by Emilia Finn
“That’s a fucking prom dress,” I hiss out quietly. “Where the hell is she going?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers back, as though she needs to be quiet too. “But she’s going in Evan McGrady’s personal town car. That’s not just a car his company owns, but his actual car, the one he moves around in when in transit.”
My heart pounds – from adrenaline, from my run, from the anxiety that leeches into my blood when Quinn moves off the concrete steps and meets the driver at the passenger door.
They speak a couple words, none that I can hear, then the guy opens the door, and she slides in like she was born to wear diamonds and ride around in town cars.
“Sophia!”
“What?” she hisses. “What do you want me to do about it? I’m watching, just like you are.”
“She’s in a date dress,” I snarl, “in date shoes, and she’s riding around in Evan McFuckingGrady’s car. The guy with the suspiciously dead wife!”
“Not an ideal dinner companion,” she agrees on a groan. “Fuck.”
I plaster my back against the wall and shield myself in darkness when the car pulls away from the curb.
“Fix it, Sophia! Fix it right fucking now!”
Victoria
Nothing is Free
“Prima.” The moment the car slides up to the curb right outside Zeus’ club, the door swings open, and Evan pulls me out with a gentle tug. He holds my hand in his, brings it up to his lips, and buzzes gentle kisses along my knuckles while the driver closes my door and rolls away. “You look stunning.” He steps back to look me up and down. “Breathtaking, really.”
“Well, thank you for the dress.” When he releases my hand, I bring it down to smooth the fabric over my stomach. “It fits perfectly.”
“I was sure it would,” he purrs. “I have an eye for such things.” He takes my arm, and loops it with his. “Shall we?”
“We’re back at the club?” I glance up at the multi-story building, and nibble on my bottom lip in thought. “Not where I expected we’d go for dinner.”
“We are here, Prima. But we’re not eating in the club.”
He leads me past the man on the door without so much as a nod in hello, then into the darkness that I pass through every single day that I work, but instead of turning right and heading toward The Pit, he turns left and leads me into what I could have sworn was a coat room.
Turns out, it’s a private elevator powered by Evan’s fingerprints, as he presses them to a screen, and the door silently opens up.
Evan gestures me forward. “Ladies first, of course.”
“Of course.”
I obey, and turn once I’m in, only to scoot a little to the side when he follows and proves this elevator is only for personal use. Two people maximum, or one, single man if he’s as big as the bouncer outside.
With another pass of Evan’s fingers over a screen, the doors close, and up we go, so smooth that I can barely feel us moving at all.
“I’m glad the rain is gone.” I try to think of small talk, despite the phone call I had with my brother playing through my mind.
I’m busting to ask Evan if he’s made any progress on the things I asked him to search. I want to collate what Will said abut Nate’s last known days, and whatever Evan may have found, and I want to put an end to this disappearance that has plagued our lives since before I even graduated high school.
Bouncing from one school, to the next, to the next, with no ID and no prior records is a sport in itself. The fact I got my GED at all was a miracle. The fact we have a home, shitty as it may be, is a miracle. And I won’t even discuss the guy I left behind four years ago, all because of this mess and the fact someone wants to pin something on my brother.
I need this to go away, we need to lay Nate Hardy to rest once and for all, and then Will and I need to take our lives back and find our pocket of normalcy.
“Did you have a restful day, Prima?” Evan stands beside me, hip to hip, and rests his hand on my opposite ribs to keep me close. He looks down into my eyes and smiles. “No work today, right?”
“I worked a little bit,” I admit with a smile. “I teach dance classes a few days a week not so far from my home.”
“You enjoy that work?” He thinks it’s cute, perhaps, but not interesting. “To dance around a room with children?” He chuckles as the door opens to a tiled room with a fancy table in the middle, and a tall vase of flowers on top. “It seems so… unlike the woman who works here.”
“Ha.”
I allow him to pull my arm around his as we leave the elevator and cross to a set of dark mahogany doors. Opening them wide, Evan reveals a massive room – leather couches, glass walls that overlook the city, crystal chandeliers, and a lake-sized stone countertop with racks and racks of wine glasses hanging from above.
“Oh my.” I release his arm and make my way into the room. “This is your home?”
“Mi casa es su casa.” He waves toward the couches, the windows. “Look around my home, Prima. I want you to feel welcome.”
“It’s so beautiful.”
I cross from shiny tile, to a plush white rug, pass a TV so big that I couldn’t even guess at its dimensions, step around a coffee table made of wood similar to the front doors, and around a leather couch that, insanely, still kinda smells of a farm.
I make my way along the wall of windows, peek out into the night at the lights coming from the city, the stars that shine above. Then I move toward the kitchen, the countertop already filled with plates of appetizers. I glance past the counter, and stop at the sight of a long, wooden dining table, with curled feet, and high-back chairs. The table is set with shiny plates stacked on more shiny plates. Crystal wine glasses. Shimmering silverware. Flowers of fall colors: oranges, golds, and browns. A bottle of red wine stands open, and beside it, a silver bucket.
“We’re eating here?” I ask in awe.
