by Nicole Fox
She flinches, rustles her purple silk nightgown, and then settles back with a rictus scowl. Then she smiles; the smile is worst of all. “You’ll see soon enough,” she says with confidence. “Listen, Colleen. One day this will all seem like a bunch of silly nonsense. You might not believe it now, but in a few years we’ll be sitting around and laughing about this. Me, you, your father, your husband, my grandchildren. All of us, having a gay old time.” She does her softening routine, extending her hand. I want to bat that hand away, but at times like this I find myself weakening. It’s a preview of what could’ve been, had we been closer all along. “If you just went along with me a bit, it wouldn’t have to be like this. If you just smiled every now and then, and at least tried to have a good time. But you never do. You’re always complaining, always whining, always behaving as though your father and I haven’t given you every luxury in life.”
This is the moment when I am supposed to crumble and apologize. I normally would, but she’s already demonstrated that the repercussions are going to be much less severe today. “Didn’t you ever stop to think that I might want more than luxuries, Mom?” It is the first time in years I have said Mom not as an insult, but as a genuine plea. “You never care about what I want, only what’s best for the—”
“For the Family, yes! That’s exactly right!” Her scowl deepens, which is almost impressive since it was so deep already. “Everything all of us do is for the good of the Family! Do you think your father wanted to let that Italian dog go, huh? No, no, the things he would’ve done to him if he had the chance … if he gets the chance again, you better come to terms with the prospect that he won’t be around for long. Anyway, enough talk. The ball is in seven hours; we’re leaving in three and a half. I want you to meet me in the costume room in one. Do you understand?”
“The costume room,” I murmur sourly. When I was a girl, the costume room was my study, but then Alma started to complain about how she needed more space for her clothes and so, voila, it became her costume room.
“Some girls never have a study for one second of their entire life!” Alma snaps. “Don’t be so ungrateful.”
“Whatever.” I fold my arms. “I’m not going to the ball, so that’s that. You can say and do whatever you want. I’m not playing your sick game.”
“You absolutely will play my game,” she counters. “All you get to choose is the way you play it: willingly …” she takes a step closer, lowers her voice, smiles savagely “… or not.”
With that, she turns away—her silk gown fluttering like a cape—and strides from the room. I sit on the bed and nod a silent thanks as Khabib (Scar’s real name) closes the door. The Russian guards are friendly enough, but that won’t stop from them carrying out Alma’s messed-up orders.
I don’t do much except sit there and listen to some Celtic music online, a mix that takes me to far-off lands where I don’t have to think about the coming night. I want to stay strong about refusing to go to the ball but I’m not sure if I can. Alma doesn’t exactly have a bad track record when it comes to making me do what she wants. I think about Gabriel, always, wishing he was here; being with him would make sense of it all. I felt like a different woman with him, especially that last night when I initiated the sex. The woman sitting here would never do something like that, but she did, that other one, the braver one, the one with some life in her. That woman wasn’t a doll.
Time passes far too quickly. I watch the clock pretty much continuously, counting down the seconds until the time when I’m supposed to meet Alma to get dressed. Eventually the dreaded knock comes on the door.
“You dress?” Khabib mutters.
“Yes,” I reply, tugging a blanket around my shoulders to cover my pajamas.
He opens the door and, as always, looks a few inches above my head. “Misses ask for you. You come.”
“No.” I shake my head firmly. “Tell her no.”
“She say you come.” He sighs. “Please. Come.”
“No!”
“I tell her.”
“Tell her then!”
He shrugs, as though it doesn’t make any difference to him, and then shuts the door. His heavy footsteps sound down the hallway and then lighter footsteps sound back toward me. Alma throws the door open, still in her gown but now with rollers in her hair and her face half-painted. She almost leaps at me, aiming her forefinger like a weapon. Some of her fingernails are painted, but others are still unpainted. It’s a strange look.
“You have two choices,” she says. “Either you follow me and you get dressed nicely. Or I order the Russians to come in here and dress you. That will mean they will see you naked, or at least half-naked. I have no desire for that to happen but you are not leaving me much choice. They will not hurt you, of course, but if you fight them I will be forced to allow them to drug you. Is that what you want, girl? To be passed out as men paw at you?” She lowers her voice to something like resentment. “Would you like that? Is that what that Italian dog did to you, turn you into a slut?”
“You’re prehistoric!” I hiss.
“Why?” she retorts. “Because I do not believe in the nonsense you young women spout, that you can go to bed with any man and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning?” She tuts. “Those are your choices. Pick one. Now.”
I pause, willing myself to tell her to go fuck herself. But the idea of Khabib and Volkov pawing at me does not bring me any pleasure. It fills me with fear, because I know that she’s telling the truth. They’ll dress me simply because Alma told them to. They’ll handle me the same way a butcher handles meat.
“I’ll get dressed myself,” I say, defeat weighing heavily on my shoulders.
