Gretel Koch Jewel Thief Box Set
Gretel Koch Jewel Thief Box Set
Breakout (Prequel) Book #1 Shiny Things Book #2 Controlled
Samantha Price
Copyright © 2020 by Samantha Price
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Breakout
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Shiny Things
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Controlled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Gretel Koch Jewel Thief series
About Samantha Price
Breakout
Gretel Koch Jewel Thief ( A short prequel)
Chapter 1
Gretel Koch slammed onto the hard floor of the prison cell. She gasped for air as a pair of hands tightened around her throat.
“What have you heard?” Rhoda loosened her grip barely enough for Gretel to speak.
She tried to lift her hair away from the grimy floor, rank from the filth of past inmates. “Get off!” Her arms and legs flailed around like a stranded beetle. Moving the woman off her was impossible; she was as tall as she was wide. “I’ve heard nothing.”
Rhoda stood, and then looked over her shoulder at the iron grille that formed the front wall of the cell. There were no guards coming. That wasn’t surprising; they were used to scuffles and arguments. Rhoda flung herself back on the bottom bunk. “Why did you ask what you did?”
Gretel picked herself up off the floor. She’d waited a week to ask the question, hoping she’d done enough to gain Rhoda’s trust. “I was only asking.”
“You gotta be careful what you say around here. How do I know you’re not a snitch?”
Dusting off her orange jumpsuit, it dawned on Gretel. There was an escape plan and judging by the reaction, Rhoda was in on it. “It’d be a pretty elaborate plan, wouldn’t it? You’ve seen all the newspapers and heard all the stories about me.”
A rare smile met her cellmate’s lips. “‘The silent jewel thief,’ that’s what they called you.”
“Yes.” Gretel wasn’t happy about the sensation created by her arrest. The last thing someone in her profession needed was publicity.
“Then you got caught. Not too clever then, are ya?” Rhoda laughed.
Gretel wasn’t bothered by her cellmate’s mocking cackles, not when all she could think about was escape. Crouching down in front of the bunk, she looked up at Rhoda. “If there was a plan, I’d be the right person to include. I’ve broken into so many places, it’d be a cinch to break out of somewhere—even here.” Gretel’s sole focus this past week had been on getting out, finding Ryan, and getting those diamonds back. Which order that occurred in, she didn’t care. When her cellmate didn’t respond, she lost her patience, and snapped, “I need to get out of here.”
“How do I know they haven’t done a deal with you?”
“A deal with regard to what?”
Rhoda’s brown eyes grew even rounder, but she remained tight-lipped.
“I want to be involved. I’d be an asset. If you haven’t got a plan fully formulated yet, I can help.”
Rhoda scratched her neck. “I’ll have to talk to the others.”
That confirmed it. “Thanks.” Gretel rose to her feet and climbed back up to the top metal bunk with its hard, one-inch-thick mattress. She tried to plump up the thin pretense of a pillow before she placed her head on it. Right now, she’d pay thousands of dollars for a hot bubble bath and a decent meal. The water pressure in the showers was poor, and the only shampoo available at the Commissary was equivalent to dishwashing liquid. Picking up a strand of her dry shoulder-length hair, she told herself it’d recover.
Everything about the prison was awful, and everything smelled the same—everything from the air to the sheets to the jumpsuits. The best way she could describe it was a cross between the way clothes smelled when they’d been washed and left forgotten in the washing machine for days, and sweaty gym shoes.
They won’t get me down. I will get out of here.
She hadn’t come this far in life to end up in a cage dancing to someone else’s tune.
No, she’d dance to her own.
It was half an hour to lights out. Rhoda often used that time to write letters. Gretel used the time to plot diabolical ways to get even with Ryan. The first thing she’d do when she got out was find him and make him pay—literally.
Chapter 2
The wake-up signal echoed through every cell in the block, setting the tone for the dreary day ahead. Gretel opened one eye and longed for the days when a tap on the snooze button gave her another ten minutes. The simple pleasure of waking when she felt like it was twenty-five-years-to-life away, according to her lawyer. Having been denied bail, the future was bleak, but Gretel wasn’t about to give up. Even in the darkest of times, she’d always found opportunities.
