Dark Secrets

by Jessica Gadziala

  "Daniel, it's over," she said, sipping her too-hot coffee, getting a sick kind of comfort from the burn.

  "No, it's not. And if you would get your head out of your ass for two minutes, you would see that too."

  "You lied to me."

  "Jesus Christ, so the fuck what?" he asked on a hiss, making her jerk back, surprised.

  "And by that, I'm pretty sure you meant 'yeah, that was a dick move and I'm sorry'."

  "Look, am I sorry that things happened this way? Yeah, babe. I'm sorry. But my intentions toward you had nothing to do with the job. That was all me. When I was alone in your apartment, I didn't snoop. I didn't overstep. I didn't do anything that you could consider not genuine. What? Should I be sorry about my job? See, that would be problematic seeing as the only reason we met in the first place was because of my job."

  "You have been trying to lock up Vin and his sons."

  "Yeah, sweetheart, they're criminals. Half of the agencies want to lock them up for one thing or another. That being said, I had no fucking idea they actually meant something to you. Half the time, you were snapping at them."

  "And you would have had me locked up if you found anything illegal on me," she said, putting her coffee down on a nearby table, maybe not trusting herself to not scald him with it if things escalated.

  "Faith..."

  She shrugged. "Let's test it out, shall we? I work at Vin's because I am blackmailing him to let me do it. Because of that, he lets me snap at him and his sons and his customers. He also pays my mother's medical bills without so much as a flinch. You going to lock me up? I just admitted to a crime."

  "What the fuck could you blackmail a man like him with?" Daniel asked, ignoring her attempts to goad him.

  "Something you and every cop, special agent, states attorney and any other number of people I don't know the names of would kill to get their hands on." She watched his brow raise, but that was the only reaction she got. "Are you going to drag me down to the station and try to get the information out of me?"

  "Faith," he tried to cut in, but she was on a tear.

  "I've also broken a man's kneecaps with a tire iron once for stalking his ex. I knocked three teeth down the throat of a potential rapist in an alley about three years back. Oh, this week I beat the ever-loving hell out of a man who was trying to keep a woman's son from her..."

  "Faith," he tried again.

  "My first two guns were illegal. I used to do target practice in an abandoned brick building in Brooklyn. Let's see... oh, I once..."

  "Faith, I quit."

  Those words, so unexpected, made her sentence trail off, her lips still parted, but no words coming. He quit? He quit his job? Why would he quit his job? Because of her? She couldn't quite bring herself to believe that. It was too crazy, too over the top a reaction.

  Hell, they barely knew each other.

  "What was that?" she asked, shaking her head a little to clear it.

  "I quit the Bureau. They haven't quite accepted the resignation yet, but now that Max's cover is shot to shit, I will make it clear to them again."

  "You, ah, quit for me?" she asked, each word so separate from the other that they were each practically their own sentence. "Daniel, that's, well, that's crazy."

  "Don't flatter yourself too much, sweetheart," he said, teasing smile in place. "It wasn't all you. Though, that was a part of it."

  "What was the rest of it then?"

  He shrugged, reaching out to hand her back her coffee, likely seeing the storm had blown over. He didn't know her well enough to know that another could be right along behind it in seconds. "I haven't had a life in over a decade. I mean, I've had lives. I've been a skin trader and a drug dealer and a bartender," he said with a small smile, "but I haven't had a life of my own. That's part of the job. I knew that going in. And in the beginning, that was fine. I was young and hungry and addicted to the rush. But I'm not a kid anymore. It's not enough."

  Faith felt her shoulders lose some of their tension at that. It was something she had been too mad at or, alternately, upset with him about, to consider- what if his intentions were pure? What if he did care about her? What if she wasn't just a mark? Just a potential file he could snap shut?

  It was dangerous to think those things with no evidence to back them up.

  But him standing there and telling her just that, well, it made it really hard to cling to her anger and sadness.

  "Faith?" he asked when she was silent for a long minute.

  "I'm thinking," she told him unnecessarily.

