All This Could End by Steph Bowe Read Free Book Online Page A

a lot easier to get away with, especially on short notice.
    Sophia shuffled the cards around. ‘Pick the queen.’ She grinned at Nina. Nina pointed a card out and Sophia flipped it. ‘You’re too good at this.’
    ‘You always do the same patterns.’
    ‘I’m trying to make it easy for you.’
    ‘You’re supposed to make the queen appear in my pocket or something, aren’t you? I mean, if we’re going to have a magic show. Or make it appear in your pocket, if we’re going to rip people off.’
    Sophia laughed. ‘We won’t be magicians; we’ll be illusionists. You’d be wonderful at it, Nina. Why stop at card tricks? We could perform death-defying stunts. Wouldn’t that be fun?’
    ‘I don’t really imagine myself as a Criss Angel type.’
    Tom arrived back in the cafe. He sat down beside Sophia and took a wallet from his pocket. ‘Here we go,’ he said excitedly.
    ‘You know, I named you after your grandfather, Tom?’ Sophia smiles. ‘He would’ve been very proud of you kids.’ She unfolded the black, square wallet, riffled through the contents, and then glanced at Tom, frowning. ‘Forty dollars, Thomas?’
    ‘He looked rich, I swear.’
    ‘Go drop it somewhere.’
    ‘ Mum ,’ he moaned. ‘What about the credit cards?’
    ‘Don’t be silly. Credit card use is too easily traced. I like a challenge, but that’s just foolish. Have another go. Practice makes perfect.’
    He shared a sullen look with Nina. Sophia ignored them, handed the wallet back to Tom, and he left, back into the packed streets of the inner city.
    ‘Mum, I think this is a bit unsubtle. The cafe is filled with people. Isn’t someone going to notice?’
    ‘Everyone is way too caught up in their own lives to pay any attention to anyone else. This is what makes life an incredibly isolating experience and a lot of illegal things very easy to get away with. You have to use the shortcomings of other people to your advantage, Nina.’ Suddenly her train of thought shifted. ‘You know I do hate how everyone uses credit cards these days. Credit card fraud, those sorts of things, it’s all very joyless, isn’t it? Not much fun. That’s what life should be about: fun.’ While she spoke, she shuffled the three cards in front of Nina, occasionally lifting up the corner of one card to reveal the queen of hearts. ‘I’ll get you another hot chocolate if you find the queen.’
    This time Nina couldn’t find it.
    Nina and Tom had rooms of their own in the apartment where they lived when she was fourteen. But the walls were thin, so when Sophia said goodnight to Tom that evening after his first pick-pocketing venture, Nina could hear her telling Tom one of the stories she used to tell Nina.
    ‘My mother died in childbirth,’ Sophia said softly. ‘Her parents, wealthy people, had disowned her after she married my dad, who was poor and wrong-side-of-the-tracks and a number of other clichés. It was all about true love. But this isn’t a love story; it’s a story about family.’ Nina could picture her mother sitting on the end of the bed, smoothing out the bedspread. Smiling at the memory of her father. ‘So I was raised by my dad. Thomas.’
    ‘What did he look like?’ interrupted Tom. Nina wondered whether Tom still asked for these stories because he was genuinely interested or if he just wanted to make their mother happy.
    ‘Just like you, Tom. Dark eyes and hair, olive skin. Very striking.’
    ‘And what did your mum look like?’
    ‘More like Nina. Fairer. I’ll have to find you a photo. Anyway, my father came from a family of blue-collar workers. Hard workers. He was very lost after the death of my mother, so he started travelling, getting work wherever he could. Which turned out to be nowhere, since the economy was rubbish and there were far more people than jobs.
    ‘And my father realised something very important about the world. That it was unfair. That the rules governing it were random, arbitrary and favoured a