“Come on, move it!” Her cellmate's voice first thing upon waking was another intolerable annoyance.
Knowing there were ramifications for not being lined up right after those cell doors opened, she sat up and dangled her legs over the side of the metal bunk. “Okay, okay. Coming.” All she had to do was slip on her shoes and pull the cover back over the rock-hard mattress. From day one, she’d slept fully clothed, hoping there might be some malfunction of the electronic doors, which would cause a riot and then a mass escape. It hadn’t happened, but positive thoughts like those kept her going.
On hearing the doors open, she stood outside the cell shoulder-to-shoulder with Rhoda, in line with the other inmates to be counted for the first of four times that day.
After a prison officer—a screw—yelled a command, Gretel and her fellow inmates made a quarter turn to the right, still single file, and headed to breakfast.
Being such an infamou
s criminal, Gretel hadn’t been given the same treatment as the average ‘first-timer.’ She’d been accepted into her cellmate’s group of friends.
Once they got to the eating room—no way could it be called a 'dining' room—she collected a breakfast tray and sat down at the same table she’d sat at for the past week. Looking down at the gray-tinged, pale-yellow scrambled eggs, her stomach churned. It was going to taste like chewy cardboard. Everything did. While she tore off a piece of bread, she looked at the others. “Anyone want my eggs?”
She got a sharp dig in the ribs from Rhoda, a reminder that giving anything away was a sign of weakness. There were so many dos and don’ts here that didn’t make sense.
“I don’t want them,” Gretel explained.
One of Rhoda’s friends said, “Eat it. You can’t afford to go without food in this place.”
“I’ll have ‘em,” another of the girls said, stretching out her arm.
Gretel hadn’t taken time to learn the names of all Rhoda’s friends; she didn’t plan on being there long enough for it to matter.
She slid the plate across the gray table to the hungry woman. “I won’t do it again,” she whispered to Rhoda. Nearly in the same breath she asked, “Are you going to ask them about …?”
Again—another dig from Rhoda. “Later, and not here.”
All of Rhoda’s friends were lifers. They had nothing to lose. Why not escape? They were unusually quiet and today Gretel studied them for the first time, wondering what crimes they’d committed. Rhoda had killed her husband. “Justifiable homicide,” she'd assured Gretel. Given Gretel’s recent experience with one man in particular, she could totally understand the concept. Summing up the hardened faces of the others, she guessed they were guilty of more than non-payment of traffic fines. Maybe it was better if she didn’t know.
“Cat got your tongues?” Gretel asked, looking around at their grim faces. “Why’s no one talking?”
The smallest of the women—Anita, Gretel thought—with tight dark braids and rumored to be a major crime boss’s niece, leaned across the table. “When we were lining up for food just now, Rhoda told us what you said. We had a good friend, Tina. She was hell-bent on escaping. Six months ago, she was shot trying to scale the wall.”
Gretel stared into the dark reflections of her instant coffee. She was doing her best to pretend she was upset about Tina, whom she’d never met and who—most likely—never even existed at all. “I’m sorry about your friend.” What she was sorry about was that they were trying to throw her off the scent of their plans. They had no intention of including her.
“You’ll get used to it in here,” Anita said as if reading her mind.
If she heard that line one more time, she’d scream. “There must be a way out of here.” When the girls were still silent, she added, “Just out of interest, has anyone ever talked about it or come up with any kind of plan?”
Rhoda said, “Zip it, Gretel. No one wants to talk about that after what happened to Tina.”
“What you need is a job,” one of the others said. “Stay busy.”
Gretel forced a smile. “I already put my name down for the kitchen.” She’d already considered the kitchen would have knives that might come in handy for escape. Sure, they monitored the inventory, but there had to be a way around that. Not to mention there would have to be delivery trucks coming and going. “But there’s a waiting list.”
“What about the laundry?”
“Full up too. Anyway, I put my name down for it as well.”
“Can you cook?” Anita asked.
“I’m a great cook.” She’d never cooked a day in her life despite being raised in a household where she should’ve grown up with all the skills of a good homemaker. Thanks to her one-year-younger sister, who had done all her cooking chores, she'd been able to fly under the radar of their strict mother. It was easy to be invisible in a family of six children especially when you were the third eldest, buried in the middle.