“Good. Follow me.”
I follow her to the costume room—open-plan dressers on three of the walls, with clothes-store-style cushion seats in the middle and two separate vanity units—and get into a sparkling red dress, the one Alma chooses for me. Then I sit there completely still as Alma paints my face and my nails.
As she straightens my hair, she mutters: “You have to have a certain face for curls to work. I have that face. You see.” She turns her face so that it catches the light. “You’re better off with straight hair, I feel, because—well …” She sighs. “Just because.”
“Sure,” I growl. “Sure.”
Soon we’re ready. Khabib and Volkov escort me down to the entranceway, where Father stands in his loose-fitting suit with a napkin stuffed messily into the front pocket. He straightens it and looks everywhere apart from at me. It’s been like that since I returned. He won’t look at me because I had sex with a man; it’s that simple.
“Is he late?” Alma says, floating down the stairs.
The doorbell rings.
“Ah! Finally!”
We get into the limousine: Alma, Father, and I in the back, Khabib, Volkov, and the driver in the front.
“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Alma says as we ride from New Jersey to Long Island: a long, dreary ride under the gray clouds and through the endless sleet. “You’re to play nice with an Italian called Samuel Romano tonight, okay? Do you understand?” There: her plan; the real reason she could not hit me.
My blood turns cold. Samuel Romano … didn’t Gabriel mention him? I try to fix on the exact memory but I can’t. Everything has moved so fast. I know that he’s not Gabriel, though, and that’s enough.
“What does play nice mean?” I ask.
“It means pretend to be a flirty virgin with him,” Father says quietly. “It means make him feel wanted. This is very important. You might be marrying this man one day.”
“But—”
“Enough!” he snarls.
The rest of the car ride goes on in surly silence. Soon my side of the car is opening and a man I recognize from the meeting at the Italians’ hideout is offering me his hand. He’s tall and razor-thin with a weird-looking goatee and a bad combover.
“My lady,” he says.
The whole car turns to me, waiting. Al
ma almost explodes when I don’t take it right away. I sigh, take the very tips of his fingers, and walk with him from the limousine toward the castle-style building. It’s not a real castle, but an imitation look that I would find very impressive if it were not for Samuel Romano’s hand, which presses against my lower back but inches down to my ass.
I reach around and grab his wrist, sliding his hand back up my back.
“Oh, playing hard to get, eh?” He grins, nudging me like we’re friends. “I guess you’re a tough nut to crack.”
I swallow bile.
Chapter Twenty
Gabriel
I try to breathe as little as possible and just focus on shimmying my way forward through the darkness. Breathing is hard enough up here anyway, with the store-bought mask pulled over my mouth and my shirt pulled up over that for good measure. My eyes sting as the air rushes past me, but I’m wearing goggles to stop the worst of it. I just keep crawling, and most of all, try not to think about what I’m doing. The second I start to think on it, I might realize how fucking insane it is and let the doubts start to creep it. It’s never happened on a job before, but this is something else.
As I crawl, I think about Colleen. But that’s not saying much since I’ve been thinking about Colleen ever since I saw her with that bruise on her neck, and again when she stood at her window, looking so beautiful it tightened up my whole damn body. It’s like you can’t know for sure how you feel about a lady until that lady is taken away. Well, they took her, and I plan on getting her back, no question. And I plan on killing that bastard Lorenzo and his pet Samuel, but the main thing is to get Colleen away from those psychopathic parents … how long until they pull some bullshit like marrying her off to some asshole?
I grunt, crawl, check the memorized map in my head, and then take the next left, contorting my body at a painful angle. There haven’t been many times in my life when I wished I was smaller, but this is sure as hell one of them.
What terrifies me more’n anything is that look in Colleen’s eyes, the look that tells me she might be doubting what we shared. Damn, it’s not like I haven’t wondered if what we shared was real or not. The whole time it was happening, I was doubting it; the whole time I was with her, I knew it wasn’t like me. But those doubts are gone now; a man can’t afford to have doubts when he’s on a job.
I crawl and crawl and fucking crawl. I crawl so that my body scrapes against the crammed edges of the ventilation duct. Eventually I come to a small vent which looks down on a storage cupboard, barely visible because of the light that shines underneath the door.
As quietly as I can, I unscrew the duct and remove the panel, and then lower myself as far to the floor as my arms’ll take me. I drop to the floor and catch myself from falling. Then I immediately go to work, taking off the mask and the goggles, peeling off the outer layer of my clothes. When I’m done, I’m standing there in a white shirt, a white cap pulled low over my eyes, white trousers, and black shoes (protected by plastic wrapping). I drop the whole mess into a trash can in the corner and run my hand over my clean-shaven jaw. I would’ve liked to keep the beard, to make it harder to spot me, but waiters at events like these don’t have beards.
