by Nicole Fox
“I just had to stop you, miss,” he says. “I have to ask you how you get your hair that shiny. It’s very beautiful.”
I run my hand over my dark hair. My father used to say it was the color of Saperavi wine—a wine so dark red that it looks black. I’ve had family members, friends, strangers, and hairdressers all fawn over it. Personally, I always wanted to be blonde.
It’s nothing new for an unfamiliar man to comment on it, but this particular Romeo’s eyes seem more interested in my chest than my hair.
“I just use store-brand shampoo,” I reply curtly. I try to step around him, but he shadows me, blocking my path.
“There must be more than that,” he says. He reaches forward, touching the edges of my hair. I jerk my head away, letting the strands slip out of his hand. In North Carolina, if people witnessed what was happening between us, they’d at least stop to see if they needed to intervene, but in this city, no one cares enough to even notice. Hard to blame them. Like I’ve said before, there are monsters everywhere you look in these parts.
“That’s it,” I say. “It must be genetics.”
“You look, uh, Mediterranean,” he says. “My ex was Mediterranean. Greek, you know? Are you Greek?”
“No.” I move to get around him again. He grabs onto my arm to stop me, his arm brushing up against my chest.
“Don’t be such a bitch. We’re just having a nice conversation,” he says. “You don’t need to treat every man like a creep. If I were a creep, I would have copped a feel.”
His hand moves before I can stop him, squeezing my left breast. As he leers, I clench my fist—thumb on the outside to avoid breaking it—and jab it into his throat.
Bull’s-eye.
God, that feels good.
The shock hits his expression in slow motion. First, the eyes go wide in shock. Then the pain waves ripple through, and his eyebrow crinkles. Blood rushes to his cheeks, turning everything a nice, embarrassed pink.
It’s a freaking masterpiece.
When he keels over, hands grasping for a throat that deserves a hell of a lot more than one wimpy punch, I lean over with him and hiss, “Don’t ever—fucking ever—touch anybody without their consent again. Got it?”
I stand back up without waiting for an answer. A few people are eyeing me now. I continue walking down the street, the old courage returning to me. New York City isn’t quite Olympus and it sure as hell isn’t Chapel Hill.
It’s a beast of its own kind.
But it’s a beast that can be tamed.
The office of the Fifth Avenue Journal is a sophisticated mixture of glass and steel. Cold pillars and artfully exposed beams crisscross the atrium, but even the towering plants dotting the open space can’t hide the fact that it feels like you’re being watched. The massive photos along the back walls don’t help that feeling, either.
The photos depict various investigative reports that the Fifth Avenue Journal broke—from the photo of an old woman’s bruised arms at an abusive nursing home to photos of several young women in a room, their faces partly covered in shadow, but the same tattoo clearly visible on all of them. That story unveiled a transnational human trafficking organization and cut it off at the knees.
I walk up to the front desk. A young blonde woman with her hair pulled into a bun is typing at her computer. She glances up at me.
“How may I help you?” she asks, continuing to type. Behind the desk, the Fifth Avenue Journal’s countless awards for investigative journalism are proudly presented behind glass.
“I just got hired,” I say, a little too much excitement in my voice. Tone it down, girl. Act like you’ve been here before.
“Congratulations,” she says. “You must be Cassandra Balducci?”
I nod, but she’s already grabbing a card key and a lanyard with an identification badge. She slides them across the desk. I take them.
“Thank you,” I say. I pull the lanyard over my head, letting it settle over my chest. It makes me feel like a freshman in college again, but since I’m new, I don’t want to constantly be scrambling to prove that I deserve to be here.
I step onto the elevator, pressing the button for the fifth floor. As the elevator ascends, I can’t help but smile. It’s finally real. Everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve wanted for so long. I’m going to be an investigative journalist at one of the most prestigious news publications in the whole freaking world. And I did it all on my own. I studied, I applied, I passed up friendships and relationships, I missed out on a lot of experiences, but it all built up to this moment.
I. Am. Here.
I fiddle with my ID, running a fingertip over my last name. I remember my father pressing the idea that he could help me get into a better college, a better major, a better career field, if I just let him help me. At the time, it was tempting—to save on debt, to stall doubt, to rebuild the damaged bridge between us.
But now, I know I didn’t need him to get me on this elevator. This belongs to me and that will always mean more to me than anything he could have given me.
My heart starts to beat faster as the elevator doors open.
The chaos on the fifth floor is palpable. There is constant movement—people with cell phones attached to their ear as they pace around, or standing over their computers, furiously typing like their life depends on getting the next word out. I hear snippets of conversations as I pass by desks.
“He said they dropped the lawsuit on the twenty-fifth—”
“—they won’t allow the International Labor Organization to get any statistics, but the company’s gotta know their view on child labor laws and—”
“—a load of bullshit. His wife wasn’t even in the country the whole second week of February.”
