“What—how do you—what are you doing here?”
“I came to pick you up,” he said as if it weren’t obvious.
I glanced around at the few vehicles in the lot. “I mean, how did they let you drive in here, though?” Already I had steeled myself for a ride through the complex on one of the crowded shuttles, then expected to call a cab or something similar to pick me up from the entrance to the facility.
“They’ll do a lot with a few well-placed donations to the complex. Here’s to your freedom, Nina. Welcome back.”
He leaned in with a smile to deliver a customary kiss to my cheek, but I immediately held up a hand.
“No, don’t,” I said. “I reek of that horrid soap.”
Eric made a face and backed up. “Oh, yeah. That stuff makes your skin feel like chalk. I remember.”
I pressed my lips together. My cousin had his own holiday in another jail on the island while being detained for insider trading. A farce, all of it. But it left a scar just the same.
“I suppose now being jailbirds runs in the family,” I said wryly.
Eric snorted. “Talk about a rite of passage. Come on. Let’s get out of this dump.”
I followed him into the back of the car, which was manned by his driver.
“How did you know?” I asked as we took off.
My cousin shrugged good-naturedly. “Barney told me after your parole hearing.”
I frowned. That he had spoken to my attorney wasn’t so strange—after all, Eric was bankrolling my criminal defense. “But you came?”
Eric’s face remained calm, but beneath that cool facade lurked a ripple of something darker. “I remember what it’s like. No one should come out of here alone.” His eyes widened as something else occurred to him. “You weren’t expecting someone else, were you?”
I shook my head. “No. No, I wasn’t. Thank you.”
I didn’t tell him that as I had walked outside, temporarily blinded by the sun, a part of me had in fact wondered if another might show. Someone with black hair and a rakish grin. Someone with a taste for vintage suits and old-fashioned fedoras. Someone I hadn’t seen in months, since I’d turned myself in for the very crime that had earned my lovely stay here at Rikers.
Matthew Zola. My heart’s enemy. And yet somehow still my heart.
I had never imagined it was possible to love and hate someone at the same time. But here I was.
“So, how was it in there?” Eric asked as casually as if he was wondering about the weather.
“Manageable.”
He nodded knowingly. “I heard things…about Rosie’s.”
I stiffened at the use of the common moniker for the center where female detainees and short-term sentences were housed here on the island. Like the peeling pinkish paint that covered the squat building, the name covered all multitude of sins quite inadequately.
“Barney was able to negotiate for a solitary cell,” I said. “Instead of the dormitory. I mostly just…stayed there.”
No one had argued. Such were the kinds of allowances people like us got. Unfair, perhaps, but at the same time, we were greater targets. During the few times I’d been forced to mingle with the rest of the prison population, I’d received a total of forty-two threats that would have undoubtedly come to fruition had I spent my nights with the rest of the women in my wing. But given my high profile, my assault wasn’t something the ailing prison, with its already questionable reputation, could afford. Solitary became a forced luxury.
Eric nodded. “I had the same. It’s something, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
I wasn’t going to detail the fears that had prevented me from sleeping more than one or two hours in a row during my time here. Especially after the third night, when a guard, unaware of my status, crept into my cell and had just slipped his hand under my thin blanket when the warden took his own stroll through our wing. The guard vanished as fast as he had appeared, but it didn’t stop me from wondering what he might have done otherwise. Two nights later, I didn’t have to wonder anymore. I could hear others’ responses to him, their hoarse whispers loud and clear only a few doors away.
Begging like that stays with you. Not for pleasure, but for mercy. I doubted the word “please” would ever sound the same again.
I rubbed absently at my knee. My skin had been crawling for days. I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t contracted lice, though I hadn’t found a thing.
“Well,” Eric said as the car finally turned onto the Queensboro Bridge. Somehow, we had already made it through Queens. The Manhattan skyline loomed. “Where to?”
I knew what he meant. There was no way I was returning to my Lexington Avenue penthouse. Calvin’s lawyers argued that by leaving it the way I did (jail or not), I had effectively ceded residency rights until ownership was settled. I didn’t care enough to fight it. For the last decade, that foppish hatbox of an apartment had been its own jail cell. I wanted to be as far from the Upper East Side as I could. Right now, I wanted to put this entire city behind me and pretend I’d never seen a single cement square of it ever.
But I had a few more things to tie up. First and foremost was ridding myself and my daughter of the man who had been nothing but an abusive leech. Second was providing the testimony in a criminal trial that would ensure he could never harm us again.
No small tasks. But I’d had plenty of time—the past fifteen days, in particular—to prepare myself. For now, there was the waiting.
I sighed. “The Waldorf, I suppose. Or the Plaza. It doesn’t really matter.” Eric could take me to the nearest shelter for all I cared.
“A hotel? I figured Aunt Violet’s. Or maybe Long Island.”
I shuddered. “Mother’s?”
