by Ella James
Elise
There’s a task force—on the Arnoldi stuff. I commissioned it the day I got the stockpile of evidence, which police from multiple precincts sat on for more than a year, waiting for turnover in my office.
The task force peeps have had a month to work, and now it’s time for them to brief me. As far as I know, there’s nothing direct on Luca. Anyway, I’m moving forward. We have closure now…and it was more than I had ever hoped for. I can’t imagine a gentler conclusion to that situation. Not that it was gentle. It was anything but. Adult Luca was—
I shake my head. Like, literally give it a good shake. My face and neck feel hot. My heart is pounding.
I glance around the conference room, but no one’s watching me pull out the leather chair at the head of the table. No one’s watching me as people trickle in with briefcases and stacks of papers. No one’s watching me—except when I’m speaking—until the halfway point, when Chris Rutherford, my predecessor, steps into the room. He takes a seat in a chair beside the door, and right away, I feel his eyes on me.
As Wimberly starts her slides, showing in methodical detail what we have on the Arnoldi family and the Fent trade. As Rupert analyzes the heroin situation—something we don’t have much good evidence on—and explains how he’s got a good connection for more recent info. As Fatima shares her presentation about human trafficking and I tell myself that isn’t true, and Kai points out the trafficking of women is the Armenians’ stock and trade, and Imani, who serves on all the Armenian task forces, points out that Luca’s brother does some money laundering for Aren Alexanian—the Armenians’ leader.
Imani stands up in her pea green pants suit, high heels snapping on the hardwood floor as she walks to the podium, and gives a lengthy presentation with some pretty ironclad financial deets that look bad for Luca’s little brother. I remind myself that I don’t know his brother, that I never got to meet him. Which makes me think of my sister, and when I look up, Chris is looking at me again.
Is this weird? Because I feel like it is. Why the hell is he here?
Right after Imani finishes, Chris stands up and covers the distance to the podium in three long strides. He pushes at one of his shirtsleeves—always with the droopy shirtsleeves, which is so odd; I know everything he wears is tailored—and he looks down, and I realize he’s got a tiny mic pinned to his lapel.
W.T.F.
“Thanks for having me in.” He nods at me, and I smile tersely as my heart starts pounding way too fast and heavy…because I didn’t ask him to come today. “I just had a few things to mention.” He frowns down at his phone, like he’s made some notes in notepad, and then looks up, smiling that smile that he does when he wants to look affable.
“I’ve got a contact for Rupert. Someone who’s knowledgeable about the heroin side of things. They’ve talked to me in the past, but I think they would talk to Rupert.” I blink twice, fast, keeping my face carefully neutral.
“Also, there’s a bit of history that you should know about.” He looks around the room, and I can feel the blood drain from my cheeks. Holy shit. This is the moment that they all find out— “Luca Galante’s father was an informant for the FBI. It was highly confidential, and few in law enforcement were ever briefed.” A low buzzing starts in my head, making it hard for me to focus as he goes on: “It’s been years since we had a real Arnoldi task force. Really years since there was anything tangible against them. Roberto has been careful. He’s still seen by many in this city as a relatively legit businessman.
“And he taught Galante all of that. Luca is a son to him. You may wonder how that is, if he was the son of an informant. That’s a question I have, too. I’m not sure how Galante became next in line after Roberto, but I have heard he views informants as traitors of the worst kind. No one in his circle is going to turn.” He taps the podium and offers me a phony smile. “Just a tidbit.” He taps his head. “Helps to know the background.” He nods at me, arches a brow, and saunters out.
By the time I open my office door thirty minutes later, I’m still reeling from the shock of learning Luca’s father was an FBI informant—working against the Arnoldis! Also reeling from the way Chris dropped by and commandeered my meeting. He doesn’t even have an office in the building now. He’s been retired for weeks.
When I turn toward my desk and find him sitting in the leather chair adjacent to it, I’m so shocked I stand there blinking for a second.