I move along the tile with soft clicks of my gifted heels, and stop behind a chair at the table. I run my fingertips over a shiny fork, over the golden edges of the white plates. I peek inside the bucket to find a bottle of white wine floating among shimmering ice.
Even the ice is shiny!
“Evan.” I turn back to him, and for the first time tonight, take a moment to really see him. He looks much the same as always – black suit, cufflinks, black tie, white shirt. It’s his usual outfit, but tonight, it’s specifically for me. His shoes are without a single scuff. His pants, without a single wrinkle. His hair is combed and styled back, his face cleanly shaven. “You went to a lot of trouble for tonight.”
“No trouble at all, Prima. I had the help in to cook. To set the table.” He tosses out ‘the help’ like they’re not people to him, but robots, and crosses the room, coming to a stop three feet in front of me.
There’s a certain level of irony in the fact that ‘the help’ are my kind of people. That he’s trying to romance a woman who sits lower on the socio-economic ladder than the women who cooked our meal tonight.
“I hope you brought your appetite, Victoria, because there is a lot of food and wine for us.”
“I’m starving.” I lay a hand on my stomach, and force a small smile when Evan moves forward and presses a kiss to the very corner of my lips.
“Come.”
He takes my hand, careful not to hurt my aching shoulder, and leads me to a chair at the table. He helps me sit, tucks me in, and then he takes his place at the head, close enough our knees touch.
“This table is beautiful.” I marvel at the spread laid out in front of me. “Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure, Prima.” Reaching forward and taking the white wine from the bucket, he stares into my eyes and begins pouring.
Time passes us by, my wine glass drains – followed by only a single refill, because I refuse to get messy while in a man’s apartment. I mean, I know who he is, I know where I am, and I guess I could probably trust that I’ll get home safely, but in my efforts to shield Will from my lif
e at Zeus’, he now thinks I’m at a sweet sixteen.
If I don’t make it home tonight, he won’t even know where to start looking, and after everything he’s sacrificed for me over the last twenty-three years, that’s a really shitty way to repay him.
So I stay sober, sharp, complimentary but not overly flirtatious.
“I was wondering…” I finally build up my courage somewhere around Evan’s fourth snifter of whiskey. I sit sideways in my chair, so my elbow rests on the table, and the split in my dress reveals my thigh crossed over the other. “Have you had a moment to look into that thing I asked about? The man who went missing.”
“I have.” Evan sits back in his chair, rests his head back, and lazily looks down at me. “I made some calls as soon as you left my office last week.”
“You did?” My heart rate speeds up. “So fast.”
“Well…” He smiles, and straddles that line between sober and sloppy. “What my lady wants, my lady gets.”
I have to school my expression, swallow the automatic “What the fuck are you talking about?” that wants to spew past my lips, and when he slides his hand onto my thigh and begins to creep higher, I take it, twine our fingers together, and study his eyes. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“I certainly did,” he drawls. He plays with the diamond bangle on my wrist, spins it, studies it. “I had my men ask questions about the man who disappeared from the docks. These networks tend to take time, it’s a bit like a game of telephone sometimes, but along the way, I caught rumors of a body buried in a shallow grave a little past the turnpike beneath the Main Bridge.”
“A…” I release his hand and press my fingers to my lips. “A body?”
“Indeed. It’s been many years since this man went missing, which means extricating the body would almost prove fruitless – unless, of course, a man has access to facilities that can process what is found.”
“We could call the cops.” Thoughts race through my mind. Plans. Consequences. “We could phone in an anonymous tip and say that our dog found bones or something. Get the body found…” I frown. “But if there’s a body, there was definitely a murder. It’s no longer a missing person’s case.” I meet Evan’s eyes. “Should we call the police?”
“No need, Prima.” He sits forward and takes the cold white wine from the bucket. Despite my glass still being half full, he tops it up, places it in my hand, and nudges it toward my lips until I sip. “I had a team come down just days ago, they dug up these bones.”
“You did?” I squeak. “Were they… are they…” I have to pull a long breath in, then let it out again. “They weren’t animal bones, by any chance?”
“No, Prima.” He pushes the wine closer to my lips, but this time, I chug a mouthful. I need the help to calm my nerves. “They were human remains, according to my contact.”
“Have they been identified?” I ask. “How long does that take?”
“They were identified as belonging to a male,” he answers quickly, confidently. He’s been holding onto this information all night, rehearsing it in his head. “The remains appear to belong to a man between the ages of twenty and thirty. Caucasian.”
“They can tell that from just bones?” I swallow the bile that wants to rise in my throat.
“Yes,” he purrs. “They can tell a lot of things these days. The age matches, the race, the sex. This man’s teeth were not well intact, so dental records may prove complicated. But cause of death was immediately distinguishable.”
“It was?” I can’t help that my breath comes out on a pant. I feel the way I do when riding around on a public bus… sweaty, shaky, ill. “How was he…” I swallow. “How did he die?”
Instead of words, Evan sets his glass down and reaches between us. Opening his hand, and wrapping his long fingers around my neck so that the diamond chain he gifted me rests between our skin, he gently pushes my head to the left, then the right. “Broken neck, mi amore. It was easy for the medical examiner to see that this man’s neck was broken.”