The idea of the overwrought townhouse where I had grown up myself honestly hadn’t even occurred to me. Nor had our family’s massive Long Island estate, despite the fact that my horse and the stables there would probably do me good. Unfortunately, both places involved my mother, who would probably be too doused in gin and chardonnay to bother giving me the appropriate amount of space or support. Meanwhile, the cooks, maids, butlers, and all the other household staff would be happy to earn an extra dollar by offering anonymous interviews to the tabloids. I hadn’t been in the papers this much since I was a teenage debutante; the paparazzi had been incessant in the month following my sentence. It was the one way Rosie’s had offered some reprieve.
“No,” I said. “I think a hotel will be best.” Another cell. Another version of solitary, perhaps. But at least this one came with a concierge and room service.
Eric was quiet as the car stopped in the traffic entering Manhattan. “Well, there is another option, if you want it.”
The world outside my window seemed like a gleaming ice cube. Or maybe that was just me, living inside the warped glass of a fishbowl. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Well, Jane sort of mentioned that if I didn’t bring you home, she’d make kimchi with my testicles.”
I turned. “She—what?”
Eric’s wide mouth quirked into an impish smile that only his wife and her peculiar sense of humor seemed to be able to bring out of him. “What can I say? She’s taken a shine to you.” He lifted a hand, then hovered it awkwardly over my shoulder before pulling it back, seeming to remember my earlier reticence to being touched.
Do you know how long it’s been since someone held my hand?
Unbidden, a memory flashed through my mind. I asked Matthew that very question the night we met, lonely and aching for someone’s, anyone’s touch. For a moment, I allowed other memories with him to wash over me like a cool rain. The fleeting rendezvous in the hotel, the woods, even his small, spare bedroom. Each time, I had allowed myself to believe that for once in my life, to just one person, I would come first. That I was precious and whole and worth loving beyond measure.
And just as quickly, I remembered the look on his face when he had decided, despite my protests, that I was a liar and a fraud. And
thus, had promptly shattered my heart.
“What about you, though?” I asked finally. “Do you want me in your home, Eric? You and Jane just moved back there, did you not? I don’t want to intrude.”
Our family was private. Maybe too private. We saw each other frequently, but everyone had their designated spaces. We barely touched, hardly shared compliments. Conversation was determined by decorum over substance.
Yes, a family like ours had rules to follow. And by spending fifteen days in a jail cell, I had promptly broken many of them.
But then again…so had Eric.
“You won’t,” he answered quickly. “I—we both wanted you to know you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you want. And if you’d rather go somewhere else…well, you know I’ll help with that, too.”
He was being kind not stating the obvious: that the assets I shared with my husband were frozen, and the bulk of my inheritance was still tied up in probate court following Grandmother’s funeral nearly a year ago. It was an issue Eric didn’t have once he had been formally hired as CEO and chairman of the board—even without his inheritance, his salary alone was astronomical. I, on the other hand, had a small allowance from the trust set up by my father, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to live on. Despite a storage room full of couture and jewelry, I was all but penniless these days, dependent on the good will of others to keep me afloat. An heiress with absolutely nothing but a record and the Chanel on her back.
Pathetic.
“Why don’t you stay through the holidays, at least,” Eric continued. “We’re having a bit of a Christmas party next week, and after that, Jane will want to see Olivia when she comes home for the holidays. She wants to spend a little more time with kids because…well…” He tipped his head back and forth, causing his straight blond hair to flop from side to side. “She’ll probably kill me for telling you this, but, yeah. We’re trying for a baby again.”
I sat up straight. “You are? Since when?”
“Right after Thanksgiving. The doctor thinks we have a good chance of conceiving naturally, even after everything she went through in Korea.”
“Oh, but that’s…” I trailed off remembering the horror of Eric and Jane’s loss of their first pregnancy at the hands of a complete and total monster. Jane was nearly dead when Eric found her. “Eric, that’s wonderful!”
My cousin’s long, straight nose pinked visibly at the end, the only sign of any anxiety as he nodded. “Yeah. It is. But I’m sure you understand that she’s feeling…a little fragile. We haven’t told anyone else. Not even Skylar and Brandon.”
I nodded with a small smile. I had come to like the Sterling family, Eric and Jane’s Boston-based friends, during my brief stay with them in September. They often opened their home to others during the holidays especially. Eric and Jane had also visited for Thanksgiving in part so they could see my daughter, Olivia, who attended school not far from Boston, in my stead.
But then another thought occurred to me.
“Did Matthew go?” I wondered, unable to help myself completely. Matthew was friends with the Sterlings too.
Eric glanced at me, but then kept his gaze trained almost completely on the traffic ahead of us. “He did not. You know we haven’t heard from him since September either. But Brandon mentioned that he was still on leave. Working at a bar downtown while he waits, I guess.”
I kept my face perfectly still. Matthew? At a bar? The idea of that beautiful, intelligent man wasting his time pouring drinks was painful.
I didn’t have time to ask more as the traffic started moving. Eric had reached out again, and this time actually clapped his hand on mine and squeezed. “Jane could use you being there. I know I could too.”
I didn’t have to think twice.
“Of course I’d love to stay,” I said, and was genuinely surprised by how much I meant it.
Chapter Two
December 2018
Matthew
Drip. Drop.