  "Maybe you could do some of it out loud so I can know if I need to protect my balls or be ready to get second degree burns from that coffee or what," he said with a wry smile.

  She felt her own lips curve up slightly at that, realizing that no one had ever been able to read her quite so well. "What's your plan?" she asked, surprising herself. She hadn't been sure what she was going to say, but that definitely didn't seem to even be something she was thinking.

  "My plan," he repeated, watching her. "Good question. Been thinking a lot about that myself. The one nice thing about working undercover for your entire adult life is your money stocks up. So I'm going to actually move in to my place, buy some furniture, paint the fucking walls. Then I am going to see what I want to do about a job."

  "I think 'skin trader, drug dealer, and professional liar' will look really good on your resume," she said with a smirk.

  "Got a lot of compiled skills over the years. I make a pretty mean bartender too," he added. "Ran fucking circles around you."

  "Do it for a decade then come tell me you aren't sick of everyone's shit and sob stories and over-the-top drunken antics."

  "Cynic."

  "Realist. It's not a job people like us are meant to do."

  "People like us, huh?" he asked, reading more into that than she intended.

  She ignored him. "This job has an expiration date. Especially for women."

  "Sweetheart, you'll be turning heads at sixty," he said, rolling his eyes. "What is your plan then if you don't see yourself doing this much longer?"

  "I'm here because my mom gets good care. And good care costs a mint. Even with my salary and tips, I wouldn't be able to pull it off. So Vin does. Some day, I am leaving this hellhole. Get a little house. Have a life that isn't so..."

  "Baby, you'd go stir-fucking-crazy in the 'burbs and you know it. PTA meetings and neighborhood watches and people bitching about how tall you let your grass grow and..."

  "Alright alright," she said, face horrified. "Fuck. I'll stay in the City. Jesus. They do that shit in the suburbs?"

  "You got no fucking idea how insane middle America is," he agreed with a nod.

  "Alright, I'll buy a condo in a better area," she compromised. It wasn't until that moment that she saw how unlikely it was that she would ever leave the City. It was what she knew. She grew up there. It had things she had gotten accustomed to- like Chinese at four in the morning after work when she was hungry and lazy and cabs and the subway so you never had to drive yourself anywhere. Hell, she didn't even have a driver's license.

  "Solid plan," Daniel said with a nod. "What about work when you leave Lam?"

  Faith shrugged. "I always figured I would just keep teaching self-defense. I got plenty of good years left in me for that."

  "I could get behind that. I'll invest a stupid amount of money in that business plan if you go into it in the future."

  "You want to invest in me," she said, rolling her eyes. "You don't even know me."

  Daniel sighed, shaking his head at her like she was being silly. "I know enough to know you're one of the best self-defense teachers I've seen. And I've seen a lot. You know what you're doing and you teach it in a very approachable way. You're tenacious and headstrong and stubborn as all fuck..."

  "Okay, this went from kind of sweet to..."

  "And you are very opinionated," he cut her off. "You are loyal. You care about people, even women you haven't even shared a conversation with
and will never see again. You're smart and you have good instincts. You'd be good at doing your own thing."

  Uncomfortable not only because he was complimenting her but because he had just proved that he did, in fact, know a lot about her, she tried to put some levity into the conversation. "You should save your money. I hear you're about to be unemployed with no job experience except being a world class liar."

  "Funny that," he said, nodding. "Apparently not."

  "Apparently not, what?" she asked, confused.

  "Apparently I am not a world class liar. You had Rhodes look into me. Something tipped you off."

  "No one sneaks up on me," she admitted. "And no one disarms a man like you disarmed Anthony without extensive training. And, lastly, you were hyper aware of the cameras. It just didn't all add up to you being 'just a bartender'. But, actually, it was Anthony who had me run you."

  "Anthony?" Daniel asked, stiffening, brows drawing together.

  "Yeah," Faith said with a small smile. "I guess he was all butt-hurt about you disarming him so he went to check out your file. He found out it was all bullshit. That, added to what I had already felt weird about, was enough to send me to Xander's part of town."

