The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1)

by Nicole French

  “Oh, fuck,” said the second guard.

  “Jesus,” I breathed. “Holy fuckin’ shit.”

  In the center of the de Vrieses’ garish apartment was the body of John Carson, lying facedown with a hole through his head, the remains of which was splattered pretty much everywhere.

  Eric and Jane stood together beyond him, shaking into each other. In another doorway stood Brandon Sterling, hovering over another unconscious body that I recognized as Jude Letour while he rubbed his knuckles. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened. Brandon was a big guy, no stranger to a good street fight.

  Two bodies.

  Three people.

  A nine millimeter Beretta, an exact copy of my own, lying on the ground.

  Fuck.

  “Get Letour secured,” Eric ordered in a voice that sounded almost distant while he stroked his wife’s hair, seemingly unaware of the fact that she was covered in her dead father’s blood.

  Shock did that. Cast an eerie calm over the people who should feel the situation the most. I knew it well.

  Brandon and the two security guards immediately went to do Eric’s bidding.

  “Where’s the Russian?” Eric asked.

  “In custody,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “We found him with Heather two blocks from the museum. Jane sacrificed herself to save your mom.”

  I continued to look around, memorizing the crime scene while I called for backup. Derek was next, but we needed the closest units yesterday.

  “Dispatch.”

  “This is Matthew Zola, Assistant DA for the Brooklyn office. There’s been an incident at 17 West Seventy-Sixth Street, Apartment 4. Two men wanted by the CIA and the NYPD have been located. We need help.”

  Eric and Jane stared at me like dummies while I continued to rattle off codes and directions. As soon as units were dispatched, I called Derek.

  “Zo, tell me you stayed put.”

  “I found them,” I said. “I’m at their apartment on Seventy-Sixth Street. You need to get here now. Both suspects are here—Carson, shot at close range, and Letour appears to have been knocked out. I’ve already called dispatch.”

  “Holy shit,” Derek said. “We’re on our way. Don’t let the local precinct’s homicide get wind of this.”

  “I don’t know if that’s possible,” I said. “Just call and let them know you’re coming. This is a mess. A big fuckin’ mess.”

  “On it.”

  I put my phone away as Tony entered the room, speaking to Eric almost automatically. “Boss. Your mother is safe. We grabbed the Russian outside of the park with the cops.”

  Eric looked visibly relieved. I had to frown. It wasn’t actually Tony who was there, but another few of his squad of security. Which meant that to some extent, all of this was planned. Eric had known something like this was going to happen the whole time.

  Quite a fuckin’ gamble, putting his mother out there to save his wife. Jesus.

  Tony looked around the crime scene with a calculating eye before he walked across the room and picked the gun off the ground. I should have yelled at him to stop, but instead, I just watched in horror as the big man cleaned the weapon with his shirt cuff and then wrapped his hand around the grip, fingers on the trigger like he was getting ready to use it himself.

  And then he did. He pointed it at the body once more and pulled the trigger. Everyone flinched. But the chamber was empty.

  Eric jerked, even though there were no more gunshots to hear. “Tony. Don’t—”

  “I had to shoot him,” Tony interrupted. “He was trying to hurt you and Mrs. de Vries. It’s my job. I had no choice.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. This was beyond fucked up. “Man, you can’t just—”

  “Tony,” Jane said weakly from Eric’s grasp. “You’re not a cop. You don’t have to—”

  “It’s what I would have done,” Tony interrupted. “Please. The DA here called the cops. That’s our story, and I’m sticking to it.”

  I smacked my forehead as sirens started wailing outside the windows. I could not be party to this. Surely they had to see that.

  And Eric, to my relief, did.

  “Well, I’m not.”

  Eric squeezed Jane to his chest, oblivious to the prints of blood she was leaving there like an inkblot test. Then he got up, went to Tony, and took the gun from the security guard.

  The big man had loyalty. I had to give him that.

