Double Crossed Read online

  Also by Ally Carter

  THE GALLAGHER GIRLS SERIES

  I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You

  Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

  Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover

  Only the Good Spy Young

  Out of Sight, Out of Time

  THE HEIST SOCIETY SERIES

  Heist Society

  Uncommon Criminals

  Perfect Scoundrels

  Copyright © 2013 by Ally Carter

  Excerpt from Heist Society copyright © 2010 by Ally Carter

  Excerpt from I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You copyright © 2006 by Ally Carter

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-8747-9

  Visit www.un-requiredreading.com

  Contents

  Also by Ally Carter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Excerpt from Heist Society, Book One

  Heist Society: Chapter 1

  Heist Society: Chapter 2

  Heist Society: Chapter 3

  Excerpt from Gallagher Girls, Book One

  I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You: Chapter 1

  I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You: Chapter 2

  SITUATED ON THE UPPER EAST SIDE with a glorious view of the park, the Athenia Hotel was supposed to be some kind of Olympus, high in the clouds above the mere mortals, a place for playing and drinking and dancing like gods. But as Macey followed her father and mother out of the gleaming elevator and into the towering ballroom, she wasn’t exactly in the mood.

  Sure, the Calloway Ball was supposed to be the charity event of the season, but before Macey had even entered the ballroom, she already knew precisely what she was going to find.

  She saw the same food and the same band. The same old men flirting with the same young women. The same stories and canapés and people pretending they were there for charity and not just for a picture in the gossip columns on Page Six.

  So Macey decided not to look at the room as the daughter of a senator and a cosmetics heiress. Macey found herself looking at it as a Gallagher Girl. She heard her Covert Operations instructor’s voice in her ear as she counted the exits in the ballroom (five) and the armed security professionals there to watch over VIPs (three). She mentally noted the best ways to block the cameras, and she eavesdropped on ten different conversations in four different languages. But still, Macey McHenry couldn’t help herself.

  Macey McHenry was bored.

  She was just starting to consider her escape (the fire exit near the kitchen seemed especially promising) when, at last, Macey saw something that she absolutely was not expecting.

  A boy.

  Oh, there were always plenty of young men at these parties. They went by names like Scooter and Mitchell and Beau and were frequently juniors or seconds or thirds. They went to schools like Colgan and Exeter and had hobbies that varied from polo to yachting, womanizing to rehab. But walking through the door right then was one boy who seemed, in a word, different from the others.

  When Macey walked by in high heels and a strapless red dress with a slit high on her thigh, he didn’t stare. When she tucked her glossy black hair behind her ear, he didn’t notice. And when she allowed her blue eyes to linger a moment too long in his direction, he gave a small smile of indifference and turned and started across the crowded room.

  For a moment, Macey studied him—the one puzzle in the room the Gallagher Academy hadn’t taught her how to break. She racked her brain, trying to remember if she’d met him at any of the many schools she had attended before the Gallagher Academy took her in, but the boy remained a very handsome enigma.

  It was something of a game to her after that. He was tall, with broad shoulders and careless hair, in a designer tuxedo that he wore as if it was simply what he’d found on the floor by his bed that morning. With his roguish smile and cool indifference, that boy looked how Macey McHenry always felt—like he’d been born into a world of privilege and had spent his whole life not really caring whether or not it spat him out.

  She watched him stop to pat the mayor on the back. He stumbled a little in the crowd, and his left hand disappeared ever so briefly inside the mayor’s tuxedo pocket. It was over in a flash, a blink, a second. And Macey was quite certain she was the only person in the entire room to have seen it, but that was just as well. At last, Macey had seen enough. And at last, the boy made sense.

  Carefully, she walked through the crowd until she found him standing out on the hotel balcony, eating a jumbo shrimp with one big bite.

  “You might want to put that back,” she told him. She leaned against the ledge, her hands at the small of her back. From there, she could look up at his square jaw and bright eyes. When he smiled down at her, despite her training, she might have swooned a little.

  “Now what would that be?” He cocked his head.

  “The mayor’s cell phone,” she told him. “It was so rude of you to slip it out of his pocket when he was distracted.”

  The boy feigned offense. “Would I do that?”

  “You know you did.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.” He held his hands out wide. “Go ahead. Frisk me.” He leaned a little closer and winked when he said, “You know you want to.”

  “Nice try,” Macey said, totally immune to the flirting. “And it might work if I hadn’t seen you steal it a minute and a half ago.”

  “Yes, but evidently you didn’t see me put it back forty-five seconds ago.” Then, as if on cue, a phone started to ring. “See,” the boy said, pointing at the mayor, who was searching his tuxedo jacket, finally finding the device not exactly where he’d left it.

  And for the first time that evening, Macey was impressed. “Oh, you’re good.”

  “Well, if Macey McHenry says so…” The boy turned from the railing and stepped back toward the ballroom, and again she felt the pang that something in this boy was familiar.

