Chapter 1

"Now remember Lyra, what's the golden rule?" my father asked me as my brother and I rode with him in his 1969 blue Camaro that he conned off of a rich woman in his last job.

"Be patient and be the character. Play the role, and leave no mistakes. Wait for the right time... then take them for everything they've got," I recited. I was only eight years old, but my father's golden rule had been embedded into my mind. When I was two years old, my mother died of a heart attack at 28 years old. My father was convinced it was because of this energy pill my mother was taking to stay up for work. She was a freelance company consultant who was in high demand, leaving little time for her family or sleep. After she died, we weren't compensated by the pharmaceutical company. My dad found it unfair. He emptied his bank account fighting for justice for my mother's death. After that didn't work, he went after the companies my mother consulted for. Nothing worked. The big companies had better, expensive lawyer and unlimited resources. A small, motherless family like ours was easily squashed under those companies. My father researched how to make them pay like a madman. In the end, he found the man who sold the drugs to her and took him for everything he had. Ever since then, it became his occupation. With my mother's death, my brother and I lost both our mother and father. Our father became obsessed. He made conman his occupation from that point on.

"So what's the job this time, dad?" my brother asked. We traveled a lot. When your job was to steal from people you had to constantly be on the move.

"A local gym... Lyra is going to break her arm on the faulty equipment," he said. The equipment in question probably wasn't actually faulty, but that would be the story. We'd already done it a dozen times. The amount of times I'd broken a bone without going to the hospital was already in the tens at my young age. My brother rolled his eyes quietly beside me in the backseat. My brother, Kristen, was 4 years older than me. He was completely into the con-game, but he wanted to try bigger and better cons. My father normally stuck to the basics: a broken arm, car "accident", hit it and quit it scam... the basics.

"When are we going to do one more exciting?" Kristen asked. My dad only guffawed  under his breath as his eyebrows knit together in a stern look.

"Keep in mind boy, the longer the con, the greater chance you risk of exposing yourself and getting too emotionally involved. And the bigger the con, the more likely you are to screw up. We don't have room to screw up," my dad answered. Kristen talked to me about it all the time when dad wasn't around, but I was eight and he was twelve. I didn't understand what he meant. I didn't understand his need for a one-stop shop that would set us up for the rest of our lives...

At least not yet.