“You’ve got stuff. I’ve got stuff, too,” he answers. “I know neither of us likes to talk about our stuff. But I think you need to tell me what I said to set you off.”
A reasonable request. But it feels excruciating to admit, “It was when you offered me an apartment. My parents…they weren’t exactly an official couple. My mom was my dad’s mistress. He already had a family and two kids when he met her. But he put her up in an apartment, then eventually a house when she had me.”
This is as close to the truth as I can get without violating a ton of WITSEC policies, so I leave it there, concluding with, “Anyway, that’s how I grew up. As this big old secret. I used to watch my mom wait by the door whenever my dad called to say he was coming for a visit. She was like a trained dog. And I swore that would never be me. I wasn’t even interested in a relationship before you came along. Really, I was just trying to get through law school, and you know, finally be of service. So, when you offered to buy me an apartment, I know you were only trying to help, but…”
“I thought I was being romantic, but I triggered you instead. Good one, Ferra.” He sighs against the top of my head. “Sorry, baby.”
“No, it’s not your fault. I should have talked to you instead of kicking you out. But like you said, I’m not used to talking about my stuff.” I sigh and say, “I love you, but I don’t ever want to feel like that. I don’t want to be somebody’s secret or possession.”
He stiffens.
And I suddenly realize I admitted to loving him. Oh, God. Tell me I didn’t say that. Why did I say that???
But before I can start backpedaling, he says, “We’ve only been together for three months.”
“I know, and I—”
“Shut up, Reynolds. Don’t start trying to qualify it, because I love you, too.”
All the qualifications I was about to make fall from my tongue, and instead, I say, “You love me, too? Seriously?”
“Yeah, I just wasn’t saying it yet because it felt a little…”
“Premature,” I finish for him. “It’s stupid early in a relationship to be talking like this.”
“Yeah, stupid,” he agrees. Then after a few moments, he says, “You know, Frank Sinatra was Italian, too.”
“Okay,” I say, bemused and wondering why he’s broken out with that non-sequitur.
But then he says, “Why don’t we do Somethin’ Stupid?”
7
Summer Wind
“I can’t believe you guys moved in together!” Naima squeals two months later at the small party Jake and I throw to celebrate our graduation from law school.
Her strong Queens’ accent sounds a little out of place with all the champagne glass clinking, and hushed conversations about clerkships and law firm offers going on around us. But I’m glad she made it. It feels important to have my least fancy friend at the fanciest party I’ve ever co-hosted.
“You’re here in our apartment, so now’s probably a good time to start believing,” Jake answers Naima.
He’s only teasing her, but I can’t help the secret thrill that shoots through my heart when he calls it our apartment.
Naima laughs at his rejoinder like Jake is the most charming man on earth. And I know I’m going to get treated to yet another whispered comment about how lucky I am as soon as he’s out of earshot.
Which turns out to be sooner than expected. The arm he has slung around my shoulder goes stiff while I’m explaining to Naima about my plan to take a few months off to study for the New York State bar before beginning my job search.
“See somebody I need to say hello to,” he says. Then he drops a kiss on the side of my forehead and takes off.
“Girl, he is too fine,” Naima whispers under her breath nearly as soon as he’s gone. “And he’s supporting you while you study for the bar? Oh, my God.”
“Yeah, I’m lucky,” I answer, trying not to think about how fast he walked off. Even after we talked about how nervous I still am about navigating around his massive apartment. You trust him, I remind myself as I smile and nod in the direction of Naima’s voice.
“And this place—girl, I hope he described it to you…”
“He did. It sounds like I’m missing out on a view of the river.”
“And crazy high ceilings! How many bedrooms does this apartment have anyway?!”
“Six—but Jake uses one of them as his home office.”
I strain, hoping Jake and whoever he’s talking to are within hearing range. But no such luck. All I can hear is the sound of glasses clinking, the hum of recently graduated law school students talking about their next steps, and Frank singing about the “Summer Wind” over it all.