  “I seem to be at a disadvantage,” she told him.

  “Don’t feel bad.” He grinned. “Most people are.”

  “I mean…” she said pointedly, “what’s your name?”

  “You’d be surprised how many times I get asked that question,” he said; then he looked at Macey anew. “My friends call me Hale.”

  “Hale? As in…a Hale?” she asked, but he only smiled in response. “Why are you stealing cell phones? Doesn’t Hale Industries own a cell phone company?”

  “Only a little one,” Hale said, exasperated, then added to himself, “Why are girls always getting that wrong?”

  “How disappointing,” Macey said. “I was starting to think you were some high-society thief, determined to pilfer our pearls and steal our Rolexes. The party just got boring again.”

  “I could be a thief.” He sounded almost insulted.

  “The grandson of one of the wealthiest women in the world?” Macey asked. “Somehow I doubt it.”

  “Would it make you feel any better if I told you that serial numbers make Rolexes almost impossible to fence? But pearls, on the other hand…” He leaned a little closer, studied her a little harder. But then, just th
at quickly, the sparkle faded. He seemed almost serious when he said, “I’m sorry if I’m not flirting with you. I’m kind of spoken for.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m not disappointed. I kind of don’t care.”

  “A year ago your father was running for vice president. That’s how I knew your name.”

  “I was America’s sweetheart,” Macey said, a little too much saccharin in her voice.

  He gave her a smile. “America could do worse.”

  The music was louder than Macey remembered when she walked with Hale back to the ball. And for one brief moment, he looked like a code she really wanted to break, a language she couldn’t quite understand.

  “I suppose I could try to pull some high-class heist,” he told her. “You know…just to spice up your evening.”

  “Really? Well, I’m pretty sure Lady Darlington was wearing emerald earrings when she got here.”

  The boy looked impressed. “Yes. But Her Ladyship put her earrings in her handbag ten minutes ago.” He shrugged. “Besides, I have a bad history with emeralds.”

  “What about canaries?” Macey scanned the crowd and pointed to the one jewel that stood out from all the others as it dangled around the neck of the woman of the hour.

  “The Calloway Canary? Oh, very tempting…” He looked longingly at the necklace that seemed to catch every bit of light in the room. “Twenty carats if the rumors are true. A perfect canary diamond surrounded by flawless white stones…Nope. Sorry.” Hale shook his head and pulled another shrimp from a passing tray. “Besides, it’s a fake,” he told her with his mouth full.

  “No, it’s not,” Macey said. “I assure you, old lady Calloway is rich enough to buy any diamond she wants. There’s no reason for her to have a fake.”

  “Oh, I’m sure the Calloway Canary is very real,” Hale told her. He grabbed another shrimp and pointed with it across the room. “I’m just saying that’s not it.”

  Was he lying? Maybe. But then again, Macey realized, maybe not.

  “So are you the Hale who was institutionalized or the one who burned down the planetarium at Colgan?”

  The boy shrugged and smiled, looked at her with that thousand-watt grin. “Who says they can’t be one and the same?”

  “Seriously.” Macey felt herself growing impatient. “Where do you go to school?”

  “Knightsbury. Why? Where do you go?”

  “It’s a girls’ school,” Macey told him.

  “So? I know lots of girls.”

  “Not like these,” Macey said with a shake of her head. “Why don’t I know you?”

  “Does anyone ever really know someone else?”

  “You think you’re cute,” she told him.

  “You think you’re gorgeous. But I’m the one guy here who knows better.”

  “So I’m not gorgeous?” Macey challenged.

  “Of course you are.” He started away, turned back at the last minute. “But I’m the guy who figured out that’s not all you are.”

  FROM THAT POINT FORWARD, W. W. Hale V knew two things for certain. First, the party was far more interesting than he’d been expecting. But the second (and more important) thing was that he should not talk to Macey again. Since the day a little over two years before when he had crawled out his window and out of his world, Hale had lived with the fear that someday someone in his old life might find out about his new one, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that Macey was very much up to the challenge.

  She wasn’t a thief; of that much Hale was almost sure. But she wasn’t your typical society girl either. Her steps had too much purpose; her blue eyes moved around the room with too much precision. She reminded him far more of the girls in the world he’d chosen than the girls in the world he’d been born to, and that was why he knew that he shouldn’t let her study him too closely. That maybe she might see a little too much.

  It didn’t matter anyway, Hale realized. He wasn’t going to stick around to find out. He looked down at his watch: 9:45. Then a man in a dark gray suit caught Hale’s eye and started his way.

  “Yes, sir?” Marcus asked. Hale had often wondered how Marcus read him so well. He was supposed to have a good poker face, after all. But it didn’t matter how good an inside man Hale was supposed to be; Marcus was a far superior butler.

