The Bet: A Manhattan Nights novel

by Natalie Wrye

  “No,” I giggled. “It’s not bad. You look amazing, actually, as…well, me. And I must admit that this was exactly the kind of laugh I needed this morning.”

  “You laugh,” she leans in. “But I’m serious.” Her tone takes a dip, lowering. “You have no idea how much you’ve inspired me.”

  I point at my own chest. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.” Emily plants her hands on her hips. “I’ve seen the change in you over the last few weeks. And I love it. I used to think that we women couldn’t have it all. That life was always going to stomp a mudhole in our Manolos. But I see you…venturing out. Smiling more. Letting go…like you did on the Rockefeller ice.”

  Emotion scratches my throat as Emily goes on.

  “I think you’re brave. And chic. And adventurous. And bad-ass,” she laughs. “And if this,” she waves at me, “is what a strong career woman is, then I know this is what I want to be.”

  My eyes grow watery, my mouth going instantly dry. I bow my head.

  I wish I could tell Emily that I can take all the credit for this “career woman” she sees in front of her. But I’d be lying.

  I was half that woman. And was incomplete. But the love of a strong man—a man like Heath—finished the half-painted picture of who Violet Keats was.

  I’ve felt like a masterpiece the second I truly let his love into my life. I glance back up at Emily, clearing my emotion-clogged throat.

  “Fine,” I exhale finally, “Miss CUNY law school. You can certainly help.”

  She smiles. “I’m going to help you nail this Chris Jackson creature…” I raise a finger, and she stops me. “And, please, don’t pretend you’re not going to go after him. You may have fooled everybody else at the firm. But don’t insult my intelligence.”

  Her smirk spreads wider, and I have no recourse but to shake my head, starting the tedious process of rearranging the files on my desk. Feeling light for the first time since I woke up, I let the warmth of the laughter with Emily run over me.

  “Just one rule: No excessive laughing. I won’t be much of an ‘inspiring lawyer’ with pee in my pants, now, will I?”

  I could tell the chuckles run their course when Emily suddenly coughs from above me. I look at her still standing there.

  “You might want to reconsider the ‘laughing’ part you were talking about…” She trails off, and I bit my lip at the frown on her face.

  What? my body questions. What was it?

  I don’t get to ask anything before Emily, solid wall of secrets that she is, starts rambling.

  “So, a man called late on Friday when you weren’t here,” she begins. “And he was polite and funny. He asked for you and when I said you weren’t there, he told me that I was the next best thing and so I told him that I wasn’t. That I was just a secretary and he mentioned that if more secretaries sounded like me, then he should definitely get one and when we laughed, he started saying that…”

  “Emily,” I interrupt. “I’m growing gray hair over here. Please.”

  “Okay, okay.” She expelled a quick breath. “So, before he got off the phone, I asked if I could take his name and number down and when he gave it to me, I realized why he sounded so familiar. His voice. The inflection.”

  She licks her lips.

  “He said…he was Fitzgerald Sparrow.”

  I swear I feel my heart drop through my ass.

  “He said,” Emily maintains, “that if you didn’t speak with him soon, then the firm was in serious trouble. That someone was going to reveal everything he knew about us. Everything he knows about you. So, he asked that you call him…” She fiddles with her fingers. “As soon as possible.”

  I blink. I think I stared at Emily so long that she started to get uncomfortable. My eyes shift to the TV located on the far wall, and again, I get those familiar pangs. The ones I have every time a Chris Jackson report comes on television. My brain tunes in.

  Focus shifting, I stare at the image of Chris Jackson in a suit crossing the screen, his entourage in tow. With Fitzgerald’s call in the back of my mind, a memory starts to form, and the memory turns solid the second I set that same damned clip they’ve been running of crooked Jackson among the crowd.

  Emily turns to stone beside me. She waves a hand in front of me to break my trance, and when she does, I lose it, jumping ten feet into the air from my chair, grabbing everything that I set out just minutes prior.

  I snatch my purse from the edge of the desk.