  "Christ, I thought he was an idiot," Daniel said with a snort, figuring maybe it was good that he was quitting if he misread the situation so much.

  "He's an alcoholic. I'd bet he's every bit as capable as Salvatore or Vin when he's clean. You know," she said, her stomach twisting again at realizing they had been having a stupid, pointless conversation about their individual futures while standing in the hospital a couple floors below where a man she recently realized she cared for could be dying by the second.

  "Hey," Daniel said, seeing the wet when it hit her eyes again.

  "I don't cry!" she insisted a little hysterically as a tear slipped over and slid down her cheek.

  "I can see that," Daniel agreed with a smile as he reached out to swipe it away.

  "No, seriously. I am not a crier. This isn't..."

  "Faith," he cut her off, putting an arm around her lower back and pulling her toward him, kissing her forehead before he pressed her into his chest, "this has been a hell of a week. I think you earned the right to have a little emotion, don't you?"

  "FBI, huh?" Vin's voice called from behind them a long couple of minutes later, just when Faith was starting to feel like maybe, just maybe, things weren't as shitty as she had started to think they were.

  Daniel hadn't been planning on fucking her over.

  Technically, he wasn't a cop anymore.

  Max was okay which was good for Daniel as well as the D'Onofrio family as a whole.

  But there was still a healthy dose of bad to go around.

  Anthony and his fate for one.

  Vin and his reaction to Daniel and Max a close second.

  "Not anymore," Daniel said, moving Faith to curl her into his side, holding her there with enough pressure that it was borderline painful, silently telling her she wasn't using the opportunity to pull away from him. "Putting in my notice," he told Vin.

  "You knew," Vin said, looking at Faith.

  To her surprise, she didn't see accusation in his eyes or anger or even a trace of disappointment in her. That was the thing about Vin, it was hard to tell how he was going to react to things. Someone scuffed his shoes and maybe he would throw a shitfit. But someone plowed into his stupidly expensive car once and he had shrugged it off and said it was just a car and all that mattered was the driver was okay.

  She always thought it was partly what made him so intimidating to his men and to the other organizations in the City- you couldn't predict his reaction to something. Maybe he'd be fine if you made a move to take over one of his racketeering gigs, but he would kill a rival he found out was knowingly sold drugs laced with shit that was killing people.

  His moral compass was hard to gauge.

  "I knew," she agreed with a nod. "That's why I fired him."

  "Hm," he said with a nod. "Interesting."

  There was no hidden meaning there either, he genuinely just thought that information was interesting.

  "Vin, what the hell made Alan snap?" she asked, finally able to talk to someone about what had been driving her half-mad since it happened.

  Vin shook his head. "His friend," he said, nodding toward Daniel.

  "Max? Max pissed off Alan?" Faith asked, squinting, not seeing how that made any sense.

  "Max accused him of skimming. It was fine until Max said he had proof and went to reach into his jacket. He obviously had been skimming and he panicked and lost it." He recounted it almost casually, like it wasn't a crazy situation. For him, maybe it wasn't. When you had been the leader of an organized crime syndicate for a good three decades, it was easy to become jaded to that kind of thing. "He was weak to begin with. Hired him when he was twenty because his mother begged my mother to make me give him a leg up," Vin recalled with a scoff.

  "Where's Salvatore?" Faith asked. "Still at the station?"

  "Yeah. I had already been questioned for a while so the lawyers got me out easily enough. They had just gotten to Salvatore. He shouldn't be too much longer. Giovani?" he asked, looking around.

  "Surgery floor," Faith provided.

  "Anthony," he said, swallowing a little hard, eyes going sad. "The stomach..."

  "He got here way before the fifteen minutes passed, Vin," Daniel surprised them by butting in. "They should be able to repair the damage."

