Dangerous Alliance

by Kyra Davis

  Across the room someone breaks a glass, and although I know the broken pieces are too far away to touch me, I feel as if the prickly shards are piercing my skin. I want to reach out to Lander but instead I just hold the cup he gave me a little tighter, trying to keep my hands from shaking. “Can you accept all that, Lander?” I finally add.

  But I hold back the words that are reverberating through my skull. Please, please don’t reject me. Please accept me for who I am and for all the things I can and cannot do. Please find a way to be my Only Lander once more. And please, make me trust you again.

  Lander takes a deep breath and then slowly his hand moves forward, over mine. “That depends,” he says softly. “Can you accept that I am never going to let go of HGVB? Can you accept my ambitions and my unwillingness to destroy everything my family has ever touched? Most of all . . .” His voice fades off and I watch as he swallows hard and looks away. Is he holding back tears? Lander? My Lander? I dig my teeth into my lower lip as I wait for him to continue.

  “Most of all,” he says again, “can you accept that I have . . . at times, misled you? Can you forgive me for not always being completely honest?”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. Who would have thought that after all we’ve been through he would be asking me to forgive him for dishonesty. “I wish to God you’d leave HGVB. But . . . I get it . . . or at least I want to get it. I’m trying to get it.” Because I can’t sleep. Because I hate the idea of being without you. But aloud I say, “You’re a bad boy, Lander Gable. But the thing is . . . I think you might be good for me.”

  “There’s a Solomon Burke song that goes something like that,” he notes.

  “Yeah, I know. I heard it on an oldies station this morning. I’m stealing the sentiment.”

  “You’re a thief.”

  “You’re just figuring that out?”

  The corners of his lips twitch with amusement, and he lets go of my hand and reaches for his briefcase. “I’m sorry I didn’t buy this from you, but I did buy it for you,” he says inexplicably as he opens the case. “And please forgive Mandy for keeping this purchase a secret. I made her promise.”

  And then he pulls the book out of his briefcase, Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales Told for Children.

  For a moment I can’t breathe. I had noticed that it had been sold. Of course I had. But I hadn’t dared ask Mandy whom it was sold to. I was afraid that if I knew, I’d have to break into the poor man’s house and steal it back.

  “There’s more.” He takes out a page, ripped out from some other book. The page is now encased in plastic. On the page is a very old photo, a daguerreotype. It’s of a bust of Hans Christian Andersen and there are some handwritten words scrawled across the page in what I presume is Danish, and there’s a signature.

  Hans Christian Andersen’s autograph.

  “We’ll get it framed, of course,” he adds as my mouth hangs open.

  “Lander, it’s too much. I can’t . . .”

  “You can’t what?” he asks as the faint sound of honking horns leaks into the restaurant from the street. “Accept this?” He shakes his head dismissively. “I know how you live. You have a bed. You have clothes and food. What if life didn’t have to always be about necessity? What if you could have things you don’t need but that you desperately want?”

  “Like a hundred-thousand-dollar book?” I laugh.

  “Like me.”

  I look up from the book, startled.

  He gestures to the gifts that now rest on the table. “It’s excessive,” he admits. “I can be excessive. I have my issues, just like you. We’re both dangerous and damaged and all the other bad ‘D’ words. Deceptive, damned, whatever. But you want me, Adoncia. And I want you.”

  “You want me?”

  “I love you.”

  Is it possible for your heart to jump into your throat and drop into your stomach at the same time? It must be, because that’s what it feels like. He loves me. It’s what I’ve wanted. And it’s what could destroy me.

  But when have I ever run away from possible destruction?

  “I do want you. I want you and I love you. But,” I say as I gesture to the two of us, “I don’t know if this will work.”

  “Neither do I. But I’d like to try. Will you try with me? Will you . . .” He pauses and then a small smile curls onto his lips. “Will you take this book and the man who gives it to you?”

  I can feel the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes and I try unsuccessfully to blink them away. “I do,” I whisper. “I really do.”

  I have my revenge. I have this amazing book. I have Lander . . . I even have a new understanding of myself.

  I feel like a fairy-tale princess.

  epilogue

  * * *

  Nothing is meant to be, there is only what is.

  It’s a philosophy that I developed many years ago, and it’s one of the few that I continue to believe in.

  If things were meant to be a certain way, surely Travis, Edmund, and Sean, along with many other people, would have gone to prison for the crimes they committed under the flag of HGVB. HGVB wouldn’t even exist anymore.

  Jessica would be alive.

  But that’s not the way things worked out. Edmund Gable and Sean White are going to prison, not for laundering money, but for their involvement in Nick Foley’s death. Edmund ordered the hit; Sean covered it up.

  It’s not clear who it was who actually pulled the trigger. Edmund has pled the Fifth, and even if he was talking, it’s doubtful that he had that information. He paid for a hit and let dark, invisible forces take care of the rest. What does seem clear is that it was one of Micah’s men.

  Micah, the man who claimed to be my friend. The man who offered his assistance and money because he owed a debt to my mom. I thought he was talking about what my mother did for his niece who shared a cell with her for a while.