  “I appreciate it, Tony,” he said. “But you’ve helped enough tonight. And it’s my weapon. It’s my family. It’s my right to defend them.”

  The bodyguard looked like he wanted to argue, like he wanted to argue with all of us as he glanced around the room. I gave him my best “you have to be fuckin’ kidding me” expression while Jane just looked like she wanted to throw up. Of course. On top of what she had just been a part of, she was a former DA herself. She knew the exact price of perjury, just as I did.

  Tony seemed to relent, then stepped back. “Understood.”

  Eric walked back to Jane and squatted in front of her, begging her to look at him. There was a dead body on the floor, possibly another in the doorway. But the pull between those two put more of an ache in my chest than the smell of death around us.

  “Like the air I breathe,” Eric said in a low, intense voice to the wife I knew he loved more than anything.

  “Like the water I drink,” she whispered back.

  Red and blue lights announced the arrival of patrol cars. I exhaled, relieved. Backup. Help.

  As knocks sounded at the bottom of the stairwell, Eric turned around with a solemn expression.

  “All right,” he said with the voice of a man who’s been through a battlefield and back again. The voice of someone who has killed to save what was his. “Let them up. Let them see everything this man has brought to my doorstep.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Death is messy. This one more than most.

  I wasn’t a stranger to crime scenes, even ones as bad as this. Sometimes I wondered if becoming a criminal prosecutor for the last seven years was my way of dealing with the trauma of war. Like I knew somehow I couldn’t switch back to a normal life after being in Iraq, where I was as likely to wake up to a distant car bomb or lose a friend as I was to have dinner that night. From the moment I left that world for what I thought would be the more civilized field of law, I wanted to make amends. I wanted to seek reparations.

  I wanted justice.

  Mostly for myself.

  Being a prosecutor in a place like Brooklyn offered a middle ground that maybe felt more reasonable than jumping straight back into civilian life. While my classmates went to larger firms, drafted contracts or tried out advocacy, I interned in the Bronx first, then Manhattan, and eventually with the Brooklyn District Attorney, where I’d worked ever since. The work was addictive, like a halfway house between the horrors of war and the polish of civilian life.

  Carson was hardly the first body I’d encountered. Nor was it my first time dealing with the hours and hours of taking statements and going over them with Derek, the cops, lawyers for just about every rich person present, and then both my boss and the Manhattan DA, each looking for a full review when they arrived at about seven in the morning.

  No one slept. We just slogged through it. Statements were given, then given again, then given again. Derek had a crack at all witnesses while the Manhattan ADA and I jockeyed for interviews. It was only after I was finally able to convince the Manhattan ADA that John Carson’s death had clearly happened in self-defense and he shouldn’t arrest Jane and Eric, that I finally left for the day, a briefcase full of statements to review and a month’s worth of paperwork to file.

  It wasn’t until close to two o’clock in the afternoon that I trudged into my house. Frankie and Sofia were still at school for the day. The place was empty. Lifeless. A complete and utter void.

  Or maybe it was me that just felt wrong.

  Maybe it was the lack of finality that bothered
me in the end. Yes, John Carson was dead. The man I’d been chasing for six months was gone, likely to the terrified relief of the de Vrieses. But, as Derek kept muttering over and over again, his death essentially severed any links to the plots we’d uncovered. Letour, who survived with a broken nose, staunchly refused to speak, and without him or Carson, we had no idea how to reach the middlemen involved in the trafficking scheme under our jurisdiction.

  Eric and Jane might have found some closure, but our case was still wide open.

  I lurched upstairs, yanking off my clothes from the night before. I tossed the jacket, vest, shirt, and tie on my bed, then kicked off my shoes below. Kate was going to kill me, but she wasn’t getting that tux back. Not with a night’s worth of police grime on it.

  I ambled into my bathroom and stood at the sink for a long time, trying to get my head right as I washed my arms, my neck, my face, again and again. As I pressed the cloth to my face, scalding hot on my street-weary skin, it all came flooding back to me. Not the night. Everything else.