  Vin nodded, but there seemed to be nothing hopeful about him. He seemed resigned to the worst. It must have been hard to be hopeful when you watched a lot of men die. That was the life, but it was clear Vin had never really considered it might happen to his own sons. "I am going to go sit with Gio. Send Salvatore up when he gets here," he said, giving them both a nod and moving away.

  "Everyone has been briefed," K said, finally showing his face again and Faith got the distinct impression that he maybe purposely disappeared for as long as he had, like maybe he wanted to give Faith and Daniel a chance to talk things out. He had been the more hesitant one at the diner the night they gave her the information on Daniel in the first place, the one to try to encourage her to think things through. "Took a lot of convincing to keep Ellie at home."

  "Thanks for calling everyone. Is Corey alright?" she asked, knowing that, behind Ellie, she was the most likely to be worrying herself sick.

  "No, I'm not fucking alright," Corey's voice said, coming up behind K who shrugged in a very 'what can you do' way. "Jesus Christ. You know, it's not every damn day that a man in a hot pink G-string and hooker boots and nothing else walks up and asks you if you heard about all the gunshots at the bar across the street. And the damn cops won't give out any information about those injured."

  "I'm fine, Cor," Faith said, giving her an encouraging smile.

  "No, you're not fine. You need hazard pay for this shit. Seriously. I am getting my attorney to draw up fucking papers or something for Vin. This is unacceptable. Whose blood is all over you two?" she asked as if finally calming down to notice such a thing.

  "Anthony and his partner's." Her perfect face dropped immediately. "Anthony is in surgery. Max is pinching nurse's asses or something and loading up on Jell-O."

  Corey took a long breath, nodding. "Okay, well, come on," she said, gesturing toward her oversize purse. "I have something to change into... don't give me that look, it's not made of leather or spandex or fishnets," she said, shaking her head.

  "Go on," K encouraged. "Daniel and I need to have some words anyway," he added, his face completely blank, unreadable.

  "K..." she said, her voice reasoning.

  "It's fine, Faith," Daniel said, giving her a squeeze before letting her go and she was mortified to realize she felt almost a little unsteady without him there supporting her. But that was insane so she shook it the hell off and moved away with her friend toward the bathrooms, wondering if there was going to be another person bleeding in a couple of minutes.

 
; And if so, who?

  SIXTEEN

  Danny

  "I like that you're here for her," K said as soon as the women were out of earshot and Daniel got the distinct impression that he had made no effort to keep Corey from tagging along like he had with Ellie. He wanted her there so he had an excuse to talk to him alone. Hell, he probably even encouraged Corey to bring the change of clothes. He had an eye for details like that. "But I got a problem with you disappearing like that," he added.

  "She didn't want..."

  "Bullshit," he cut Daniel off. "Bull-fucking-shit and we both know it. She likes you. And I know you haven't known her all that long, but she doesn't like men easily and she almost never trusts them fully. She's seen too much shitty stuff from men in her life. I don't blame her for being cautious. But she wanted to trust you and you shit on that and you needed to be a man and own up to it and instead you hid away until tonight. Explain that shit to me."

  "It's complicated."

  "Nothing is complicated," K snorted, shaking his head. "Life is real fucking simple- a series of choices you make. You chose to stay away. Why? Your job?"

  "Partly," Daniel admitted. "Max was still undercover and I didn't want to put him at risk."

  "I understand that, but Faith doesn't exist within the bubble of Lam. She teaches. She trains. She has an apartment..."

  "Figured maybe she needed some time to cool down before I approached her again. Knew I would be at Lam tonight. Thought I could gauge her reaction and move on from there. I am in the process of resigning and getting my life together. I'd like her to be a part of that," he admitted. "She seems receptive to..." K's laugh cut off the rest of his sentence. "What?" he asked, confused.

  "She was just involved in a traumatic thing an hour ago, watched a man she gives a shit about almost bleed to death. She's reeling. It's not going to be that easy. Once Ant is out of surgery and she can take a deep breath again, she's going to remember she's pissed at you and then she's going to make you work for it. She'll let you have it, though, if you stick it out. The question is whether you are willing to or not."