This is it now; this is the stupidest, most reckless thing I’ve ever done in my life. I press my ear against the door and listen to the far-off sounds of people talking, a laugh; a glass clinks. I open the door and walk down a small hallway and then past the kitchen. I steal a metal tray and put some cheese and pineapple sticks on it and then walk toward the sound of the party, the main ballroom.
It’s the weirdest damn sight a Family man could ever see: a room full of Irish and Italian, all talking and not killing, some of them even laughing together. I even see an Italian with an Irishwoman on his arm, kissing her on the neck and then laughing deeply when she giggles and pushes him away. It takes all my nerve not to turn around and walk away when I spot Lorenzo and a bunch of men I recognize. That man knows me well, knows my face, knows the way I walk. My only salvation is that what men don’t expect to see, they never normally see. That’s saved my ass on plenty of jobs. A man sees a postman walking on by, he assumes he’s a postman. He never stops to wonder if he’s carrying lead instead of letters.
“Hey, boy!” an Irishman barks, snapping his fingers at me. He’s already past drunk, a fat prick with a gut the size of a beach ball and acne all over his neck. “Bring those here, will you?”
I swallow my pride and duck my head even lower. It’s a good thing, too, because just as the Irishman takes three sticks, an Italian wanders by, an Italian who’s known me for a few years now. Shit, this whole place is full of Italians who’ve known me for years.
I walk the outer edges of the party, spotting Lorenzo, in a different circle now: Lorenzo’s wife, Alma, and Shane O’Rourke in conversation. Shane laughs and Lorenzo claps him on the back, a bunch of old friends having the best night of their life. I need to find Colleen; mission number one is to get her out of here, and if I have to let Lorenzo and Samuel live one night longer … Fine, let those bastards draw a few more breaths. But I need to get to Colleen. This is my best chance; after the night I visited the house, they started laying traps for me all over the place, maybe thinking I was some rookie who wouldn’t spot them.
After another circuit of the party, I spot Colleen … standing with Samuel. Not just standing with Samuel, though, walking with him toward the bathrooms. At first it looks like he just has his hand on her back, but when I look closer, I spot it: the glinting edge of a pocket knife. Colleen looks panicked, too, even though I can just see her back; it’s the stiff way she moves, her shoulders rising and falling as though she can’t breathe properly. The bastard is taking her to the bathroom with a knife to her fucking back. He’s going to rape her; that bastard is going to rape her!
I circle back to the other end of the party as fast as I can, making straight for the bathrooms. My blood is on fire, my heartbeat a war-drum. I haven’t felt panic like this since my very first job, the first time I killed a man. I was still a boy back then, couldn’t even grow a beard. I thought I was going to die with the panic that gripped me. But this shit makes that look weak. I’m almost at the hallway that leads to the bathroom—the hallway that Colleen and Samuel have disappeared down—when the Italian comes trundling over to me, drunker than anybody else in this place.
He’s a thickset man called Matteo, around fifty years old, with two gold watches and his sleeve rolled up to properly display them, displaying some of his arm hair in the process. He waves a hand at me and then jumps into my path, blocking me.
“Where’re you going, eh?” He steps wide and glares at me. I bite down on a hundred responses and stare at the floor, knowing that if shit kicks off here, I’m truly fucked. There’s no way in hell I can fight everyone in this room, even with the pistol strapped to my back. The fuck am I going to do, tool up a room full of trained killers? I have to play this out quickly, but I also have to make sure I don’t get spotted. If they spot me … But Colleen, down there, anything could be happening to her.
“Eh?” Matteo repeats, wobbling from one foot to the other. “You think you’re a real tough guy, don’t you?” I’ve experienced this shit all my life. Some men get drunk and they want to fight everybody in the room, but Matteo can’t go’n fight anybody in this room. So, like a bully, he picks on a waiter. “I saw the way you’ve been looking at me all night.”
“Excuse me, sir?” I say, making my voice higher in pitch. He wants to see a scared waiter, and he’s drunk off his head, so maybe he won’t recognize me.
“Excuse me,” he echoes, laughing harshly. “I’m sick’n tired of bastards like you. I’ve gotta say that. I don’t mean no offense by it or nothing, but I’m just sick’n tired of pricks like you looking down on me. Do you have any clue who I am, boy? I could fuck your whole life up.” He grabs the remaining cheese and pineapple sticks, looks at them for a second, and then tosses them to the floor. Then he snatches the tray and drops that, to
o. Several people turn to look but then they all turn back to their conversations; one man heads toward the don, probably to let him know that Matteo’s drunk again.
“What do you think, eh, that I’m some pushover? Is that it?”
“No, sir,” I say, resisting the urge to grind my teeth. Everything in me wants to smash this prick right in the face, kick him to the floor, and then take the metal tray and work him over with it. Everything in me wants to beat him until he can’t move. If I don’t kill him, he’ll be eating through a tube for a damn long time. But it doesn’t matter what I want. All that matters is that I get this over with as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry if I caused any offense, sir.”