“God.” I reach up and rest my hand over his. Not in a caress, not because I want to touch him, but because I want to touch me. To shield my neck. To cover up such a weak spot on a human’s body. “When will your contact know for sure whose bones they were? Will he ever know, or is that something only the police can find out?”
“Prima.” He smiles and sits back again to sip his alcohol. “You allow me to bury the lead.”
“What?”
“Nathanial Joseph Hardy. My associate already gave me the name.”
“Oh no,” I cry out. “He’s really dead?”
“Are you okay, Prima?” He reaches forward and rests a hand on the back of my head. “You look ill.”
“I’m not… I’m just…” I breathe through my mouth and concentrate on the bubbling panic wanting to surface and spill all over the fancy floors. “I’m okay,” I pant out. “I, uh… I guess I’m in shock.”
Evan tilts his head to the side and regards me. “Was this man special to you, Prima? Was he… a lover?”
“No. My brother…” I lick my lips and shake my head. “It’s just that my brother is being blamed for that man’s death. I was hoping Nate would turn up alive someday, and prove to the authorities that Will is innocent.”
“That is…” He tastes the words on his tongue. “Unfortunate.”
“His wife was pregnant,” I whisper.
Evan’s eyes flash with anger. “Whose wife?”
“Nate’s. Well, his girlfriend, I guess. Not his wife. They were having a baby, and then the next thing we know, Nate is missing, and now I heard a rumor that she is dead. Where’s the baby?” I ask no one. Since there is literally no one here who could possibly know. I speak to myself, plan, make a list of questions. “I should find out if the baby survived. I don’t think… Where is she now? Where was the mother buried?”
And why does it matter to me?
I sit back and set my wine glass back on the table. “It doesn’t matter. Her death has nothing to do with Will. Her body is not missing.” I pause, swallow, meet Evan’s eyes. “Do you think the person who got Nate was the same person who got his girlfriend? And why are they pointing their finger at my brother for one, but not the other?”
“Valid questions, amore. You could have made a good detective in another life.”
“Hardly.” I choke out a small laugh, only to stop when my phone rings in my purse.
I glance across the room to where I left my bag, then back to Evan. “I’m so sorry, but that might be important.”
“Of course.” He waves me off and sits back. “I will have the help come in to clean our dishes away while you’re busy. I could do with a little dessert, couldn’t you?”
“Um… sure. Something sweet. Please.”
I set my cloth napkin on the table, and stand from the chair. Crossing the room with a hand on my rolling stomach, I snatch my phone from my bag, and hit ‘answer’ before processing the unknown number on my screen. “Hello?”
“Miss Quinnton. Hello,” a nasally, whiny voice greets me. “My name is Aletha Asa, and I’m from City Electric. How are you this evening?”
“Um…” I look down at my phone, at the room around me, at Evan as he instructs previously invisible maids to clean the table. Bringing my phone back to my ear, I frown and answer, “I’m well. And you?”
“I’m well, thank you. I’m calling all of the residents on your street tonight because, due to today’s heavy rainfall, there has been damage to the power lines that connect yours and five other apartments nearby.”
“Um…” I frown deeper. “Okay.”
“Water has made its way into the electrical outlet that leads into your homes, and this could become dangerous if not checked.”
“Oh… um… okay. Is my apartment on fire or something?”
Evan spins at my words, and tilts his head.
“Certainly not, ma’am. But there is a risk, small as it may be. We have workers knocking on doors now
, but no one is answering at your home.”
“Yeah, um…” My brother is at work. “I’m out… on a date.”
“I’m so sorry for interrupting your date, dear. But it’s imperative we gain access to your apartment immediately. If you’re too far away, our linemen are instructed to gain access however they need to.”
“However they…” I press my fingers to my temple. “Huh?”
“They would kick your door in, miss. And because this phone call has been logged, thus gaining your permission, the city would not be liable to replace your door.”
“Wait a minute!” My temper spikes instantly, escalating from confusion to rage. “You can’t just kick my door in, lady. That shit is expensive to replace, and at this time of night, after all the stores are closed…” I throw my hand up, only to hiss at the pain that shoots through my shoulder. “If you kick my door in tonight, they won’t be able to fix it until tomorrow at the earliest, and that’s your rich ass assuming we can afford a new door that someone else broke.”
“I apologize, miss. This isn’t personal, but surely you can understand a door is cheaper to replace than an entire building.”
“Why do you need to get in?”
“Our tech team must access your power board. It’ll take only a moment, but it’s imperative this happens now. Unfortunately, if you’re too far away, we won’t have a choice but to—”
“If you kick my door in,” I spin and collect my purse, “I’m gonna kick some heads in. Dammit, lady. I can be there in about ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes may be five minutes too long, ma’am. Could you possibly move a little faster?”
“Yeah. I’m coming. Jesus.”
I make my way across the apartment, stop in front of Evan, and try not to show my relief at a valid excuse out of this date. I came here for information, and though I got some, it doesn’t make me happy. I need to leave, to regroup, to breathe fresh air, and to stop sipping wine.
“I’m so sorry, Evan. There’s an emergency at my apartment, and no one else is there to let these people in.”