She sipped the prison’s lousy excuse for coffee while she considered her position. Rhoda hadn’t been able to talk the girls around. After Gretel had set her coffee down, she ripped off more of her bread trying to figure out which of the women was the true leader of the small group. If she could work her way into the leader's confidence, she could talk her into adding her to the group.
After careful consideration, she figured out who the boss of the group was—Anita. It made sense given who her uncle was. Knowing Anita worked in the library, Gretel felt a sudden reading urge coming on.
Chapter 3
Gretel sat in the library waiting for a chance to talk with Anita. Looking around at the gray walls and the bars on the windows, she knew this cage couldn’t be her world for the next twenty-five days, let alone that many years. It had been a blistering-hot summer and she badly needed air-con. She couldn’t breathe in here; she had to get out.
Anita was sorting through books with another girl. Gretel would have to wait until they finished.
“Koch!”
She looked up to see one of the prison guards had just walked into the room. “Yes?”
“Your lawyer’s here.”
“Finally!”
She was cuffed and led through a series of security doors until they came to an interview room. On the way, she observed the security while wishing she had contact with Kent, her genius IT guy. He’d figure out a way of escape, she was sure of it.
The screw opened a door and uncuffed her. She rubbed her wrists looking at the handsome face of Cameron Wiltshire, the head of her team of lawyers. He had to be twice her age and, going by the ring on his finger, married. There hadn’t been time to get to know him on a personal level.
He smiled and stood up when she approached. She smiled back to cover the awkwardness she felt with no makeup and her hair carelessly tied in a ponytail. Then there was the disgusting orange jumpsuit that drained her face of color.
“It’s nice to see you.” She sat on the hard chair.
“And you.” He sat back down with only a metal table between them. “You’re looking good.”
“Yeah, right.” She scoffed, moving some strands of hair off her face. “Save the lies for the courtroom.”
His ice-blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “I’m pleased you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
“Yeah, well that’s the only thing I haven’t lost. I’ve lost the privilege of making the simplest decisions for myself. When I sleep, and when or what I eat. I don’t have access to Wi-Fi or my cell phone.” She drummed her acrylic fingernails rhythmically on the metal table. “And I need my nails done again. Two of them have broken.”
He chuckled. “It is prison.”
“What are you doing here? Can you get me out? Am I getting an appeal?”
He raised one eyebrow. “You were denied bail.”
“I know, but ...”
“You can’t get an appeal. There has to be a trial first before you can get an appeal.”
“I know. I meant … can you get me a do-over for the bail?”
He shook his head. “It’s not looking good. We’ve got multiple countries involved and multiple robberies have now been attributed to you.”
“I deny them all.”
“It’s not as easy as that, and that could go against you. We’ve got someone who’s prepared to give evidence. It’s a long way to go, but at this stage it might be better to cut a deal—avoid a trial.”
“You said someone’s giving evidence?” Her stomach churned. It could only be one person—the one to whom she’d told many of her secrets. “Ryan?”
He nodded. “Ryan Castle.”
Hate and rage burned within. She closed her eyes, telling herself to calm down, promising herself she would get revenge. He wouldn’t get away with it. As fast as he’d snatched the diamonds from her hands, leaving her to drown in that sinking car, love turned into hate. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Perhaps you don’t know what 'denied bail' mea
ns? You were there. You were deemed a flight risk. In your apartment, they found five passports all with different names.”
“I wouldn’t go anywhere,” she lied. “I’d wait for the trial.”
“We’re working on it.”
“And you’re being paid well for it. I’m not a person in here. I’m stuck in this cage like a trapped animal, stripped of dignity and individuality, unable to make simple decisions for myself.”
“I know, you already said that.” He drew his eyebrows together. “I'd hoped we’d get bail.”
We? She didn’t see him suffering in his five-thousand-dollar suit, silk tie, and expensive soft leather hand-stitched shoes. “I’ve got to get out of here, Cameron.”
“We can’t do anything. We’ve got no grounds to ask for another bail hearing. There’s too much media focus on you. Lay low for a while.”
“I’ve got no other choice in here. What if I plead guilty?”
He almost sighed. “Best we wait for them to offer a deal.”