  “Miss Keats—Violet, are you ok?” She leans in closer. “Do you need…” Her brow furrows. “Do you need some help or something?”

  “Yes,” I replied, still scrambling and scraping to grab my shit. “I need some things. I need lots and lots of things.” I finally looked up at her. “Including you.”

  I marched for the door.

  “Me?” She gapes, watching me scuttle like a chicken with its head cut off. “Miss Keats, we just got into the office. Your coffee’s not even cold, and we have a million things on the schedule today.” She clasps both hands upon her chest. “What on earth could I do?”

  I step past her, heading out of my office.

  “You can help me get the hell out of here, Emily. And grab your purse.” I glance back at her, still speed walking with the fury of Hell within my heels. “Because we won’t be coming back.”

  Chapter 27

  HEATH

  I learned the lessons of love and hate a long time ago. Fifteen years ago, to be exact.

  I was eight.

  Love was a fairytale, a story more unbelievable than the Boogeyman in those days. There was very little of it in my household, and what little that did exist, only survived in the small bonds between me and my equally unloved siblings, a ragtag group of dreamers, drug addicts and money-chasers.

  And among them, I was the worst. At least, in the eyes of the only man who mattered.

  He looked at me then, on the eve of graduation, his golden eyes hardened beneath a set of bushy dark eyebrows, the hair above his heavy lids thicker than the strands on his balding head. He crosses his arms.

  “You’re the student body president of your Harvard Law Class, for Chrissakes. And you’re telling me…” he shifts on his feet in my tiny wooden kitchen, “that you’re not walking across that goddamned stage?”

  I rotate towards him, feeling the icy breath from the open fridge door. I reach inside. Still standing in my silk-covered cap and gown, I grab for the glass brown bottle stashed on the refrigerator shelf, swigging from its open neck.

  Funny. I don’t taste a thing. The heavy robe on my frame brushes the black laces of my spit-shined shoes, and I blink once, pushing beer and bile back down my throat, washing both away with a feeling of guilt to follow. I swallow that too, leveling my glare.

  “Technically, I didn’t tell you anything. The dean did the lovely honors of doing that.”

  “The dean is a good friend.” My father stares.

  “How nice for you both.”

  “He wants you to succeed, Heath. Just as much as I do.”

  “No.” I shake my head, swiping the tassels across my brow to the side, my grin a sad reply. “What Dean Whitmore wants is a whisky bottle without an end and a college-aged mouth around his shriveled cock. Let’s not pretend he cares what happens to me.”

  “But do you care?” My father’s chest heaves hard. “Do you care at all that you’re throwing three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of education away? Do you care that you’re choosing to forego graduation from the most prestigious law school in the goddamned country?”

  “Sure I do.” I smile weakly, the expression turning sardonic as I stare into eyes so much like mine. I nod slowly. “I care enough not to continue this sham.”

  “Exactly what sham are you referring to…?” His teeth tighten as he grits the words. “Son?” He cocks an eyebrow up to the sky. “The sham of a spoiled heir, wasting his God-given talent? Giving it away to gambling and entrepreneurial fantasies and girls?”

&
nbsp; “It’s women, Dad. Not girls. They’re all over the age of eighteen. Wish the same could be said for the ones I found with the Dean.”

  He glares. “You’re ungrateful.”

  “By ungrateful, you mean not blindly obedient.” I glare back.

  “My father graduated from Harvard.”

  “Good for Grandpa.”

  “His father went to Harvard before him.”

  “And I guess you’re scolding me for not sending gifts or…?”

  He continues, ignoring me. “And yet here you are. Living each day like it’s your last. Spitting in the face of me, the firm, hell—the entire institution that is Law.”

  “The dramatics are a nice touch, Dad. Really.” I remove the heavy cap from my head. “After you retire from the firm, I’m sure a nice television stint awaits.”

  “You’re a grade-A fuck-up, you know that?”

  I exhale as his teeth start to chatter. Here it comes. The Fitzgerald Sparrow I know best.

