Black Heart by Holly Black Read Free Book Online Page A

my mother had taken it.
    “You stole it?” I mouth, pointing to the other room. “From him ?”
    “A long time ago,” she says.
    I can’t believe that she’s treating this so lightly. I keep my voice low. “Back when you were screwing him?”
    After all these years I think I’ve finally shocked her. “I—,” she starts.
    “I found a photo,” I say. “When I was cleaning out the house. The guy who took it was wearing the same ring that I saw Zacharov wearing in a picture at Grandad’s place. I wasn’t sure, but now I am.”
    Her gaze goes toward the other room, then back to me. She bites her lower lip, smearing lipstick on her teeth. “Yes, fine, back then,” she says. “One of those times. Anyway, I stole it and got a copy made of it—but I knew he wouldwant the real one back, even after all this time. It doesn’t make him look good not to have the real one.”
    The understatement of the year. If you’re the head of a crime family, then, no, you don’t want people to find out that your most valuable possession was stolen. You certainly don’t want people to know that it was stolen years ago and you’ve been wearing a fake ever since. Especially if your most valuable possession is the Resurrection Diamond, which, according to legend, makes its wearer invulnerable; the loss of it is going to make you seem suddenly vulnerable. “Yeah,” I say.
    “So I thought I would sell it back to him,” Mom says.
    I forget to keep my voice down. “You what ? Are you crazy ?”
    “It was all going to be fine.” Now she puts the cigarette to her lips and leans into the burner on the stove to catch the edge of the flame. She inhales deeply, and embers flare. She blows smoke.
    The tea water is starting to boil. Her hand is shaking.
    “He doesn’t care if you smoke in the house?”
    She goes on without answering me. “I had a good plan. Worked through a middleman, everything. But it turned out that I didn’t have the real thing. The stone’s gone.”
    I just stare at her for a long moment. “So someone found yours and switched it out?”
    She nods quickly. “That must have been it.”
    This is turning into one of those stories where each new piece of information is so much worse than the thing before that I don’t want to ask for more details, but I am pretty sure there’s no way around it. “And?”
    “Well, Ivan might not have minded paying a little bitto get his property back, especially since he’d probably given up on getting the real thing returned to him. I think he would have just made the exchange. But when he found out the stone was a fake , well, he killed the middleman and found out I was behind it.”
    “How’d he find that out?”
    “Well, the way he killed the middleman was—”
    I hold up my hand. “That’s okay. Let’s skip that part.”
    She takes a deep drag from her cigarette and blows three perfect rings of smoke. When I was a kid, I loved those. I would try to pass my hand through them without the breeze from the movement blowing them apart, but it never worked. “So, Ivan—he was angry. Well, but he knows me, so he didn’t want to kill me right out. We have history. He told me I had to do a job for him.”
    “A job?”
    “The Patton job,” she says. “Ivan has always been interested in the government. He said that it was important to stop proposition two from passing in New Jersey, because if it passed in one state then it could pass elsewhere. All I had to do was make Patton renounce it, and Ivan thought the whole thing would just collapse. . . .”
    I put a hand to my forehead. “Stop. Wait. It doesn’t make any sense! When did all this happen? Before Philip died?”
    The kettle starts to wail.
    “Oh, yes,” Mom says. “But you see, I blew it. The job. I didn’t manage to discredit Patton at all. In fact, I think I made the chance of proposition two passing better than ever. But you know, sweetie, it’s never really been mything—politics. I know how to make