  It would happen every so often after a particularly grueling arrest. A few gunshots, a desperate perp. One wrong expression, and I was back in Fallujah.

  I saw their faces looking back at me.

  There were my men, worried about the three we left inside.

  There were the kids across the street, peering at us through the windows of the building I’d just ordered blown.

  There were the women holding them close, knowledge of their dooms written across their otherwise stolid faces.

  For years, I’d tortured myself for their deaths. It was why I had always known, without a doubt, that I’d never be the good man everyone wanted me to be. No matter how hard I tried.

  Because being a killer was like being an addict. You could be in recovery for the rest of your life, but it never changed the simple fact of what you were.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, I stood in front of my closet for what seemed like hours as the same train of thought cycled through my mind. The way the slumped bodies had brought me back to the scene of my own crimes. I’d never imagined I’d kill again. But I always knew without a doubt I could. Had I arrived a few minutes earlier, would I have been the one to pull the trigger?

  Eric had done what he needed to do to protect his wife. He had proven without a doubt that he would do literally anything to take care of what was his. And that included killing a man.

  If anything, it made me respect him more.

  And I couldn’t help thinking of Nina.

  The bruises on her wrist.

  The too-plump sight of her lips.

  The way she cowered from certain kinds of touch, but sought out others like a battered animal.

  There was something I was missing. Someone was hurting her. Her husband, maybe. An uncle. Hell, maybe it was Eric himself.

  But she had never let me in long enough to find out.

  I started to shake as fury at my complete and utter failure really began to sink in.

  Make me proud. Nonno’s last words.

  I tried, Nonno, I really did. I found a good woman, and loved her all I could. But she couldn’t love me back, Nonno. What good is that pride, when it only leaves you alone?

  I had tried so hard.

  I should have tried harder.

  I had fought so hard.

  I should have fought harder.

  For her.

  For us.

  I turned from the mirror, sickened by my reflection. Maybe Nonno was wrong the whole time. Pride was a deadly sin, just like envy. Just like lust. I couldn’t pretend not to be a vain man, with my closet full of three-piece-suits, right down to the pants I was wearing right now. Perhaps the way out of this demented existence was to stop caring so goddamn much in the first place.

  Pride comes before the fall.

  And I had been falling for the last five months in every sense of the word. Smashed by my own cowardice when it came to the woman I loved.

  I stared at the simple white walls that framed my bedroom. She had only been here once, but I had never stopped seeing her in it.

  Suddenly, though, I hated that color more than I had ever hated anything in my life. Nearly every time I had seen her, Nina had worn some shade of white. Colorless neutrals that forced her to fade away. Only that night at the opera had I ever seen her in color. Seen her look completely and truly alive.

  To some, white might be the color of purity. To me, it just looked like a trap. A way to pretend like the rest of the world in its infinite messiness didn’t exist.

  Blood was red. And it stained too.

  Just like the color of her lips after I kissed them.

  And without thinking twice, I pulled back my fist and rammed it into the wall as hard as I could. The plaster was thin—I knew because I’d installed it myself. I’d have a hell of a bruise later and my knuckles were already bleeding, but my hand went right through the wall, causing a cascade of dust to fall over my hair and shirt.

  “Fuck!” I shouted and punched the wall again. And again. And again, until finally the pain throbbing up my arm overcame the rest of me.

  I turned, breathing heavily, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Gone was easygoing Matthew Zola. Well-mannered attorney. Good uncle, grandson, and brother.

  I looked like an animal. A creature ruined. A man at his wit’s end.

  “What are you doing?” I asked aloud and, quickly, slapped myself hard across the face.

  “Slap me, baby,” I told her as our pleasure took over.

  “What?” Her voice was heavy with lust, in spite of her obvious confusion.

  I took her arms and yanked her up, falling onto my heels so I could drill into her from below.