  The beast behind the mask.

  It was only a matter of time, really.

  “You have respect for nothing but yourself,” he hisses.

  “Oh, I do actually. I have respect for the last shred of decency left in me. The ones that won’t let me shake the hand of a philandering, predator of an academic dean with more skeletons in his closet than the Arlington National Cemetery. The ones that won’t let me support a system so slanted towards the rich that the Ivy League booster club shits gold. An institutional circle of back-scratchers so self-absorbed that decent fucking men like my goddamned roommate Jesse Somerset can barely scrape a job because Ivy Legacy free-loaders like me have gifted them all on a silver platter.”

  I stare into the deepening depths of my father’s furious eyes.

  He steps forward. His steps are slow and deliberate.

  “You may have the money my father left you in his will when he passed. But you’ll never have any stake in the firm. You mark my words, Heath… You’ll be back, begging, before five years is out.”

  I grin.

  This is not my first rodeo, and I’m way better at gambling than my father’s ever been. This won’t be my first roll of the dice…nor my last. I raise my chin, uttering infamous last words.

  “Wanna bet?”

  I raised my hand for him to shake, my fingers lightly trembling as I waited. I held in a deep breath, counting to myself.

  One. Two.

  It’s been seven years since that day, and the lessons are still the same. Now sitting against leather seat of my rented Audi, among the Manhattan snow, I realize I’ve learned another lesson along the way…

  The most important?

  That love is imperfect. It’s messy. Full of fucking flaws.

  And life is only two beats from changing.

  Ever notice that? It never gets to three.

  It surprises you before you get to the third number, dropping the bottom out. And nothing dropped the bottom out from me more than the note that was passed to me in that seedy little strip club.

  I still remember reading its crooked text.

  “Get rid of the redhead.”

  That’s what the note said.

  No “hi’s” or “hello’s.” No niceties to top off the lap-dance. No half-assed attempt at even pretending to be civil or even vague.

  My mystery letter-writer was long past the point of being subtle. And when I’d found that Violet had snuck from my sheets, slipped out before the early morning sun, I nearly broke my neck to get to Brett and Elsie’s, checked the King & Sparrow office before coming up completely empty. My cell phone out of service due to the winter storm, I visited everywhere I thought my sexy vixen would be, wrangling Jesse in as my unwilling assistant.

  I bark at him from a set of walkie-talkies I abruptly picked up from the only open store, my voice husky.

  “Follow her.”

  I can hear nothing but Jesse’s breath as he hesitates on the other end of the line.

  “Follow her, you said?” he repeats, as if he hasn’t heard me first time.

  “Yes,” I oblige him between gritted teeth. “Follow her.”

  “As in…now?” I hear muttered over the scratchy speaker.

  “No, tomorrow, Jess. Yes. Follow her right now.”

  “But…” The sound of the street around him drones his husky voice out. “She just walked out of her apartment building. Not too long after she walked in. Maybe she’s going to get some breakfast…”

  I stare at the walkie, listening to the voice coming out of it, wondering —just a little bit—why the hell my father hired him in the first place.

  The best trial lawyer in the country was clueless in terms of espionage, and if he hadn’t been my college best friend, I’d have fired his ass on the spot for gross incompetence.

  I put the walkie back to my mouth, unclenching my teeth one-by-one.

  “Listen,” I hiss. “I’ll be about two seconds off your ass, if you don’t. We’re tailing Marilyn. And the biggest part of tailing is that you follow the subject. Wherever they go. Whatever they do. So… fucking follow her.”

  Jesse exhales loudly. “Sure,” he declared. “But I don’t get it… Do we have to do this GI Joe-style?”

  I shift in my car seat. “Yes.”

  “Well, can we at least use some traditional walkie-talkie code?”

  I inhale deeply, exhaling just as quick “No.”

  “So, we want to keep an eye out for Violet and your sister, why?”

  “Because we’re protecting them,” I added.