Freezing cold raindrops smacked the collar of my trench coat and splashed my cheeks. A storm was threatening from the New Jersey side of the Hudson, darkening the skies over the Statue of Liberty. From this crumbling cement block of an abandoned Red Hook dock, I had a front row seat.
It was the first day of December, and Mother Nature was celebrating with a harsh drizzle that could easily turn into the first snow of the year. The rest of the streets in my lonely corner of Brooklyn were suspiciously empty—people had already gone to work or else had hibernated at home.
But I hadn’t moved for the last three hours, since I’d returned to my side of New York after finishing my latest shift at Envy, the Lower East Side lounge where I currently had a job as a part-time bartender.
Job. Ha. More like a joke. Once I was a Marine. An officer, even. Captain fuckin’ Zola before I became Matthew Zola, ADA. I had medals, degrees, accolades and honors. Now I was slinging drinks for Wall Street assholes and the women they wanted to fuck, night after night while I waited for the powers that be to decide if I could, in fact, still be a prosecutor in the city of New York.
And who fuckin’ knew when that might be.
With a swig from the flask of bourbon I’d been nursing since clocking out sometime past four, I stared at the front page of the Post I’d found abandoned on the subway on my way home. A few more rain drops stained the newsprint, from which shone two familiar faces caught in the bright flashes of paparazzi outside the Brooklyn courthouse where I litigated case after case for nearly eight years. Eric de Vries and Nina de Vries…Gardner.
I almost spat out my drink. Just thinking that name put a bad taste in my mouth. Instead, I took another swig and swallowed heavily, ignoring the buzzing in my head.
The de Vrieses were a good-looking family, I’d give them that. Side by side, the cousins certainly bore a clear resemblance to one another. Same long nose, same flaxen blond hair, same piercing, almost hawkish gray eyes. Despite the generations of polish, ruthlessness lurked behind the designer clothes and perfectly straight teeth. Shadows of the Viking ancestors who had conquered most of Northern Europe at one point, burning and pillaging wherever they went. People who would do anything—and I do mean anything—to protect what they believed was theirs.
Eric in particular looked like he had just seized another town. I understood why. The case against Jude Letour was a big one, and the fact that it was going to trial this quickly, just six months after the guy was arrested, was big news. Even bigger when the key witness was one of New York’s ten richest people.
But where most people with de Vries-level clout might be content to move behind the scenes, asserting their power like a puppet master, it was obvious that Eric wanted to be a part of this particular display. After all, it was personal.
Letour was the second-most-powerful man in a ring of extremely powerful men, a secret group known as the Janus society. They were stupid rich sociopaths who attended Ivy League colleges before inheriting some of the most powerful positions and wealth in the world. People who say the United States doesn’t have an aristocracy are wrong. Wealth and power are generational, and the Janus society was proof.
It also seemed they were having a bit of a civil war. The first-in-command was dead, shot last May in self-defense by Eric’s own hand. The Viking had protected his own—in this case, his wife. Letour, though, was responsible for a lot of what had happened to them. He was complicit in the near constant targeting of Eric over the past decade, through the murder of his first fiancée, the abduction of his wife, and even Eric’s own kidnapping. Mob tactics, plain and simple. You don’t just go after your target—you make them heel by attacking the ones they love.
And when Eric had gone to war with members of the Janus society, I had served as his general. Af few months ago, this had been my case. I had been working tirelessly and secretively for nearly a year to put this motherfucker away. People like Letour didn’t come down easily. The members of Janus had the feds, congress, even the president in their
pockets. So I alone had filed all the papers, arranged the stings, worked lock, stock, and barrel with Derek Kingston and Clifford Snow, the single investigative unit who knew about this case. And in the last year, we had identified Jude Letour and John Carson as part of one of the largest human trafficking rings ever in the Northeast. But they were smart enough not to put their names on the thing—just use it, apparently. No, the ring itself was headed by someone outside the Janus society. A man named Calvin Gardner. Nina’s husband.
I took another heavy drink. Fuck. Breaking up the white-collar criminal ring that was the Janus society would have all but guaranteed me a promotion, probably bureau chief in another year or two. Instead I was sitting here on this crumbling dock, drinking at seven in the morning next to the river to avoid going home and facing the void my life had become. And for what?
A woman, that’s what.
I drifted my thumb over Nina’s face, tracing the stark lines of her cheeks, the graceful contour of her lips. She still looked beautiful. More beautiful than any woman I’d ever seen. But unlike Eric, she looked sad. She wasn’t wearing red anymore. She hadn’t on the night we met, but after I’d mentioned it, I’d only seen her with her lips painted crimson since. Until now.
Yes, I’d sacrificed my future, fucked up my life, for the defendant’s wife. And in doing so, I’d also convinced myself that she was just as guilty as he was…and for that, she’d never forgive me. Any wisp of a future disappeared the moment she looked at me in that interrogation room like I’d killed her puppy and kicked it into the river. After everything, I hadn’t believed her. I hadn’t trusted her the way I had come to realize she had trusted me.
Instead, I’d used her to gain as much as I could for the case against her husband, and possibly against her too.
Now, I had next to nothing.
A shitty job that barely paid my grocery bill.
A mortgage that was quickly eating up my savings.
The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Page 3