by Nicole Fox
The thought of her walking down the side of a road in the middle of the night curbs the fury racing through my veins. The thought that she was so desperate to leave that she fled on foot fills me with a strange kind of shame. Eve stayed when I pushed her up against a wall in the hallway and told her to never touch me again. She stayed no matter how many times I lashed out or pushed her away. So how bad had things become that she had finally cracked and fled?
By the time I get back to the mansion, the urge to follow her has disappeared. Maybe it’s better that she is gone.
The front gate is cracked open, and I can imagine her squeezing her body through it. I open it remotely and park in front of the house. I know she is gone, but I still climb the stairs and go immediately to her room.
The armoire is still full of clothes, which isn’t surprising. She never liked the things I’d bought for her, anyway. Everything looks normal. The bed is made and the clothes are all put away. In my head, I imagined her throwing her things wildly into a suitcase and running for it, but none of that was necessary. I’m so rarely ever home that Eve wasn’t worried about me walking in on her packing. She took her time.
I turn to leave and see the cookbook I just gave her sitting on the table next to the bed… with her wedding ring laid on top. The sight of the ring there, so lonely, stirs a weird pang in my gut.
I leave it there and check the rest of the house, though I know it is futile. The silence around me is eerie, and I almost forgot how lonely the mansion could be. How quiet. I’d grown accustomed to the sound of Eve plinking away at the piano and cooking in the kitchen. The sound of music floating out from under her bedroom door, even when we weren’t speaking, was a comfort to me. Now, there is nothing. Just the sound of my footsteps echoing off the marble.
Thinking back on it, I’m surprised Eve didn’t run after the lunch we had with my parents. It was my father’s idea to get Eve pregnant, and I was so upset by her betrayal that I didn’t fight him. In a strange way, it made sense. If she was pregnant, she’d have to be loyal to me. Which might or might not be true, but either way, the truth remains the same: I’m not fit to be a father. I’m not even fit to be a husband, so how could I raise a child?
Once I’ve finished my search of the house, I check the GPS tracker again. The dot is still flashing, growing further and further away with each second, but I turn off my phone and shove it in my pocket. Our marriage was an arrangement, anyway. Not real. Eve was never mine in the first place, and regardless of how I feel now, I’m better off without her.
Within the hour after I find Eve’s wedding ring on her bedside table, I’m back at Patrick O’Neill’s house. The pent-up energy inside of me needed to go somewhere, but I didn’t have another Irish mob member on my list. Patrick was the only person I’d visited who I hadn’t confirmed as useless or dead, so I head there.
He is in his office again when I arrive, and for reasons I’ll never understand, he never changed his locks. The key I stole before stills fits, and I slip in the same way I did before. This time, however, he jumps as soon as I step in the doorway. When he swivels around in his chair, I pull the trigger.
The bullet hits him in the same shoulder where he struck me. It seems only fair.
“Shit.” He presses his hand to the wound and shakes his head. “I just started feeling better from when you almost stabbed me in the fucking heart.”
“Shame I missed,” I snarl.
His face is white, blood oozing between his fingers. “Come on, man. My wife and kid are upstairs, and—”
“No, they aren’t. I already checked.”
His eyes go wide. We’re alone, and he knows it. There is no one here to save him.
“Where is Cole Morrison?” I ask.
He takes a shuddering breath. “I guess someone told you his name, then?”
I don’t respond.
“I don’t know, okay? I already told you. No one tells me—”
I shoot his kneecap. His leg sprays blood and bends at a strange angle, and he doesn’t know whether to tend to his shoulder or leg first.
“God damn it!” he screams, pushing off the floor with his good leg until he is pressed against the wall. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Where is he?” I ask. “Tell me, and I’ll be merciful.”
“This is mercy?” he asks, eyes wide and wild.
I aim at his other knee, and he holds up his hands. “Look, all I know is that the Irish gained access to a local military base. They got a shit ton of assault rifles, and Cole is supposed to be selling them.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, I think.” He shrugs. “I see the financial reports when it is all over. No one fills me in on the details.” He is pale and shaky from blood loss.
“Where are they storing the weapons?”
He hesitates, and I point the gun at his chest. The answer spills out of him faster than the blood. “Kaufenberg Shipyard.”
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
I lift the gun to his temple, and Patrick squeezes his eyes closed. I shouldn’t leave a witness. It is Crime 101. Don’t want to get caught? Don’t just tie up your loose ends; kill them. But Patrick looks pathetic. He is shaking and trembling, and when I look over his shoulder, I see a framed photograph of him and his wife and child at an amusement park. There is a Ferris wheel behind them, and his son has his eyes and is smiling at the camera.
I’ve never been so soft before, but I lower the gun and step away.
Patrick opens one eye and then the other.
“If you tell anyone I was here, I’ll come back,” I warn. “I’ll kill you. Them, too,” I add, pointing with my gun at the framed photo.
He gulps and nods, and I turn to leave. The Irish mob will be destroyed soon enough. By tomorrow night, it won’t matter if Patrick tells anyone I was here. There won’t be anyone left to come after me.