The whole place is a who’s who of investigative journalism heavy hitters. There’s George Holland, owner of two Pulitzers and a beard that would make a Viking jealous. Two desks over is Melissa Brady, who called an African dictator a “charlatan” to his face and looks like she could crush watermelons with her thighs. I have her Princeton commencement speech practically memorized. When I nearly reach my new boss’ office, I see Jacob Silton, who broke the Kromsky scandal all by himself, run past me, holding onto a large plush toy with its stuffing poking out of the back of its head.
The sight of the toy tugs on something ugly in my mind, but I push the dark thoughts out of my head. Today is a good day. Nothing is going to change that.
When I reach my destination, I knock on the door.
“Come in.”
In comparison to the rest of the chaotic floor, it’s eerily quiet and organized in Tom Harden’s office. There’s only his desk, his laptop, two chairs, and Tom Harden himself inside.
“Please close the door,” he says, his eyes focused on his laptop before he starts to type again. “I can’t concentrate with all of that noise.”
I step in, closing the door behind me. He taps on his keyboard once more, checks the screen for a second, and snaps the laptop shut. He looks up, smiling.
“Cassandra Balducci. I’m so glad you’re here. Come, sit down.”
I sit across from him, nearly beaming now. My interview with Tom on campus went so well that it feels like I’m reuniting with an old college friend.
“It’s crazy out there,” I remark. “Silton seems like he’s onto a good story.”
“Smuggling,” Tom says. “But let’s talk about you. Did you find a desk yet? You likely won’t be at it much. Most of our reporters only come to the office to use our resources or to get away from their wives.”
“Uh, no, I didn’t find it yet, but I’ll get acquainted with it soon enough.”
“Good. We want you to be comfortable.” He gazes out the window. “Moving on—work. The good stuff. For your first assignment, I wanted you to do something you’d be highly educated on, something in your wheelhouse, something you can really smash out of the park.”
His excitement is contagious. It’s not hard to tell why the man is s
uch a legend. He’s got fire and steel in equal measure. One of those guys you immediately respect, and whose respect you crave in return. I sit up straight. “If it’s about the college admission scandal, I know someone who works in an admission office. They’d likely want to remain anonymous, but maybe …”
He shakes his head and cuts me off. “No, no. That’s fine, but save it for another day. I’m far more interested in a grittier topic. Organized crime.”
My stomach plummets. So this is why I’m here.
We stare at each other over his desk.
“Oh?” I ask. “I don’t … that doesn’t sound easy.”
“With your personal connections, it should be very easy.”
I tuck a strand of my hair back, trying to ignore the sudden roaring in my ears. “I don’t have any, um … personal connections.”
He laughs, but suddenly he doesn’t seem quite as friendly as he did just a few moments ago. “Cassandra, come on now. Your father may have evaded conviction, but the Balducci family has been an active Mafia family since the Depression. Your family might not be as powerful as it used to be, but let’s not beat around the bush here.”
“I can’t write about my family,” I whisper. It’s hard to get the words out. Did someone steal all the air out of the room? Why can’t I breathe right?
“It’s why I hired you,” he says, and that hurts more than anything else he could’ve possibly said. His words stab me, a steak knife slicing through both my lungs and my heart.
From the second the words “organized crime” left Tom’s lips, I was terrified that we were headed to this point. But now that he’s said it outright, I can’t deny it. I can’t pretend it was a misunderstanding.
My hard work didn’t get me here. My brain didn’t get me here.
The only thing that got me here was my family name, paving the way for me even when I didn’t want it to.
My father would be delighted.
“I can find a better story,” I say in a panic. “Way better. I promise.” He’s already flipped open his laptop again, focusing on the screen. I wonder if he is even hearing me. “Mr. Harden, you must have read past my name on my résumé and my references. You can call anyone I’ve worked with and anyone who taught me—I’m a hard worker and I’m determined. I’m not afraid to dive into the difficult topics.”
“Your family—” he starts.
“We’re estranged,” I interrupt.
He glances at me, then shrugs. “Better get un-estranged, then.”
I stand up suddenly. “I’ve admired this paper for a long time. I will find a better story to write. News about the Mafia might catch people’s eye, but, like you said, everyone knows my family has some complicated history. It’s not news. I could break open something brand-new.”
He waves a hand distractedly in the air. He’s already moved on from me, I can tell. It’s crazy how one man can make you feel so, so small with such little effort. “Fine, have it your way. You have two weeks to propose something better,” he says. “And a month to write it. If you can’t, find yourself another paper to write for.”
I’m no idiot. That’s a death sentence. The short time span means that he expects me to cave and write what he wants me to write. It would be difficult to dig up a new story in two weeks, and damn near impossible to gather enough information and write it within a month.
It’s his way or the highway.
“Thank you, Mr. Harden,” I whisper. I turn away from him, walking slowly to the door in a daze. I can almost feel my family name clinging to my ankles like chains, weighing me down and dragging me back.
Nothing else I do will ever matter. From the moment I was born, I was a Balducci and a shadow was cast over me.
It seems like I can’t run fast enough to escape it.