“Okay, lucky is an understatement,” Naima informs me. “You didn’t just hit the jackpot. That guy is like the Powerball of dudes. Like one in a billion chances! I’m glad you finally let him in.”
“Yeah, me, too…” I say, voice soft. Resisting…trying so hard to resist my suspicious nature…
“But it was just him living here before you moved in? What does a single guy need with a place this big?” Naima asks.
“I guess it’s an investment property. His family owns it,” I answer.
“What does his family do again?”
Okay, I can’t take this anymore. “Nai, can you see who he’s talking to?” I ask.
I hear the creak of faux leather as Naima turns to look off in the direction Jake went. “Oh girl, you don’t have anything to worry about. He’s talking to a guy.”
Naima’s right. I have nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing. Still, I ask, “What does the guy look like?”
“Uh…big. Muscle-y. Looks like he dyes his hair with black paint. Not to stereotype—but a total Italian. Maybe he’s one of Jake’s relatives? Didn’t you say his family lives in New Jersey?”
“Maybe,” I agree, but my voice sounds distant, even to my ears, because why hasn’t he introduced me if the guy is family?
It’s not like that, I tell myself…even as pictures of my parents’ hidden relationship start flashing through my head like a bad movie.
“Ooh, wait. Now he’s following Jake upstairs. Maybe to put down his jacket? I should probably find a place for mine, too. It’s a little hot in here.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “Here, give it to me, and I’ll take it.”
“You don’t have to do that. I can take it.”
“No, let me,” I insist. “I’m still getting the hang of navigating around this apartment. I could use the practice.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Naima agrees. “Have I mentioned this place is huge!”
A few minutes later, I’m walking up the short set of stairs toward the front of the apartment with Naima’s jacket slung over my shoulder, even though I know there’s a perfectly suitable coat closet only a few steps away from the front door.
But upstairs is the bedroom Jake converted into a home office, and Naima’s coat gives me an excuse for being up here if he asks.
I chide myself for being silly all the way up the stairs. Then I stop dead, gripping my walking stick tight. The argument is so loud I can hear their voices nearly as soon as I clear the top step. But I can’t understand their words. So, I get closer.
Eavesdropping, I know. But I’ve pretty much used up all my trust issue willpower this month on moving into Jake’s Upper East Side apartment. Gripping Naima’s jacket like a teddy bear, I get as close as I can to the door.
“Jesus fucking Christ! You went after his moolie daughter? What would your dad say? After what his set did to us. After what he did to you!”
“Look, I know what I’m doing. I pulled a message to her dad off her laptop a couple weeks ago. So, she has a way to contact him. Maybe Peretti will even come out of hiding if he hears his only daughter is living with me now.”
What’s crazy is how confused I am at first. I’ve been playing the part of Amber Reynolds for so long, I’d almost forgotten
who I was when I still had my eyesight. And Amber Reynold’s parents died in a car accident. So, it takes me a moment to realize who they’re talking about.
The other me. Bella Peretti.
The secret daughter of the Romano crime family’s best enforcer. The girl who used to bring the Italian meals her mother made down to the bad men in the basement. The girl who once tried to save a boy she knew didn’t deserve to die at such a young age.
Dread claws at the back of my throat, because that boy’s name was Luca, but that wasn’t his full name. No… I’ll always remember WITSEC breaking down all the players in the tragedy that ended Bella’s life as she knew it, while I lay recovering everything but my eyesight and name in a hospital bed. Them telling me exactly who my father had kidnapped
And the truth hits me like something I tripped over without my stick to catch my fall.
Luca Jacob Ferraro. That was the name of the boy my father kidnapped and tortured for days before his crew found him.
Luca Jacob Ferraro. The name is close enough to Jake Ferra to spit at.
And moreover, I recognize the voice of the guy he’s arguing with. Because it’s the last voice I heard before the explosion that blinded me.
