“—fucked, Sean, we’re fucked, and I’ve already heard from two clients complaining about the bad PR bouncing back onto them. And the news—Jesus, you would not believe those vultures! They’ve been ringing everyone off the hook, even the fucking interns.”
I force myself to tear my eyes from his cheeks. “If you’ll tell me what’s happened, I’ll fix it. I promise.”
Valdman heaves himself into his chair and reaches for the globe bar he keeps next to his desk. “You want a drink?” he asks, already rummaging for a glass and the scotch decanter.
I glance discreetly over at the clock. It’s a little after nine a.m.
“I’m good,” I decline cautiously. “Now, sir, about whatever’s happened—”
“Right, right,” he mumbles, taking a drink and then setting the scotch decanter on the desk between us. “The Keegan deal.”
I’m honestly confused. “The Keegan deal, sir?”
Valdman blinks at me with bloodshot eyes, takes another drink. Waiting for me to say something.
But what is there to say? “Every version of that deal went through legal at least twice,” I offer, racking my brain, trying to think of any potential snags that would have Valdman in such apoplexy. But there were none, seriously. Fucking none. It was a good deal—every contingency prepared for, every clause examined, every city code and sales tax bond painstakingly referenced and braided into the agreement. “And we did have to get special approval from the City Council, but that went better and easier than we ever could have planned for. And then we sent it through our legal a final time, after the Keegan team’s legal went through it. There’s nothing even close to illegal or unethical in there, I promise you, sir.”
Valdman grunts. “Illegal, maybe not. But unethical? You sure about that?”
I stare at him. I know I’m wrecked from no sleep and stress, I know I’m thoroughly wrung dry from the last four weeks of late nights and early mornings trying to get this deal to paper—but my mind has always worked best when pushed like this, and so I know I’m genuinely stumped. I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that in the past I’ve drafted some deals that nudged a few moral boundaries—the best money is made on the frontiers of morality, after all—but there wasn’t even a whiff of that in the Keegan deal. No trace of anything slimy or suspicious. Just some old brick buildings that will be turned into shiny new profit centers. Hell, even as a citizen I think it’s a good deal.
Valdman finally sees that I honestly have no idea what he’s hinting at, and he sets his glass down with an irritated thump. “The man selling the property—Ernest Ealey? Did he ever mention anything about a lease? Tenants?”
Easy question. “Not once,” I say firmly. “And we pulled every agreement logged in those three buildings for the last forty years. No standing leases, no liens, no surprise historical registry shit. It’s clean property, sir, I promise.”
“You’re wrong,” my boss tells me. “Because there is a lease, and there are tenants.”
I shake my head. “No, we checked—”
“Ealey lied to you, son, or he just plain forgot because it was a handshake agreement done twenty years ago.”
“If it wasn’t disclosed—”
“I don’t care about fucking disclosure right now,” Valdman says. “I care about the fucking newspapers breathing down my neck.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I still don’t understand why the press would care about some random tenants—”
“Nuns, Sean,” Valdman interrupts. “They’re fucking nuns.”
Of all the things he could have said, the word nuns was probably the farthest down on my list of possibilities and I’m still asking myself if I heard him right when he continues. “They run a shelter and soup kitchen there, and in the last year, they’ve used it as a place to put up victims of human trafficking.”
Nuns. Shelter.
Human trafficking victims.
I blink.
And blink.
Because.
This is bad.
“Good old Ernest Ealey couldn’t sell those buildings for years, so he rented them out to the nuns for one dollar a year to get the tax write-off.”
“One dollar a year,” I echo.
Shit, this is so bad.
Valdman appraises me shrewdly over a sip of scotch. “I see you’re finally grasping the extent of the fucking problem.”