As I open the office door, the noise from the other reporters hits me again. Several cardboard boxes have been stacked up against one of the cubicles in the short amount of time since I went into Harden’s torture chamber. Jacob Silton is pulling more plush animals from it. He’s scowling at the boxes.
“I swear to God,” he says to one of the nearby women. He rips the head off the teddy bear. “If I don’t break this story, it’s going to break me.”
“You should sleep,” the woman says.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he mutters. He tears the head off a plush dog. “Fucking hell! There it is.”
I can’t see what he’s looking at, but the whole office seems to stop, turning to see what he’s looking at. From where I’m standing, his eyes are bright and the joy across his face makes me smile too despite myself. I move a little farther to the left to see a brick of cocaine. I eyeball it and add up the street value of the drug before I can tell my brain to shut up. Twenty-five grand in Columbian pure.
Thanks, Daddy, I think sarcastically. It’s his schooling I have to thank for that little mental math.
I’m desperate, but it’s not money I want. I’m going to prove to Harden that I’m more than my name. I’m not just Gianluigi Balducci’s daughter.
I’m Cassandra. I’m my own person.
I just have to find a story.
3
Maksim
The conference room table stretches out in front of me, all black and steel. I look around at each of my lieutenants. Ravil, Nail, Genrikh, Semyon, Rostislav, Timofey, Borislav, and Yakov. It’s a motley crew. Genrikh stands six foot five, built like a bull, while Timofey barely scratches five foot seven and wouldn’t look out of place in an accountant’s office.
They’re killers, every last one of them.
But I know each of them would rather face God on Judgment Day than defy me.
Nail, a wide-faced man with small eyes and a love for strangulation, opens the cardboard box in front of him, taking out a small jar.
“After some persuasion, Cimona Ramirez agreed to put a smaller container inside the lotion jar,” he says. He slides the jar over to me. I spin it in my hand. Cimona’s Face Cream. It’s a glass jar, so the lotion is still visible from the outside. I twist off the top and peel off the foil seal. The cocaine lies hidden in a bottle inside the jar, the lotion still surrounding it, like a little Russian nesting doll.
“You ensured that her company won’t turn against us?” I ask Nail.
He nods once. “It’s a small family business. They know it would be better to go to prison than to give us up. They do have a request.”
He pauses. I screw the top back on the jar and wait.
Nail clears his throat and continues. “They are, uh, requesting that we arrange for one of their members to cross the border,” he says.
“No,” I say. “They ship the drugs, we pay them. That’s the deal. There’s no more negotiation than that.”
“They were insistent,” Nail says. “It’s very important to them and it would be very simple for us—”
“Tell them that they are currently a liability. They either take the deal or they remain a liability. We eliminate liabilities in this Bratva. Understood?”
“Yes,” Nail says, bowing his head. “I will inform them.”
Some of the lotion is smeared on my hand. I rub my thumb against it until it’s gone. “What’s next?”
Genrikh leans forward, the edge of the table cutting into his gut. “We have a minor issue with the Columbians. At least four different members have been seen trying to sell in Brownsville. One was seen around Betsy Head Park and the other three were spotted on the corner of Jefferson Street and East Fifth. We’re not certain if it’s ignorance or arrogance that’s causing them to enter our territory. I have men available that could get more information.”
I pass the face cream back to Nail. “Tell our soldiers to take care of them. Leave them outside Liliana’s.”
Genrikh’s arm shifts closer to his body. Nail looks away from me. Tension hardens the faces of the other lieutenants. Ravil is the only one who remains impassive.
“All of them?” Genrikh asks cautiously.
&nb
sp; “All of them,” I growl.
“Liliana’s is historically important to the Columbians,” Genrikh says. “Sentimental, you know. To the, uh, culture.”
“Tell me why that is relevant, Genrikh.” I stare at him until he looks away.
“It isn’t,” he replies hurriedly. “I’ll take care of it.”
“The Balduccis are the bigger problem,” Semyon cuts in. “They’re still trying to encroach on our territory.”
“We can’t just kill them like the Columbians,” Borislav interjects. “They have the means to retaliate.”
The men erupt in a hubbub, arguing back and forth about what should be done with regard to the Balducci rats. I let them clamor for a long moment before I hold up a hand. They instantly fall silent.
“Don’t worry about the Italians,” I say into the ensuing silence. “I’m handling that one personally.”
Not a single man disturbs the silence.
I look around at the council. “If anyone wants to question my decisions, they should speak their mind now.” Genrikh focuses his attention on the face cream and Semyon keeps his eyes on my hands, but everyone keeps their gaze steady on me. “Will that be all?”
Again, not a peep.
“I asked a question,” I snarl icily.
A chorus of “No” answers me at once.
“Then thank you for your time, gentlemen,” I say, standing up. The lieutenants follow my lead. They each shake my hand before leaving, one by one. Ravil remains seated. Embers of irritation sear in my veins at his lack of decorum, but I extinguish them. Ravil isn’t allowed to disrespect me, though he’s granted some latitude as my oldest friend.