  “More like stalking,” my college roommate concludes. “And don’t get me wrong,” he spouts quickly. “I’m all on board for a little light stalking work, but if that’s what we’re doing, ya gotta tell me. Might have to dial down my focus, especially since you’re not paying me.”

  I tap the throttle in my car, resisting the urge to smash the black talking square against it. I hold it closer to my mouth instead.

  “Jess. Listen. I need all of your focus. Turn your dial back the hell up.”

  I sit back in the driver’s seat of the rented Audi, my nerves on high. Post-blizzard Manhattan traffic plays the score to my impatience, and I wait for Jesse’s voice to come over the line again, hoping he will have a clue as to where Marilyn’s heading, where she might lead us.

  I hope to God it’s to Violet.

  She’s the one under the threat. Not my sister.

  But with cell phones out of commission and Violet’s love for “DND” mode, I can’t tell if she’s running from me again…or been taken. If she’s run, I know my sister won’t tell me the truth.

  Either way, I need to get to her. Before whoever’s taking aim at King & Sparrow’s stock and business comes calling after her.

  Marilyn had just gotten back to her apartment and yet here she was again, leaving it. My wily sister was making up for lost time since making it out of the hospital.

  I’d considered Brett to help me tail her, but Jess had been my first call. With paparazzi tailing him and Elsie, it was the last thing my best friend needed, especially after we’d last ended on such fucked-up terms.

  I still needed to mend that when I had a chance. But my own time was now running out.

  I was worried about Violet.

  I continue sitting there in the car, anxious for Jesse’s next update, and when it comes, I regret my decision to call him for the fortieth time.

  “Holy shit,” he comments on the line. “When did Marilyn get so grown up?”

  I sit up. “Sometime around the age we did.”

  “Your sister is gorgeous.”

  “Really great update, Jess. I’ll tell her you mentioned it.”

  “I just noticed how…adult she is. She seemed like such a kid when we were at Harvard.”

  “She sort of was.” I growl. “No more than seventeen. Now, could you keep your eyes off my sister’s ass and on where she’s going? I really don’t need a play-by-play of you noticing how hot she is.”

 
“Huh. Well, she is.”

  “Congratulations on having eyes.”

  “And my eyes weren’t on her ass, but if they were…” He trails off. “I mean, it is tight as hell. You could bounce a fucking quarter off it. Nice skirt-suit she’s wearing, by the way.”

  I snap. “Stop fucking talking about sister’s ass.”

  “We could talk about Violet’s ass, if it makes you feel better.”

  “Look anywhere near Violet’s ass, and I’ll throw your fucking walkie talkie into the street.” I lower my voice. “With your ear still attached.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it, boss.” Jesse jokes. I’ve got her covered.” I snort loudly and I can sense his smile over the line. “In the…non-sexual sense, of course, and well, would you look at the time…?”

  “Quit fucking around, Jesse. And keep me updated.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Okay, I’ve got Manhattan covered. You…have fun in Brooklyn, I guess. Nothing there anymore but bad art and hipster bars.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t trade places with you right now for the world.”

  His statement sets something off in me. My gut clenches with a new thought. I turn the wheel. Kicking up grudge and dirty snow, I head in the direction towards the bridge—back to Manhattan. Thrusting my throttle, I throw the Audi car into overdrive, my fist tightening just the same as my tires which spin over ice and sleet, flying over the road.

  I lower the walkie from my ear, whispering into the small speaker, my pulse bouncing all around my throat. I hiss to Jess.

  “Turn around. I know where Violet is going to be.”

  Chapter 28

  VIOLET

  Le Petit Pony has a few people, but Heath isn’t one of them. After our taxi cab took us to his apartment, I found it empty. Scouring the city, looking for him, my phone deader than dead, I, at last, land on the local bar we can’t stop coming to.

  The one we’d been in the night we first met.

  On Christmas Eve, the streets are scarily quiet. The snow has shuttled everyone inside and as I stroll towards the back of the bar, my eyes scanning for Heath, they land on something—someone—I never thought would be here.