I check the tracker when I get back to my car, and see that Eve’s GPS dot has stopped moving. She is at her apartment, and I can’t believe she would go somewhere so obvious. I figured she would skip town and hope that I would be too busy and too lazy to chase after her. But staying within the city limits? It is bold. Almost like she didn’t actually want to run away, at all.
I tell myself to go straight back to the mansion, but I can’t resist driving by her place. I park along the curb outside and look up at her window.
It’s late but the lights are all on. She hasn’t been back there in almost two months, so she is probably cleaning up and dusting, organizing her things. I see flickers of movement past the closed windows, her shadow stretching across the blinds. I want her to open them and look down at me, but of course she doesn’t. She doesn’t know I’m here. Which is fine with me.
I drive away and call Gabriel. The soldiers need to be prepared for an attack on Kaufenberg Shipyard. He doesn’t ask any questions, but assures me it will be done. Loyal to a fault, that one.
I should be heading back to the mansion, but I circle around and stop outside Eve’s apartment again. It is hardly secure. Her father should have done more to protect her. The mob lifestyle is anything but safe, especially for a beautiful woman like Eve, and doubly so for someone with a reckless father like Benedetto. He makes too many enemies. I never realized how nice it was to have her living in the mansion. I didn’t have to worry about her. It allowed me not to focus on the car bombing that happened at Cal Higgs’ funeral, killing Samuel Notarianni.
I know Eve thinks I had something to do with it, but I didn’t. I would have never planned something so public and something that could have easily injured her. She was within the blast radius.
No one in the Volkov family fessed up to the attack, and my father didn’t know anything about it, so I don’t think it was carried out by my family at all. Which means Benedetto has garnered other enemies, as well. Enemies who might want to take out his daughter next.
My only hope is that the Irish mob is responsible. If so, we are three-q
uarters of the way towards shutting them down. However, I have no idea how the Irish could have gotten so close to Benedetto’s top advisor’s car without anyone noticing. It worries me that they were able to slip under the radar at the funeral and again at my wedding.
When I finally get home, I lay in bed and research houses for sale in the city. Eve doesn’t want to live with me, but maybe she’d allow me to put her up in a more secure house. It takes me longer than I’d like to admit to realize how pathetic it all is. Eve ran away from me. She left the security of my house to live in her tiny apartment. Why should I care about her safety?
Still, I bookmark a few houses for later. Just in case.
23
Eve
Chiara kicks her feet up on my coffee table and hugs one of my turquoise throw pillows to her chest. “I missed you, girl, but this shit is crazy. You should be up in that mansion on the hill. Not in this dinky apartment.”
“It’s not dinky,” I say. Though, it is. Especially the kitchen. I was spoiled by the sparkling white modern masterpiece at the Volkov mansion. My kitchen is slightly remodeled, though the cabinets are clearly from the late 80s and have been painted so many times I bet I could peel the different layers off like a sticker.
I expected Luka to come for me last night. I couldn’t sleep, thinking every footstep of my neighbors above and below me was Luka sneaking in the apartment to drag me back to the mansion. But he never came for me. He never showed up or called or anything. Part of me wonders whether the tracker in the bracelet wasn’t just a lie he told to scare me. If it was, he must have laughed and laughed when the threat of the bracelet kept me docile for so long. How stupid I must have looked to him.
If it was a trick, he’ll probably be coming for me soon. I wonder if he’ll kill me, but I can’t imagine it. Not really. And if he did come, switchblade at the ready, I’d tell him about the baby. Maybe that would sway him. Loyalty means more to him than anything, so even if he was willing to kill me, surely he wouldn’t hurt his unborn child.
“I can’t believe you are going to have a baby,” Chiara says, holding her hands a foot away from her stomach, imagining what her own pregnant belly would look like.
I run my hand down my still-flat abdomen. “I can’t, either.”
“Do you think Luka will take the baby?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” I really don’t know. While sitting awake all night, I wondered whether I shouldn’t keep running. I could flee the city and the state and the country, even. I could raise my child far away from this lifestyle, but even though Luka is a wild card and a possible threat, the idea of taking his child so far away from him feels wrong. Even if I never let Luka have a relationship with his child, it still feels wrong to flee the country.
Chiara grabs the remote and flips on the television. I’m amazed I still have cable since I wasn’t paying any bills while I was gone, and it suddenly strikes me that Luka must have been covering them. “He should at least pay child support. God knows he is good for it.”
I’m too tired to think about child support or cable bills or any of it, so I flop down on the couch next to her, prepared to watch hours of some ridiculous reality television show that, honestly, is beginning to bear too much resemblance to my real life. But just as I sit down, my phone starts to ring.
“Is that Luka?” Chiara asks, rising up on her knees, desperate to see the screen.
I shove it back in the pocket of my favorite pair of jeans and shake my head. “My dad.”
I have no idea if he knows I left the Volkov mansion or not. If he doesn’t know, he is probably calling to see what information I’ve gathered, in which case I have no desire to speak to him. If he does know I left, then he is probably livid and is calling to yell at me, in which case I still have no desire to speak to him. Either way, I’m not answering. He leaves a voicemail. Despite not wanting to hear his voice, I can’t resist checking it.