  But it would seem that his debt was much bigger than that.

  If things were meant to be a certain way, I’d know where Micah is. He’d be in prison right now.

  But that’s not how things worked out.

  If some things were meant to be, surely Nick Foley wouldn’t have died to protect a secret that, as it turns out, didn’t even need protecting.

  C’est la guerre.

  As for Travis—ah, Travis. Perhaps he really is the devil. Only the devil could be this difficult to destroy. He may still go to prison, but it hasn’t happened yet. The tape that Jessica made isn’t as incriminating as it should be. It proves her guilt, but his? Does he once fess up to asking her to lie under oath? Not really, not exactly. He doesn’t admit to planning Nick’s murder either. On the contrary, he says he wishes Nick had been allowed to stay alive. And I believe that Travis meant that. I believe him because, even now, I understand him. Travis likes to control people, and occasionally torture them, without ever lifting a finger. His favorite weapon is inside his head, and he’s completely confident that it’s the only weapon he’ll ever need. He’s smarter than his father. He may even be smarter than Lander, although he’s also much less complicated than Lander, which makes him much easier to predict. That said, Travis was involved in covering up Nick’s murder. He was involved in setting up my mother for murder. I’d bet my life on that. But it might be hard to make those charges stick.

  If there was a meant to be, that wouldn’t be the case.

  But of course there’s another charge. The charge of killing his wife. Jessica had spoken to the police in the weeks leading up to her death. She told them that she was afraid of her husband. But since she was unwilling to say that he had ever laid a hand on her the police had blown her off. Now they wish they hadn’t.

  And of course, when they looked at Jessica’s computer they found that she had been posting on a battered women’s online forum. Perhaps I should tell the police that I’m the one who posted on that forum, using Jessica’s computer. If I want to be good, I should tell them that I did so because I wanted to make Travis loo
k bad. Yes, speaking up is definitely the right thing to do.

  And I’m never going to do it. Jessica clearly wanted Travis to go to prison for murder, and who am I to interfere with the wishes of the deceased?

  Plus, as I said before, he helped set up my mother. So fuck ’em.

  That’s not to say that he’s definitely going to jail for Jessica’s death. He’s out on bail right now and he has the best lawyers in the United States working for him. He was pushed out of HGVB, but he still has plenty of money. And if anyone can beat the odds, it’s Travis.

  The last time I saw him it was in Central Park. We met early in the morning, in a clearing, surrounded by trees that had just begun to change color for fall. Lots of green with just the most subtle sprinkling of orange. Perhaps I should have been scared, meeting him at a time and place where there probably wouldn’t be any witnesses. I didn’t even tell Lander about it. He would have wanted to come and protect me, but I wanted to have this meeting alone. I wasn’t afraid. I know Travis. If he’s going to hurt me it won’t be through traditional violence.

  He arrived first, and I was impressed to see how collected he was, standing there in his four-thousand-dollar Loro Piana city trench, dark khaki pants, and hard, icy stare. He looked like a gangster who was about to be photographed for GQ.

  “Are you wearing a wire?” he asked as I approached.

  “No.” And it was true, I wasn’t.

  “You know I can’t risk believing you,” he said.

  I studied his face, noting that his crow’s-feet were a little more pronounced, but other than that the stress of the last several months hadn’t aged him much.

  “Why am I here, Travis?”

  “I wanted to congratulate you on a job well done. You weren’t able to make the HGVB charges stick, at least not to me personally, so you conspired with my late wife and helped her make her suicide look like a homicide. And you made it all look very convincing. It’s truly impressive, Bell. I was right when I said I had found a worthy adversary in you.”

  My lips curled into a bemused smile as I cocked my head to the side. “Are you wearing a wire, Travis?”

  “No,” he said sternly, but there was a glint of appreciation in his eyes.

  “Yeah, well, you know I can’t risk believing you.”

  “Touché,” he said with a genuine smile.

  “And my name’s not Bell.”

  “You will always be Bell to me. Let Lander call you Adoncia. With him you can be sweet. But for me? You will always be the goddess of war.”

  I laughed and cast my eyes around the park. New high-rises filled with luxury condos and co-ops for the rich and famous have been built around here. They cast long shadows on the park in places where there used to be sun. “You know you deserve this, don’t you?” I asked. “You set my mother up for murder, you worked with drug cartels and terrorists so you could boost your bank’s profit margins. You’re a very bad man, Travis Gable. You deserve to go to prison.”

  “But I’m not going to prison, Bell. People like me are given get-out-of-jail-free cards at birth, remember?”

  “Yeah.” I nibbled on my thumbnail thoughtfully. “But you only get so many of them, and you’ve been blowing through those things like Liz Taylor blew through husbands.”

  “If I run out I’ll just buy more. Money can buy you almost anything.”

  “Did it buy you Cathy?”

  Travis fell silent and I could almost see his energy shift.

  “I hear she went back to her husband.”

  “She never left him, not officially.”

  “But she was going to,” I pressed.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “she was. But Cathy doesn’t want just money. She wants respectability, she wants to be everyone’s first priority, she wants to be the woman who everyone wants at their party.”