8
The World We Knew
Big Italian Tony.
The goon who killed my mother and set off an explosive in my house is in my boyfriend’s study. No, not my boyfriend’s. This room belongs to Luca Ferraro. Not Jake Ferra, the guy I thought I knew—the guy I thought I’d fallen in love with. But Luca Ferraro, the boy my father kidnapped and was planning to kill right before the Ferraro soldiers showed up at our front door.
Pain rips through me like a poison-tipped dagger, and I reel with the new knowledge. None of it had been real. The soul-healing sex, the date nights, those long hours studying on the couch together, just to stay near. None of it had been real. And my first gut instinct had been completely right. The guy who’d pursued me so hard is a shark I had no business letting through my front door, much less trusting him with my heart.
My mind burns with the revelation, and I turn in my tracks to run—only to walk straight into a wall.
“Ow! Fuck!” I drop my cane, the curse words falling out of my mouth before I can stop them.
Pain flashes, searing and hot, across my face and I feel something warm and wet dripping from my left nostril. Probably blood. Crap… I’m completely disorientated, which would be a problem for a sighted person but is an absolute disaster for me. My mind is spinning with what I just discovered about Jake, but I need to find my cane, then concentrate on following the chatter of the party below so I can figure out which direction to walk—
“What was that?” I hear Big Italian Tony ask.
Okay, forget the cane. I put my left hand on the wall I ran into and start walking, holding my other hand out in a way that’s nowhere near the cool and capable look I usually go for as the only visually impaired student in my law school class. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to get away! I’ve got to—
The sound of the door opening. “Amber?”
I walk faster. Have to get downstairs! Have to get to people, I command myself with an image of Big Italian Tony shooting my mother. Right between the eyes, one of the detectives told me. No reason to feel guilty about not getting to her before the bomb went off, another said. She was already dead.
“Amber, your stick. You left your stick!”
I keep walking. Pretend I don’t hear him.
A hand catches my arm. Spins me around.
“Christ, your nose is bleeding! What happened?”
I can smell the overbearing cologne of another presence in the hallway. But he doesn’t talk. Which makes him all the more menacing.
“Let me go!” I whisper to Fake Jake. “Let me go, or I’ll scream.”
“Amber, what’s going on?” he demands. Still playing the part. Still playing me for a total fool.
And that alone infuriates me enough to snarl, “Don’t you mean Bella?”
I hear the quiet hitch of his breath. I also hear the crack of a gun being cocked. Unmistakable, because once you hear it in real life, there’s no forgetting the sound.
“Don’t,” Fake Jake says, his tone flat and ruthless. Nothing like the guy I thought I loved.
And I don’t know if he’s talking to his enforcer or me. Either way…
“Amber,” Jake starts again.
“Bella,” I hiss. I reach out and wave my hand in the air a few times before I find the cane. “Stop pretending!” I say to him as I snatch it back.
“Bella,” he says with a heavy sigh. “Come into my office. We’ve gotta talk about this.”
“No, I’m not coming into the office with you and the man that killed my mother in cold blood. I’m leaving right now. Don’t try to stop me or I’ll scream, and there will be a lot of questions from all those people down there. Everyone who doesn’t know you’re really a mafia prince.”
“C’mon, don’t do this. We can fix this. Just—”
I don’t hear the rest of his words. I’m already headed back to the party.
Gasps sound from below before I’m even halfway down the stairs. “Oh my God, Amber, your nose is bleeding!” a voice calls out. It’s a girl from my Public Health Seminar. One of the ones who used to moon over Jake until I started letting him sit next to me in the assistant chair halfway through the semester.
But right now, I grab onto her voice like a lifeline. “Can you find my friend, Naima? She’s…um…” Dammit, I have no idea how to describe her. “She’s half-Dominican, half-Haitian…” I finish weakly because that’s the only physical qualifier I have for her.
