The door to the housekeeper's house opened, and I drew in a breath sharply as two men exited the building and walked toward the car.
"Guests," Iver said, looking at me. He paused. "And...wait a minute. You know who they are."
I shook my head, and swallowed hard. "I don't."
"Don't lie to me," he said. "Or have you forgotten I can read people? The expression on your face says it all."
"It's nothing," I said. "No one." I put the car in drive, ready to blow past the two of them and out of there, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Instead, I just sat, my gaze fixed on Silas. I watched him pull open the driver's side door and get inside, and the tail lights came on. When the car backed out of the driveway, I paused.
The little voice inside of my head, the reasonable one, told me it was a stupid idea to follow him.
Don't do it, I thought. Let him go.
"I can see what you're about to do," Iver said. "And if you think for a moment I'm going to let you tail someone who's not involved in this job because of a personal reason, without knowing all of the sordid details, you don't know me well enough at all."
I ignored Iver and rolled the car down the road slowly, far enough behind Silas that he wouldn't see us.
If there was one thing I knew how to do, it was tail someone.
It was one of my lessons when I was growing up. By the time I was eight, I was skilled in the art of pickpocketing. My father had taught me his card tricks, and by ten, I’d mastered poker and could hustle a game of pool. I’d been involved as a prop in most of my parents’ cons, but by adolescence, I was actually good at it.
Really good.
My parents were proud. Deception and evasion were second nature to me. Evading a tail was as instinctive as breathing. Tailing someone without being seen took a little longer.
My upbringing hadn’t exactly been normal. It had been highly unusual. And by unusual, I meant pretty fucked up by most people’s standards. While other kids learned to read and write, I learned the Three Card Monty and the art of pickpocketing.
Some kids learned the Golden Rule, I learned the Grifter's Code.
My father’s hand flew up to my wrist, as quick as lightning, and he looked down at me with a grin, his gold tooth glinting in the sunlight. "Gotcha."
"Crap." I yanked my hand back, and tucked it in the pocket of my jacket, tattered and worn.
"Hannah Wilde," he said, looking at my mother. "Your child just made an excessively clumsy attempt to lift my wallet."
"My child?" My mother was in front of the house, sitting in a rocking chair, newspaper held up close to her face. She folded down the edge, then peered over it at us. "Tempest's pickpocketing skills are more similar to yours than to mine."
My father looked down at me and winked. "Better luck next time," he said. "You need more practice. You're already eight years old. You should be smoother than that."
I sighed and kicked at the pebble on the ground under my shoe. "Come on, dad," I said. "When can I try it, for real?"
"You can try it when you're ready," he said. "And only then. If I can catch you, it means you're not ready."
I followed him up to the front porch of the house where we were staying. It wasn't our house, of course. It was a scam. We were squatting, pretending to be the relatives of the owners. We'd been there for two weeks.
"Dad?" I asked.
He sat down on the porch, then pulled out a deck of cards and began shuffling them, the cards flying through the air in a blur. I sat in front of him, mesmerized as I always was by the movement.
"I like it here," I said.
He didn't respond, just kept shuffling, his fingers flying.
"Could we just stay here?" I asked.
My mother looked over her newspaper at me. "You mean, like regular people?"
I nodded, the thought of being a regular person - someone with a house and friends, someone who stayed in one place - like something out of a dream.
"You're not meant to be a regular person, you hear me?" my father said, pausing his card shuffle. He laid three cards out on a small table between us, then gestured toward me. "Sit. You're a grifter, understand that? It's your birthright. You want to work for someone else your whole life? Be a slave to the system?"
I exhaled heavily. "No," I said. I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded bad. "But we could stay in one place. We wouldn't have to move so much."
My father gave me a long look. "And what? Find the Queen,” he ordered, pausing for a moment while he waited for me to pick a card, which I did, incorrectly. “You put down roots, you die. It's as simple as that. There's no staying in one place for people like us. You're a wanderer. It's in your blood. The people that work for the man, they're getting conned. The people that own the businesses, they're the real cons."
I pointed to the middle card.
No roots. Traveling was in my blood.