“Eve. Call me. Now.” His tone is the same one he used to chastise me for misbehaving as a child. He definitely knows. “We need to talk.”
No, we don’t. I delete the message.
When my phone vibrates again, I think it is my dad calling back, but it is actually a calendar alert. “Shit,” I mumble, dismissing it. “I have another class with Véronique Cauchon tonight.”
“Are you going to go?” Chiara asks, far less interested in me now that she knows I’m not talking with Luka.
“I don’t know. What if Luka shows up? He knows about the class, so it would be a surefire way to find me.”
Chiara raises a penciled in eyebrow. “Do you really think he doesn’t already know where you are? He could come get you anytime. If he hasn’t broken down your door already, he isn’t going to. I say, go to the class.”
I know she is right. But why hasn’t he come for me? The only reason I can really think of is that he doesn’t care anymore. Luka didn’t want to spend time with me, anyway, so maybe this arrangement is better for him. Now he doesn’t have to avoid his own home to stay away from me.
My throat thickens with unshed tears, but I swallow them back. I’m tired of crying.
The lesson is a disaster.
I get eggshells in the mixing bowls, the butter burns when I try to brown it, and I overmix a meringue so badly the peaks aren’t only stiff, but sticky like glue. Véronique is trying to be kind, but I can tell her patience is waning. She hovers around me, correcting my mistakes and making sure nothing catches on fire, and I just try to keep my head together.
I thought leaving the Volkov mansion would make it easier not to think about Luka, but he is at the forefront of my mind all the time. Seeing him coming and going on the rare times he came back to the mansion were apparently the only thing keeping me sane. Now, I have no idea where he is, what he is doing, or whether he cares I’m gone or not. And it is driving me crazy.
“Why don’t I crack the eggs while you…” Véronique looks around for a task I can complete on my own without ruining everything. “Get the custard out of the refrigerator!”
Moving a bowl from the refrigerator proves a task fit for my skills, and I manage to set it on the counter without dropping it on the floor. I swear the chef lets out a sigh of relief like she was actually nervous.
I almost wish Luka would just show up. Every time the door swings open, I look to make sure it isn’t him. It is distracting to the point I’m not even sure what Véronique and I are baking.
She turns off the stand mixer and points out the stiff peaks in the meringue to me—I know what stiff peaks look like, but I don’t blame her for thinking I don’t—just as there is a commotion outside the kitchen door. She pulls her blonde brows together in concern and then, suddenly, the door swings open.
I have one thought: Luka. He came for me. He blew his way past the hostess and the cooks and is coming to get me. I have no idea whether I’ll resist or not, but there is something like relief filling my chest at the thought that he is in the same building as me again.
Except, it isn’t Luka. It’s my father.
“Dad?”
His face is red, and he charges towards me. Véronique moves out of the way without hesitation. She may be a tough chef in the kitchen, but she has no interest in taking on my father. When he orders her to give us a minute alone, she practically sprints for the doors.
“What is going on?”
“You know what is going on,” he snaps, stepping too close to me, his breath sour on my skin. He has been drinking. “Ivan Volkov called me. He told me you reneged on the deal.”
“How did you find me?” I ask. I never told him about my lessons with Véronique.
“You still have your tracking device on.” He points to the bracelet. So, it was a real tracker. At least now I know I didn’t fall for a dumb trick. “Ivan told me where I could find you. Why did you run away? Is this because of the hormones? Your mother lost her mind when she was pregnant with you. I couldn’t even talk to the woman for nine months.”
“No,
it isn’t just my hormones,” I snap before a realization washes over me. I narrow my eyes. “How do you know about the pregnancy?”
“Chiara.”
God, can I trust anyone?
“Because Chiara cares what happens to this family, unlike you.” He grabs my arm and pulls me towards the door. “Go back to Luka’s. Now. This can still be salvaged, and then—”
A heartbreaking reality opens up in front of me. My father knows about my pregnancy, and he doesn’t care. I’m pregnant with his first grandchild, and he hasn’t asked how I’m doing. He doesn’t want to know if I’ve been to a doctor or how I’m feeling. He is just worried about getting me back to his enemy so his life can be easier. He doesn’t care about me at all.
“And then what?” I yell. “Then you can find some new way to use me?”
“Eve,” he says, rolling his eyes like I’m being ridiculous.
“You’ve tried to marry me off to your enemies twice now. This last time was successful, so congratulations,” I say, clapping my hands sarcastically. “But I’m done doing what you tell me to do. You say I don’t care about the family, but that is all you care about. You certainly don’t give a shit about me.”
“That isn’t true.” The vein in his forehead is throbbing. Usually, I’d be concerned about his blood pressure, but if he doesn’t care about me, why should I care about him?
“I’m your pretty little pawn, and I’m not going to do it anymore.” I step away from him and cross my arms. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He stares down at me, nostrils flaring, lips smashed together. And then, without another word, he turns and leaves.
The doors swing shut behind him, and I think I’ve won. I think I’ve finally gained independence from my worthless father. No one comes back into the kitchen, so I clean up the perishables on the counter and head out the back door. The lesson was a bust, anyway. I couldn’t focus on anything.
