grabbed the electric torch from the kitchen drawer . . .”

“And your dad?”

“I found him in the tub, wearing his bathrobe and holding the toaster in his lap.” Finn sat back again. “I can still smell the burning hair. The man couldn’t keep his job or his wife. He’d fathered a little thief. Like I said, he died of shame. I’m the one who pushed him over the edge.”

“You can’t blame yourself, Finn.”

He didn’t answer, and Talia bit her lip. She sensed there was more he needed to get out. “Help me understand. What does your dad’s suicide have to do with Tyler?”

“Don’t you get it? Dad gave up. Mom had her boyfriends. I was on my own.” He pounded his chest. “Just me. If I died jumping from a mountainside, I died. If I went to prison for a heist, no big deal. No one would care. No one would be hurt.”

“Until Tyler made you part of a family again.”

His eyes were glossy in the moonlight. “Tyler is a new kind of father, in this Fabian-became-a-preacher-man sort of way. But I’m afraid of failing him like I failed my dad. And if I’m honest, I’m afraid of failing you too. That’s what all the princess and your highness stuff is really about.” Finn shook his head. “Today I failed you both.”

Her mind spun. For months, from the moment she’d first seen him signing autographs for snow bunnies, Finn had been this two-dimensional person—always cocky, wearing his You must be thrilled to be in my presence smirk. But in the last week Talia had met a new version of him.

Trembling, mostly from her fear of