  “She wants everything,” I said, summing it up for him.

  “Yes, Cathy has always wanted . . . no, expected everything. And I can’t make her my first priority while I’m battling murder charges. I’m not getting many party invitations these days, and it’s hard to be seen as respectable when you’re on the arm of a man who might be a murderer.”

  “In other words, she’s less worried about the possibility that you might be a murderer and more worried about what people will think of her if she chooses to overlook that possibility.”

  “You have to know her like I know her to understand it. She’s not being unreasonable.’

  “Nonetheless, you lost her.”

  “Yes.” His eyes were on the trees as they rustled with waking birds.

  “That’s the part you won’t forgive me for. The lies I told to get into your home and gain your trust, the HGVB charges, even the murder charge—you see all of that as a game, right? Like some kind of weird form of chess. But that all this cost you Cathy . . . That’s the thing you want revenge for.”

  Travis’s eyes slowly slid down to me. “Yes,” he said again, his voice almost a snakelike hiss as he studied me with those icy blue eyes.

  For about a minute we just looked at each other as we worked out our own individual battle plans in our heads. “You’re an evil man,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “You feed off other people’s humiliation and pain. You have no moral compass at all. But”—I lifted my finger in the air, adding one more observation—“you do know what love is. You are a nuanced devil.”

  Travis took that in without a word or a smile.

  “I almost forgot.” I reached into my oversized bag and pulled out a wrapped gift. “Lander and I bought you this. It’s from that place where I work, Callow’s Rare Books. We were going to have it delivered, but since I’m here . . .”

  As he took the gift, Travis said, “I would have thought you would have found yourself a more powerful and well-paid position by now.”

  “No, I like it there. It suits me, the real me.”

  Travis gave me a weary look, but he tore back the wrapping paper anyway and studied the gift inside. “A little obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a first edition,” I explained. “Signed by the author. Look.” I opened the cover for him and showed him the inscription. “The minute we got it in I knew Lander and I had to give it to you.”

  I saw a spark of amusement in his eyes. Then he looked up at me, suddenly serious again. “How are they?”

  “Good, they’re good. Anytime you want to see them—”

  He waved off the invitation, apparently disinterested. It pissed me off.

  “I do hope they let you take that book to prison with you.”

  “I’m not going to prison, Bell.”

  “You are,” I said simply. “If they don’t get you for soliciting false testimony in a homicide case and paying off a cop, then maybe they’ll get you for Jessica’s murder, and if by some miracle they don’t get you for that, there will be something else. You’ll commit another felony and I’ll find out about it.” I stepped forward and tapped the book in his hand. “Count on me to always be there when you mess up, Travis. No matter what else I have going on, I promise to always make time for that. Bringing you down is one of the many things that makes my life worth living.”

  I got up on my tiptoes and sealed my promise with a light kiss on his cheek. And then I walked away, leaving him there, in Central Park, holding a first-edition copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.

  That was two weeks ago. His trial is next week. I’m not sure how it’s going to go, but I’m not too worried about it. Edmund and Sean are in prison, and as I told Travis, if I can’t nail him on this I’ll nail him on something else.

  After I’ve finished my Saturday shift at Callow’s, I take a cab toward Lander’s, but have it drop me off five blocks before I get there. I just want to walk for a while, feel the wind in my hair and all that. As I move down the sidewalk, my footsteps adding to the beat of the city, it’s hard not to think about how much things have changed for me. My whole worldview is different. I still have m
oments of intense anger, but it’s not all the time and I know how to control it.

  And now, when I think about my mother, really think about her, I don’t think about the day they took her from me. Instead I remember all those years that we did have together. The years of pixie dust and hope. They were good years. They’re worth remembering.

  I breeze through the lobby of Lander’s new building, waving at security as I make my way up in the elevator. I like Lander’s new place in SoHo. It’s luxurious, but it’s also comfortable. Elegant without pretension.

  When I get to his penthouse, Lander throws open the door before I even have a chance to put my key in. Mercedes is riding him piggyback, her arms wrapped so tightly around her uncle’s neck I’m worried she might strangle him.

  “How you holding up?” I ask as I scoot by him.

  “Uncle Lander’s my horse and I’m a race jockey!” Mercedes cries, clearly thinking the question is meant for her.

  I smile and lean in to give Lander a light kiss and also to adjust her hands, ensuring that she holds on to his shoulders rather than his throat. “Where’s your brother?”

  Mercedes points toward the living room, where I find Braden reading a graphic novel. I lean over his shoulder to see what it’s about. “I can’t believe you’re able to read this; this should be way above your reading level.”

  “It’s not,” he says sullenly.

  “Mmm, is it a scary one? It kind of has that look.”

  Braden turns the page without answering me.

  He’s angry. He doesn’t really understand what’s going on with his dad, but he knows it’s bad or Travis wouldn’t have consented to allow both him and Mercedes to live with their uncle.

  Plus, even though he didn’t get along with Jessica very often, she was still his mom. He misses her. And I know what it’s like to lose your mom.