“Well, hi.” I blink a few more times, and he nods.
“I won’t take much of your time.” He gives me a friendly smile—or one I would have thought was friendly in bygone times. Now I can’t be sure.
Despite the knot that’s cinching in my stomach, I sit at my desk, the one that was his less than two months ago. I straighten my spine and look at him the way I’d look at anyone who came into my office.
“I’m ready to hear it,” I say, this time giving him my own fake smile.
For a moment, he looks troubled—maybe unsure. Then his face takes on a look of calm assurance, and he says, “Well…the subject matter.” He tilts his head toward the door, as if I’ll understand the gesture. “I was throwing you a bone. Trying to dampen all that. I know they waited for you—all these…officers,” he says with what looks like an eyeroll. “But it doesn’t mean you’re locked in. All that trafficking rumor stuff—” He waves like he’s dismissing something. “We all have alliances and compromises, Elise. I had mine, and you’ll have yours. What matters is the way you leverage your baggage. And where you draw your lines. But a task force like that can go nowhere. Other things come up, and you get busy…” He shrugs, getting to his feet.
“Is this because—” I blink as all the wheels in my brain spin different directions. “I’m sorry, did you say this because of my…”
“Your father,” he says, holding my eyes before dropping his gaze to his feet. “I…came to know. Over the years. And he was a fine prosecutor. Never acted inappropriately. It helps that Roberto was—” He shakes his head. “He never dealt in harder drugs, and he would try to…do less harm. I think the way I saw it was just…let them have their world. If they stayed out of mine, there weren’t such problems.” He lifts a brow.
I can’t find my voice. I open my mouth like a fish that’s flopping on the shore, and close it and then open it again before I can say, “My…father?”
He narrows his eyes at me. Then his face transforms into a look of horror.
“Christopher, what are you telling me about my father?”
Now it’s his turn to pale. He backs out of the office, muttering something about “can’t believe it.”
I cut out of work an hour early, waiting till I’m in my black car to give myself over to my feelings. I pull up a picture of a linen hanky I found once on Reddit when I googled “Arnoldi family.” Someone uploaded it, claiming to be a housekeeper of the deceased elder Arnoldi. I stare at the “A” on it, and stare and stare some more, as the car drives me to my father’s place. But I don’t need to look hard. I’ve seen this “A” my entire life. Because there’s a handkerchief that looks identical to this one framed atop my father’s desk.
I shut my eyes and think of Isa—how her eyes look just like mine. I noticed it in high school, how she wore the same eyeshadow palette I did…because we had the same color eyes. Brown like autumn, almost amber. Then I’d started noting her eyebrows, and how their curve looked so much like my own. It seemed crazy, because Isa was so beautiful. But I thought about it, and I thought about my father calling me cara, and I remember for a time I really thought my dad was “in the mafia.” That’s why I’d been snooping in the Columbus Building that night that I encountered Luca.
My heart flutters at the base of my throat as I ride the elevator to my father’s floor and march to his door, knocking hard.
It takes him a while to open for me. When he does, I can see from his face that he’s been forewarned.
“Daddy, I need to come in.”
He hangs his head. “
I know.”
10
Elise
As it turns out, it’s not something I can talk about. With anybody. It’s…hard to explain. So I decide not to try.
What I do is pack my bags on Thursday night, so after work on Friday, I can head for Saranac Lake. It’s a long drive—between five and six hours, depending. I’m not sure what possessed my parents to buy seven acres with a house and two fishing cabins so far from Manhattan. But nobody asked me. No one asked me about a lot of things.
I’m rolling over the George Washington Bridge by six p.m., firing up one of my favorite fury albums, Jagged Little Pill, as I fly up the Northway. I’m breathing a little easier when I stop to get some matcha tea just outside Albany.
The last two and a half hours of the drive tend to be soothing, reminding me of childhood since I almost never come upstate except to relax at the cabin. The little cabin on the south side of the property is all we own now.