Oh, I am, and here it is: it doesn’t matter how legal and aboveboard the actual deal is now. Because the story is that an out-of-state developer is kicking a group of sweet, do-gooding nuns out of the place they do good from. The story is that a place of charity will be torn down and turned into a temple of consumerism and greed. The story is that these tiny old nuns—fuck, I can see them on the news now, with little wimples and adorable wrinkled faces—just want to feed and clothe the poor, and the big, bad millionaires are punishing them and the city’s needy just to make a quick buck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. How did I fucking miss this?
I run a hand through my hair and pull for a minute, using the pain to focus. “Do you want me to find a way to cancel the deal?”
“Fuck no,” Valdman scoffs. “Do you know how much money we’re making from it?”
Of course I fucking do, but I don’t say that.
My boss leans forward, tapping the top of his desk for emphasis. “No, it’s in Keegan’s and Ealey’s best interest to move forward, not to mention ours. Keep the deal, but fix this. Fix our image.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me,” he rumbles. “The PR is the real problem, not the deal, so you fix the PR.”
“I—” I actually don’t know what to say. “Sir, I don’t know shit about PR.”
“No, but you inked the deal, so it’s best if you’re the one the press sees. Plus you aren’t half bad-looking, kid. Makes the rest of us look good.”
I’m already shaking my head. “Sir, please—”
“It’s done, Sean. I’ve already had Trent reach out to the nuns—”
“You what?”
“And they were going to send their boss or whatever to meet you, but I guess one of the sisters is sick, so they’re sending a nun intern to meet with you.”
“A nun intern?”
Valdman looks impatient. “You know, like she’s not a nun yet, but she’s a nun-in-training or something. I don’t know—you’re the one with the priest brother, right?”
“Postulant,” I say, surprised I still know the word. “She must be a postulant.” And then I add, “And he’s not a priest anymore.”
His brow furrows. “But that must mean your whole family is Catholic, right? That you’re Catholic?”
“They used to be, and I haven’t been Catholic since college,” I say, and something in the tone of my voice makes Valdman shut up about it.
“Ah, okay. Well, anyway, the training nun offered to come here, but I think you better go to her. Makes for a better first impression. She’s expecting you around ten at the shelter.”
I glance at the clock. Thirty minutes from now I’m going to be shaking hands with a nun. What the fuck happened to my day? “What’s the postulant’s name?” I ask as I stand. Might as well go in having as much information as possible.
Valdman glances at his computer screen. “Um, it’s Iverson.”
My blood jumps up a degree in temperature.
Chill out, Sean. There’s probably lots of Catholics with the last name Iverson in Kansas City.
Valdman squints at whatever notes Trent the Secretary left him in the call memo. “Zenobia,” he pronounces. “Zenobia Iverson.”
“Zenny,” I correct automatically.
Valdman looks up at me. “Pardon?”
I smooth down my jacket and grab my briefcase. My blood is hot with something between anxiety and relief. “It’s Zenny. She hates the name Zenobia.”
“Do you…do you know this training nun?”
“Postulant. And yes, I do.”
“Well, I don’t know how wel
l she knows you. She was the one who leaked the story to the press yesterday—with your name attached.”
This does nothing to settle my pulse. “Oh.”
Valdman tilts his head at me. “How do you know her again?”
I answer as I’m walking out of the door. “She’s my best friend’s little sister.”
“Careful, son,” he calls after me. “Remember the deal comes first.”
As if I’d have any trouble remembering that. I give him a wave as I round the corner into the hall, check my phone to make sure I haven’t missed any calls from the hospital, and then head down to meet Elijah’s little sister and cajole her into calling off the press dogs.
Easy peasy, right?
Chapter Four
Okay, not so easy peasy. As I get into my car, my brain starts peeling everything apart, and I have to stop thinking about Keegan and PR for a moment so I can just…process.
Little Zenny-bug is a nun?
Little Zenny-bug is a nun who reported my financial firm to the press?
My mind is in a tumult as I navigate my Audi to the Keegan property to meet with Zenny. Zenny the postulant. Zenny the soon-to-be nun. I call Elijah, and it goes to his voicemail, so I toss the phone into my passenger seat with a huff, trying to remember if he’d said anything about his sister joining a religious order.