  “Slap me. Hit me. F-fuck, baby. Are you close?”

  Her arms were entwined around my neck as our sweat-soaked bodies met. Her head fell back, offering me the white expanse of her neck. I bit one side.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, God, I’m…I am close. Matthew!”

  “Then, slap me.” I grabbed her chin and forced her to look at me. “Treat me like the dog I am. Please, Nina. I need it.”

  A moan erupted from deep inside my chest. I really was an animal. A deeply, deeply wounded one. And, as always, I had done it to myself.

  “You done crying, you worthless fucking POG?” I demanded of my reflection. My eyes wet—from sadness and pain. I slapped myself again and again, taking my vengeance out on my own face instead of the walls I’d worked so hard to build. “Are you done fuckin’ crying, you fuckin’ pussy? You need a goddamn straw to suck it the fuck up?”

  There was no answer, of course. None but the other, unintelligible voice that existed deep in my soul. The one that told me it was time to pick myself out of this shitty spiral and get back to my life. Fix the holes in it, literal and otherwise. Patch the wall. Paint it another color if that’s what I needed. And, at long last, move the fuck on.

  Spurred into sudden action, I stripped off the rest of my finery and changed into clothes more fitting for a man like me. Twenty-year-old jeans stained with paint, an old undershirt.

  Full of intention, I pounded downstairs in search of my toolbox under the sink.

  “Fuckin’ mess,” I muttered as I shoved the garbage pail and various cleaning implements out of the way. It wasn’t bad, actually—Frankie and I tried to keep things relatively clean.

  A drip of water fell on my face.

  “Goddammit.”

  I pulled out a wrench and immediately flopped onto my back to tighten the leak. It was dirty work, lying under a sink. Grease quickly got on my hands, the white of my undershirt. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I ruined this white forever.

  Just as I was almost finished, a loud knock sounded on the front door.

  “Frankie?” I called out. “Sof? Is that you? Get your key, I’m elbow deep in the damn sink.”

  The knocking continued, but there were no telltale footsteps outside door.

  “Shit,” I mutter
ed as I gave one last tug on the wrench, then shoved out from under the sink.

  The knocking grew louder. I rolled my eyes. My tenant, who worked a graveyard shift, was probably pissed about the sudden raft of noise.

  “Hold on, hold on, Brent,” I called as I shuffled to the front door. “Listen,” I said as I opened it, “it’s only going to be five more—”

  But it wasn’t Brent at the door. Instead, it was the last person I ever thought I would see standing on my front step today.

  Nina stood like an angel, the afternoon sunlight gleaming behind her where it bounced off the harbor in the distance. She was dressed, per usual, mostly in white, with only a slightly smeared dab of red coloring her lips. But little things were off. Her shirt, a white blouse, was untucked and wrinkled, like she had worn it all night. She wore jeans for the first time since I’d met her—skinny gray things that hugged every curve she had, but looked at least ten years old, as if she hadn’t worn them since before she had become a mother. Her hair was pulled back into a mussed braid instead of a sleek ponytail.

  But her eyes—her eyes were round and wide as they traveled over me, taking in my slovenly appearance.

  “Shit.”

  I looked down. I was dressed for chores, not company. I didn’t usually let anyone but my siblings see me like this. Rags, all of them. Fitting for a man who worked with his hands, who spent his days on his back, not at a desk.

  Which right now, I supposed, I was.

  Maybe that was all I was ever supposed to be.

  She held up her hand in hello. Still wordless. But instead of the customary flash there, something else caught my eye. Or, I should say, a lack of something.

  Her ring finger on her left hand was bare.

  The diamond was gone.

  “I, ah, hey, doll,” I said as I rubbed my neck. “I—shit, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  In spite of the fact that she had just been hammering at my door like a woodpecker, Nina still didn’t speak. Instead, she just stared, looking up and down my body with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Horror? Lust? Disgust? I honestly couldn’t tell.