When I was young, my parents had the house, a simple, whitewashed two-story, retrofitted for Becca’s gear. That year after she died, we sold the white house at Saranac and our residence in lower Manhattan. My parents moved into a smaller place, closer to Wall Street. For years, I didn’t even know we still had one of the cabins; for that reason, Saranac is not a place that I associate with fresh grief.
Finally, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was having migraines, and Dad mentioned it. Each cabin sits on about two acres, and each one has access to Lake Flower. I decided to spend a few weeks. The second week there, Dani and Ree joined me, bringing this ridiculous grocery store bakery cake that was probably intended to feed an entire football team. We stuffed our faces sitting in the Adirondack chairs in the warm grass beside the water, holding fishing poles sometimes and other times just watching them bob.
Fireflies danced all through the woods. One morning, from the screened porch on the front, we saw a deer eating a mushroom. I remember Dani drove the two of us to the hardware store, bought some tools, and fixed the porch swing sitting in a dusty corner of the attic. And there we stayed together for the next two weeks.
In many ways, we were coming back to one another. Ree had been at NYU and Dani at Bard College. The prior year, Dani and I had had a falling out at a bar. I was drunk, and she said she was sorry that she hadn’t seen me in a while. I said something about how when you have a sister and your high school boyfriend, I was sure it was easy to stay busy. Dani cried and I just left, so things were weird for almost all of sophomore year. Until the cabin.
Turned out Dani had found Ty cheating on her with one of her new college friends. I remember she felt sorry for not understanding more how I’d felt after Luca.
The summer after junior year—the summer after the winter where I saw Luca in the elevator and slapped him—we roasted marshmallows and drank box wine almost every night. One morning, Ree decided she would buy a manual mower and tame the overgrown lawn. Instead she twisted her ankle, and we had to drive her to the area hospital, where we dropped her off and didn’t see her for two days, because a pretty nurse took her home.
I’m grinning as I pass Lake George.
I know this time will feel different. Frozen trees and snow on the ground. I brought jackets, boots, and several of my favorite blankets, plus a whole armful of books. Also marshmallows…because Lake Saranac. I feel a little guilty not inviting Dani or Ree, but sometimes you need to be alone. Like when you find out your whole life has been a lie.
Tears fill my eyes. I blink them away, but they keep coming. There’s a blue sign near Pottersville for a “Text Stop,” so I pull over there and give myself a minute. I hate crying. It seems stupid, like a waste of time, but I’m a crier and I always have been. Over time I realized it’s more logical to let it out and then proceed.
This time my tears are over the babies and their ’80s-tastic mothers in the photo from my dad’s library. When I confronted him, I asked randomly—seemingly randomly; nothing is ever really random—if the short-haired woman with the chubby baby boy was Luca’s mother, and Dad’s eyes widened.
“Oh, so that’s how you knew the Galantes! They were your ex friends.”
I had every bullshit line imaginable fed to me inside that hour. I was young, my father’s mob connections were a secret, it was high-risk information, could have jeopardized his career or even our lives.
“Oh, right, kind of like mine now?”
I was too livid to even feel a bit of lawyer-ly glee when my father brushed pretend lint off his pants.
“I heard today his dad was an informant. Did you get him to inform you? I can’t believe you told me they were bad people!”
“Don’t take that tone with me.”
“What tone? The tone that a D.A. might take with her criminal father?” I was crying by then. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Do whatever you want. No one’s telling you to change the way you behave in your office.”
“What does Luca have on you?”
“I’m not a stone-cold killer, if that’s the implication.”
“I didn’t say you were, but you just now said you weren’t. Isn’t that the old rule? Now who’s guilty? How could you do this to me?”
The hurt of finding out from Christopher. The hurt and the shame. Good enough to be D.A., but not worthy to know my family’s darkest secrets. I step out of the car into the frigid air and lean against the driver’s side door, tensing as a lone car flies by. Feeling like I hope a bear will come out of the woods and eat me.