  “I think I’m in the mood to leave, Marcus,” Hale said, scanning the room. He saw his father chatting up a business associate by the bar; his mother was busy looking over an antique clock that was a part of the silent auction. He wondered exactly how long it would be before they realized he was gone. If they’d ever realize…

  “What’s our exit strategy?” Hale asked.

  “I believe the stairs by the balcony are mostly vacant,” Marcus told him.

  “Perfect,” Hale said, and without another word he started toward the other side of the room. When his phone rang, he had to dig through his pocket to find it, and his fingers brushed against a pair of tiny earbuds he and Kat had last used in Monte Carlo. Hale smiled a little, realizing he hadn’t worn the tux in ages. It was just one of many ways his life had changed in the years since a girl named Katarina Bishop crawled into his window and into his life.

  “You’re late,” Kat said as soon as Hale put the phone to his ear. She wasn’t the kind of girl to wait for hello.

  “What can I say? Macey McHenry has been throwing herself at me….”

  “See, that’s the kind of thing that would make me jealous if she weren’t way out of your league.”

  “You know, if I had feelings, that might have hurt them.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Now come on down. There’s a Raphael in Rome that has our name on it.”

  “I don’t know…” Hale started. “It might be hard to get away from Macey. It looks like she works out. And you know how crazy I drive the ladies.”

  “Crazy is an understatement.” Kat took a deep breath. “Am I going to have to come up there? Because I will. I have no objection to stealing people, you know.”

  Hale started to laugh. He wanted to tease. But right then he saw something that seemed a little out of place in the elaborately decorated ballroom. Behind the stage, covered in canvas, lay a device, a piece of metal sticking out at such an angle that only Hale could really see it.

  Kat talked on, but Hale was no longer listening as he crept closer to the narrow gap between wall and stage, looking. Thinking.

  “Hale?” Kat’s voice sounded in his ear. “Hale, are you listening to me?”

  That was when Hale noticed a hotel employee standing beneath the security camera that was trained on the dance floor, an odd bag draped across his arm. On the other side of the room, a sign that read that the elevators were temporarily out of service made Hale’s mind come to a terrifying stop.

  When Hale saw a man lingering near the elevators, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu, remembering a particularly intricate operation in Denmark.

  Another man, in an ill-fitting waiter’s uniform, was moving to the stairs by the veranda, and Hale thought about a long night spent near a garbage chute in Belize.

  “That settles it.” Kat sounded annoyed by Hale’s silence. “I’m coming up.”

  “No, Kat!” Hale shouted, but she was already gone. “Marcus, I need you to go downstairs. Now. Stop Kat.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “And, Marcus,” Hale called after him. “Just…tell her I have these.” Hale reached into his pocket and found the long-forgotten earbuds.

  It is a testament to both Marcus’s demeanor and the oddities of Hale’s new life that the butler didn’t say another word. He didn’t ask a single question. And Hale was left with one other thing to do.

  “There you are,” Hale told his mother when he found her.

  “Oh, darling, do you know Michael Calloway? His mother is the event chair. We’ve just been arguing over whether he is going to let me outbid him for this gorgeous antique clock,” Mrs. Hale said, but her son didn’t care.

  “Sorry,” Hale told the man
in the tux with the small bits of sweat gathering at his brow. “I need her,” he said, pulling his mother from the table and toward the bank of elevators on the far side of the room, the ones that appeared to still be operational.

  “Mom, I need you to come with me.”

  “But, darling,” the woman protested, “it’s Swiss!”

  The elevator dinged and Hale pushed her inside it. “Sorry. Dad will meet you downstairs.”

  The doors were just starting to close when someone yelled, “Hold it!” and Hale turned to see Macey McHenry dragging her own mother behind her. “She’s going down,” Macey said, and pushed the button for the lobby. Before anyone else could protest, the doors slid smoothly closed.

  Behind Hale, another elevator opened, and Macey pointed to it. “After you,” she said.

  “No.” Hale let the word stretch out. “After you.”

  “No,” Macey said. She grabbed his arm and pushed.

  “Hey, I bruise,” Hale said. “Also, you are freakishly strong.”

  Macey McHenry was sidling up to him. She looked like a bored society girl who was in the mood to grab the nearest guy and leave the party. But if there was anything that W. W. Hale V truly understood, it was that looks could often be deceiving.

  As soon as she was close, she whispered, “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No. You’ve got to get out of here,” he told her. “Go downstairs. Go now.”

  “No,” she countered. “You go.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You tell me first.”

  But before they could say another word, the last elevator slid slowly open and two men in masks rushed out. From the opposite side of the ballroom, shots rang out, rapid-fire, piercing the ceiling, plaster falling onto the dance floor like snow.

  And then Hale and Macey whispered in unison, “Because of that.”

  PERHAPS IT WAS TOO LATE—the crowd too tipsy—but it seemed to take a moment for the partygoers to realize exactly what was happening. Their exits were blocked. And the finest of New York society had no choice but to huddle together, watching a series of masked men run into the ballroom through the fog of falling plaster.