With some chagrin, I realize we don’t talk about our families much; an unspoken mutual thing, so as not to bring up anything that evokes the Great Iverson-Bell Schism of 2003. I didn’t even tell him Mom was sick until after he found out about it from his dad.
And it’s never bothered me that we don’t talk about family, but Zenny becoming a nun seems like something I should have known, at least for Elijah’s sake. His parents had been decently kind and understanding when he came out, although I knew he’d faced an unvoiced wall of Catholic discomfort about him being gay. The one thing his parents did voice was a desire for grandchildren of their bodies. Elijah hadn’t let it bother him—or maybe he simply hadn’t shown that it bothered him, I don’t know, we weren’t always great at talking about that kind of shit—but part of what had appeased his parents was knowing that Zenny might still give them grandchildren.
And now she’s becoming a nun.
I hope that hasn’t made anything harder for Elijah. I resolve to ask him about it whenever he calls me back.
I park on the street outside the property, leaving my pretty German car-baby behind with some reluctance, and then I have to poke around the block of old five and six-story buildings before I find a metal door marked simply with a cross and a local phone number. It’s unlocked, and I step into a narrow linoleum-floored landing with a badly lit set of stairs leading upward. I creak my way to the second floor, and there a door marked Servants of the Good Shepherd of Kansas City takes me into a makeshift waiting room. It’s also lined in linoleum, ringed by red plastic chairs that were definitely salvaged from a 1980s bowling alley or some shit, and dotted with baskets of well-worn toys. A dusty fake plant sits in a corner, and somewhere, incongruously, Bruno Mars is singing about Versace on the floor.
Sex and wealth—definitely the first things I think of when I think of nuns, right?
I ring the orange bell at the vacant receptionist’s window and wait.
I wonder what Zenny will look like after all these years. I can’t remember seeing any pictures of her floating around, but I guess it’s not that surprising. Elijah always claimed he was too burned out on social media from running the museum’s feeds to update his own personal accounts, and honestly, I’m too busy myself to open up anything on my phone that isn’t The Wall Street Journal or my stock apps, so I’m pretty much clueless about anything that isn’t directly related to my job—even my best friend’s family.
Well, given the schism, especially my best friend’s family.
I picture Zenny as I remember her best—as Zenny-bug, young and dimpled with hair in pigtails that ended in little dandelion-shaped puffs. I’d had to babysit her once or twice before the schism; in fact, I remember trying to slouch back to Elijah’s room in junior high so we could do some Playstation and my mom making me come to the Iversons’ kitchen to hold the new baby so she could get a picture.
When had I last seen her? The day of Lizzy’s funeral? Yes, yes, that had been it; I can remember the tap of her Sunday school shoes on our kitchen floor as she chased our family dog around the house after the service. The happy noise of her playing with Ryan while my dad wordlessly poured glasses of whiskey for the adults.
And me, I’d locked myself into the upstairs bathroom and gripped the edge of the sink until my knuckles went white, stared at the row of smudgy mascara tubes and half-empty lip glosses that Lizzy would never use again. I don’t know how long I’d been there, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing, before I’d heard a tentative knock at the door. The soft, rain-like noise of the beads on a little girl’s brand new braids clicking.
“Sean?” she’d asked. She’d been seven then, her voice just edging into a big kid voice and losing the little warbles and lisps of childhood.
If it had been anybody else, I would have roared at them to leave me alone, I would have hurled things at my side of the door until they left, but I couldn’t with Zenny. She was Elijah’s little sister, so I simply said, “Yes, I’m in here.”
“Mom says that we’re only supposed to say things like ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but Ryan and me thought you’d want to know that Jurassic Park is on the TV in the basement.”
And miraculously—it was the only time it happened that day—I smiled. “Thanks, Zenny-bug.”