“I don’t think he would blackmail you via me.” My father’s face was somber.
“And why wouldn’t he, to keep himself from prison?”
“I don’t think the boy’s that sloppy.”
“You have no idea what I have on him, and you never will. Chris Rutherford is never coming in my building again.”
“Don’t throw fits, Elise. Your fit-throwing never was becoming.”
Oh, but I had itched to slap him.
“Neither is your deceit.”
There was more I had been wanting to know, but I spun on my heel and stormed out, forever what my second-year law school professor said of me: “Too emotional to make a cool-headed prosecutor, but just fiery enough to make a great one if you keep your focus.”
Now I climb back into the heat of the car, wiping my swollen eyes.
Fuck my dad. Fuck my mom. Fuck Luca.
He was just a kid like you were.
“None of this matters,” I say aloud.
I spin back onto the road, mash the pedal to the floor, and let the winter-bare woods swallow me up.
Luca
Fuck, she drives fast. Who would have thought the D.A. wouldn’t give a shit about a speeding ticket?
I’m working out the motor of my 821 to gain some ground on her, but I’m just guessing where she is, because I can’t look at my phone’s screen while I’m riding.
When I landed at the regional airport where I keep a hangar—and this bike—she had about an hour and fifty minutes on me. Right now, if I had to guess, it’s maybe ten. And I can get it down to zero if I push it.
I rev things up a little, gritting my teeth because it’s fucking freezing. When the tracer app attached to her car pinged to let me know she’d pulled over at that weird side-of-the-road spot, I jumped the gun and had my guy Davide fire up the TTx. He’s a younger dude, was in the Air Force until I hired him to do cargo stuff. Now when I’m in a big hurry or I can’t fly myself, I have him chauffeur me around.
This time, he was able to prep the plane while I headed to the airport, so we were in the air within half an hour, but I was in a rush and left my leather jacket.
I grin as I spot her taillights. Can’t be quite sure…and now I can, because there’s moonlight, I’m up on her ass, and that’s a white Acura. I lower my head as I zip around her, hoping it won’t freak her out to see a lone guy on a bike. It’s not like she knows I’m headed to her place, and she sure as shit doesn’t know why.
; Aren’s being weird as hell. He’s called twice in the last day and a half, incensed like that first time, cussing me out for footage he claims the Brooklyn cops have of some of his guys and Alesso doing the monthly exchange. Fishy thing is, I had Max ask around, and nobody up in Brooklyn’s heard about that footage. And Max has some good contacts up there. One thing Max did hear is Aren’s fucking some woman who—as it turns out—works for the goddamn FBI. Soren looked her up, and her job description seems to be classified. Looked to him like she worked out of Manhattan.
If it’s true he’s with her, there’s no way that’s good. Roberto told me, in one of our few detailed conversations about informants and people turncoating, that you’d be surprised how often feds will do dirty shit, like fuck someone who has info they need.
I’m not overly worried about Aren causing damage to me, but it bothers me that when he calls, he keeps mentioning Elise. How she’s a cunt, and she got his cousin arrested back when that airport task force shit went down. He keeps asking me if I’ve fucked her—maybe to make himself feel better about his own sketchy FBI-agent fuckery? The last time he called, he said something that scared me shitless.
He said, “I hope she has protectors for her.”
The worst part was, I couldn’t even tell him that he better goddamn not or I’ll feed him his fucking dick—because I can’t let him know I care.
I had Soren’s PI buddy track Elise starting that morning after Aren called me in the middle of the night. How do I know Aren isn’t doing the same thing? Someone could be waiting for her in that little cabin. I didn’t pass anybody as I zoomed toward her, but you never know; if it were me, I’d lie in wait. It’s not rocket science to guess where she’d be going on a Friday if Aren was having her tracked and she was pointed up this way.