Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Just a millisecond. That’s all it took before it was gone.
“We’re leaving California tomorrow,” I reminded Hailey. “It’ll be okay.” I was ready to get the hell out of there. To start the next job.
It’s always about the next job, bug, I heard my mom’s voice in my head.
Hailey turned more to me. She squinted at me through rain and tears. “What if we don’t?”
“Don’t what?” I blinked through confusion.
“Don’t go to Seattle.”
To the next job, she meant.
My stomach tossed like it had earlier that night. I glanced back down at the inside of my thigh, expecting to see more blood, but it really was gone.
Now she squeezed my hand. The desperation in the strength of her fingers clung against my heart. “We could retire, Phebs.”
“We’re twenty-four. I don’t think we’re in a position to retire.” I held my Hermès purse over Hailey’s head as an umbrella, so the rain would stop pelting her face.
She looked simultaneously thankful and distraught.
We weren’t trust fund children with loaded bank accounts, but growing up, we’d experienced wealth like we were daughters of neurosurgeons and tech moguls. A Bugatti for two weeks. Penthouse suite at a five-star luxury hotel for a month. Two-grand rib eye with shaved black truffle for dinner.
There were times the fantasy would pop, and we’d reconvene at a Holiday Inn like regular middle-class folk, but only for short moments. One night or two.
Our lives were always fantasies, and our parents taught us how to construct them and then rebuild when they started to crack.
Money would flow in heaps and go out just as fast. Be flashy enough to maintain appearances but not enough to cause attention. Wear the designer dress. Drive the car that’d elicit your neighbor’s envy. Pick up the thousand-dollar tab once to show you can.
Insulate yourself in the “right” social circles.
When we became adults, things shifted a bit. Instead of playing with private school kids at some rich family’s mansion for an afternoon, I could now attend an exclusive nightclub with VIP bottle service. Or the strip club that B-list celebrities frequented.
Only, I wasn’t just partying the night away but seducing someone out of a few grand. Felt a lot different than batting my eight-year-old innocent eyes at the unsuspecting elite.
The marks tended to be affluent assholes, and as a kid I liked to believe we were Robin Hood—stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. But we weren’t. We just gave to ourselves, and I was mostly a prop for my mom’s long cons. There to give her backstory—sometimes as my doting mother, other times as my kind aunt or selfless guardian—more credibility.
By the time I was a teenager, I was no longer a shill. A prop. I had more responsibility and a bigger role to play. Long cons were always the bread and butter that kept us thriving. Short cons were like practice and a way to travel from A to B: conning someone out of a hundred bucks in sixty seconds, shortchanging a cashier.
Anyway, after all our families did to live this fabulous lifestyle, my savings didn’t see much reward. It was never about saving money for some brighter future.
We were supposedly already living the “brighter” future. Our line of work is ethically and morally questionable and borderline corrupt, but it’s not like we robbed banks. Most of the time, we just . . . tricked people. Into believing our fantasies.
Our lies.
But still, I listened closely to Hailey at that rainy bus stop like I understood what she was saying already. Even if the concept seemed far-fetched.
“Retiring is the wrong word,” she whispered, but no one was around us. Barely any cars zoomed past our stretch of road. “More like . . . starting over. Like really starting over, from the beginning.” Her mascara-smudged eyes were pleading with me. “Phebs.” Her voice fractured. Despite her goth wardrobe and her unapproachable aura that radiated toward strangers, I’d seen Hailey cry plenty of times in our lives.
She cried over a turtle she ran over.
She cried when Romeo and Juliet died in the 1968 film.
She cried and cursed after breaking her pinky in a doorjamb.
And now she was crying from the fucked-up Carlsbad job.
I hated seeing her this distraught. Tears of my own threatened to rise, and I was trying—God, I was really trying to see what she saw. A way out? I’d never considered it.
I never wanted it.
“We can do the normal thing,” she said. “The way that normal people do.”
I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t see. “Hails—”
“We can. I know we can. We don’t have to keep doing this. We don’t. You and me—let’s leave together.”
My eyes stung, and I looked around for answers that I still couldn’t see. Not like her.
“Inertia,” she whispered a life-changing word into the rain, one that swung my head back to her.