“And I found a book for you to read.” There was a thunk and papery hiss of a book being wedged under the bathroom door. “It was in Mrs. Carolyn’s room, but I figured you might need it more than her. My dad always reads in the bathroom for a long time too.”
I did have to laugh a little at that as I reached for the cheap paperback now being birthed from the crack under the door. It was one of my mom’s historical romances, with a gold curlicue font and a guy in old-timey clothes clutching a woman’s shoulders.
In the Bed of the Pirate: Book One in the Wakefield Saga
“Thanks, kid,” I said. “Appreciate it.”
“I’m going to go watch Jurassic Park now,” she declared, and there was the crush of the carpet under her shoes, the plastic rain-sound of her beads, and then she was gone. The one person in the house who’d managed to stay sane through the whole mess of Lizzy’s death.
I’d stayed in that bathroom for another hour, still too fucked up emotionally to face anyone downstairs and too wound up to simply go to my room and sleep. In fact, the only thing that finally calmed me down enough to leave my bathroom cocoon of pain was reading the first fifty pages of In the Bed of the Pirate, which was weirdly compelling. After reading the chapter where Lady Wakefield was kidnapped by the mysterious pirate king, I finally felt normal enough to go downstairs. Which was of course when I walked into the middle of the schism—raised voices, Mrs. Iverson tugging on Dr. Iverson’s elbow, my mother crying, Elijah looking shocked.
And before I fully processed what was happening, I remember being grateful that Zenny was in the basement and far away from whatever ugliness was currently crackling between our families. And I’d held on to that Wakefield paperback like it contained the answers to life itself as I finished coming down the stairs and faced what would be the final, terrible gash left by Lizzy’s suicide.
Fuck.
I hate thinking about that day.
I shake off the memories and ring the bell at the window again, the first tendrils of impatience snaking through me. I glance at my watch. Yes, it’s definitely ten o’clock, and judging from the picture of the Virgin Mary hanging above the cheap plastic chairs, I’m definitely in the right place.
“Hello?” I call through the window. “Anyone there?”
I hear a laugh—muffled as if through a door—and a couple voices in ringing conversation, and the
voices sound like they’re coming closer, thank God.
“Hello?” I call again, hopefully. “I’m here to see Zenny?”
I hear a door open somewhere I can’t see, I hear footsteps on the linoleum, and suddenly, I’m suffused with huge amounts of confidence. Optimism.
Because this is baby Zenny, baby Zenny who likes Jurassic Park and brought me a book once just so I wouldn’t be bored. This is the same baby Zenny I had to push in the swings at the park and guard my popcorn from during family movie nights. This is my best friend’s little sister, and this is going to be so easy. She’ll see her old friend Sean and realize that this was all a misunderstanding, a simple mix-up, and then she’ll step aside and let me clean this up.
Like I said before, easy peasy.
The footsteps get closer and I take a step back from the window, already pinning my best big-brotherly smile on my face as Zenny comes into view.
Except.
Except.
Shit.
It’s not Zenny at all.
It’s Mary.
Chapter Five
"Mary?" I say, totally stunned.
She's in a white collared shirt and black jumper, a rosary hanging from her belt and a cross around her neck—as far away from the red dress she wore last night as she could possibly be—yet it’s still the same Mary. The same mesmerizing mouth, with its full upper lip pouting over the smaller bow of the lower one. The same tiny stud glinting from the side of her nose, the same eyes with their copper haloes around the pupils.
It’s her. It’s her, and immediately, I remember the feel of her in my arms, the tentative touch of her fingers on the nape of my neck, the silky give of that tempting mouth under my fingertip. My body responds in an instant, my cock giving a lazy jolt and thickening behind my zipper, my tongue running along the edge of my top teeth.
“Mary,” I say again, and my voice has changed, just enough to make her bite her lip, just enough to send that faint rosy hue to her cheeks.
Sinner (Priest Book 3) Page 4