But in the next moment, a new voice calls out to me, “Amber? Amber! Oh my God! Are you all right?” The thump of hard heels shakes the stairs, and then Naima is beside me, pressing a tissue into my nose.
“What happened?”
“Got disoriented and walked right into a wall,” I answer.
“Oh, my God. Where’s Jake? Want me to find him?”
“No,” I say, fighting to keep my voice calm. Struggling to stay Amber Reynolds, even though I now know there are at least two people who know I’m not really that girl.
“Can you take me home?” I ask Naima. “Back to your place? I need to not be here for a while.”
LUCA
From up above, I watch her go off with that cute social worker friend of hers, disappearing into the summer wind just like Frank was singing about a few minutes ago.
“You know we gotta kill her, right?” Deltano asks from beside me.
Yeah, I know. But I don’t answer my dad’s underboss.
“She recognized my voice. That means she could pin me to that explosion,” Deltano says as if to summarize my thoughts.
Fuck, why did he have to come here unannounced? And why did Amber have to follow me? It’s a no-brainer. Deltano is family, and Amber is the daughter of the enforcer who tortured and would have killed me without batting an eye. But… “I still need her to get to her father.”
Long pause. Then Deltano growls, “You want that fuck to come out of the woodwork? Kill his daughter. That will bring him back. Two birds with one bullet.”
Greggi is right. Absolutely right. This thing me and Amber had, it wasn’t real. It was like that play she made us watch on Lafayette Street the other week, with two people yelling happy lines about everything being okay while scenes from A Clockwork Orange played on a floor-to-ceiling screen in the background. Deltano saved my life…rescued me from that basement. Amber…Bella was a game I never should’ve played in the first place.
Graduation was only a few summer classes away, and then I’d be officially beginning my training to take over the Ferraro crime family. I can’t afford to look weak now. Can’t let the daughter of someone on my list bring me low in front of the Ferraro underboss.
With a fist squeezing tight around my heart, I turn to Ferraro and give him my answer.
9
That’s Life
Amber
“You’re up! Let me pour you some coffee from this machine Naima got us for our 30th wedding anniversary,” Mrs. Almonte, Naima’s mother, says with a thick Haitian accent when I walk into the kitchen of her Queens’ duplex the next morning. The radio announcer quietly going over today’s headlines is soon drowned out by the talking push-button coffee machine as it grinds beans to produce a single serving of quality coffee.
I hear the scoot of a chair underneath it all, and then Naima’s in front of me, saying, “Hey girl, the table’s over here.”
I have my stick but let her guide me to a table that is clear of clutter or any of the other knick-knacks you might find in a fully-sighted family’s kitchen. From what Naima told me when she showed me to the couch last night, the Almontes live in a very humble home. But it doesn’t feel that way to me. It is refreshing to visit a place other than my apartment with completely clear pathways wherever I walk. Naima even removed the kitchen door for her parents, so all I had to do is walk right in when I woke up this morning.
Naima still lives with her parents. She says it’s because it doesn’t make sense to pay some landlord thousands to pile into an apartment with a bunch of roommates. But I suspect she doesn’t want to leave her parents alone in the house, even though from what I can sense, they’d get along perfectly well on their own.
Naima’s Dominican father, Mr. Almonte, is already at the table.
“Hola, Mami, let me lean that stick against the table for you,” he says, taking my mobility cane from me. “It is good to have you here in my home.” Then he says, “You know I was very idiot man this winter. Went out without my stick. Slipped on the ice in front of the whole neighborhood. Could hear the kids laughing as the women sent for an ambulance. Broke my leg in two places. Now they have me on this PT. You have no reason to be embarrassed in front of that rich boy.”
My face heats, because apparently, Naima’s already filled her parents in on how her hysterical friend insisted on spending the night at their place because she was so overcome with mortification. I weirdly wish I’d come up with a less embarrassing cover story.
LUCA_Her Ruthless Don Page 7