3
Ren
Forty-two thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a Gulfstream G700 banks hard and diverts course back to JFK International. The jet barrels straight into a flickering storm, nose-first into the turbulence it had just escaped. The pilot does not question it. Lightning flashes against the window as I stare out at the swirling dark, the cabin of the aircraft lurching violently under us.
My thoughts flicker in tandem with the lightning.
Nadia.
My hand curls tight in its leather glove, the skin stretching with an ever-present ache as the pain throbs down to the bone. Bad weather always makes it a little worse, but something about hearing her voice has fired up my nerves again. The cabin shudders, causing the glasses in the bar cart to clink.
Air traffic control advises us to divert course. Wait for better conditions. The cabin lights flicker. I refuse to divert. Olivia Basham, my personal assistant, tucks her head against her knees and kicks off her Louie Vuittons so she doesn’t puke on them. We were supposed to be waking up in Switzerland in a few hours, but the wheels touch down on a rain-slick U.S. tarmac again, a balm to the frayed nerves of everyone else on board.
Rain pours down in sheets.
Basham fumbles with her umbrella while I march through the rain to the car waiting, engine on. “Wait,” she screams against the wind. The umbrella goes horizontal. “Mr. Caruso, wait—”
The car door slams and the engine roars.
She fades in the rearview, left behind in the shadow of the jet. Let her catch the next car out. I don’t have time to wait.
Fishing is a game of patience. You bait the hook, cast the line, and drink the time away. I am not a fisherman. I am a hunter. When I pursue something, I chase it down to its last exhausted breath. I leave it trembling and spiritless, but alive, at my feet. For six years, I’ve hunted Nadia. Six long, painful years. Red tints the edges of my vision when I think about it for too long.
Whatever has happened, whatever desperate situation has sent Nadia running to me rather than away, it’s dire. She was being tailed when we spoke. We didn’t stay on the phone long. I sent Elijah ahead of me. My brother’s the only one in the city whom I trust to collect Nadia until I can get to her. If he needs to act before she makes it to my territory, they need to be communicating in real time.
I’m only of use now that I’m back on the ground.
I’m almost to Queens when Elijah calls: “We have a problem.”
“Do you have her?”
“For now. It’s Dellucci. How far out are you from Queens?”
I don’t like that.
“Fifteen minutes. My driver can do it in eight,” I answer. A weighty pause follows, as if even eight minutes might be too much. “Do whatever it takes,” I instruct him, like slipping a leash off a guard dog. My brother growls as good as one and cuts the call short.
My patience ticks like a homemade bomb as I’m left to wonder in the dark. Where has she been this whole time? I’ve tortured and maimed in pursuit of her. Offered bounties. Paid off U.S. Marshals that work witness protection, which is more tedious than one would first think. It’s easy to get a man in just about anywhere else you’d want one, but not there.
Every time I thought I’d gotten close, had a hound dog on the trail, the scent would vanish again. Six years I’ve waited to find her, but these last six minutes are the worst.
I won’t lose her again.
Elijah sends me a location. I slip the gun out of my jacket. This feels like a setup, our car drifting through the dark rain-slick streets. Two dark Bentleys are rammed up on the sidewalk at the address Elijah gave me. One of them is smashed against the side of a dented yellow cab, whose headlights pierce the fog. All empty. An NYPD cruiser has pulled up to investigate, an officer is talking to the cabbie and muttering into his radio.
The real commotion teems farther up the street. Flashlights sweep across the road. I spot Elijah, rain-soaked, his hands in his pockets and his head down, walking inconspicuously down a street of dense apartment buildings.
“Keep driving,” I order. “Don’t draw attention.”
We pass Elijah slowly. Through the streaked glass, he gives me a subtle nod forward. I order the driver up ahead, faster now, urgent on the gas pedal. We swing around the next block, ignore the stop light at the empty intersection. The long knot of apartment buildings gives way to low brick townhouses, all crammed together side by side. Short fences, a little greenery. No good places to run out here.
The car rumbles over rain-filled potholes. My eyes sweep the shadows far from the streetlights. One of the flashlights in the distance bounces faster. A shout rises up.
“Opposite side, now,” I order him. Marco floors it, runs parallel around the street to head off the silhouettes coming down the sidewalk. We reach the end of the block again, where a narrow one-way lane lets out. I step out into the rain.
Under the sound of shouting and the tread of distant boots, I hear it: the softest slap of feet on pavement, running this way. A pitched, feminine gasp for air as she runs, flashlights blazing behind her in the dark. I step out into the road, directly in her path.
Nadia’s feet skid. She lurches to a stop not twenty feet away as she sees me in front of her.
She’s haloed in bouncing light and drenched from the rain. Her wet hair clings to her cheeks, her nightgown plastered to her body.
She has a tearful child in her arms.
A girl.
Our eyes meet for half a second. So much time and history stretch between us in that short distance. I see it in her face. The thunder of the past claps ominously in the meeting of our eyes for as short a time as she can hold it before she lowers her gaze. She can’t look at me.
I storm toward her, grab her by that frail little throat and make her look up into my face. She half screams, half sobs as I pull her toward me, the two of us lurching into each other’s proximity after six years of waiting, hunting, craving.
I finally have my hands on the only woman I ever loved. The one who destroyed me.
“Ren,” Nadia begs, tears and rain indistinguishable on her face. “Ren, please help me. Help us.”
Her free hand tightens in the front of my damp shirt, and the way she says my name, so desperate —it makes me insane.
“Stop!”
The man’s voice echoes through the street, trying and failing to cut through the tension between us as we stare into each other’s eyes. I brush my hand under her eye, wiping off the rain and the tears.
“You aren’t theirs to chase,” I tell her slowly. “You’re mine.”
I step around Nadia. Put the woman behind me, a finish line no one else can cross alive. The flashlight catches my face. One of Dellucci’s men slows immediately. The younger one keeps coming, keeps yelling. No sense of self-preservation. My hand tightens on my gun. Lucky for him, his partner has sense and seniority. The recognition dawns. He calls out for his partner to stop.
We stand in a simmering stalemate: two of Dellucci’s men facing me down, with Nadia behind my shoulder. Somewhere, out in those rows of houses, I trust Elijah to be waiting in the wings.
“This isn’t your fight, Caruso,” the older one says, making a diplomatic show of holstering his gun. “We need the girl. It’s business.”
“I don’t think so,” I answer, calmly.
“You best watch what you bring under your own roof, Ren. If you take her in, you take everything she did with you. You give her to us now, then we never saw you here. You can wash your hands of it.”
“I’ll be washing my hands of you if you threaten me again. Jon has my number. If he wants to talk, tell your boss he can call me. But the girl, and whatever she’s done, are mine. If you have an issue with that, well…” I glance at their hands. “I count two wedding rings. Take a moment and think about how far your life insurance policies will stretch for your widows before you decide what you say next.”
“Oh, for fuck’s—” the younger starts. Doesn’t get far. The bullet catches him in the stomach, rips the words right out of him. His partner jumps, flinches hard, not fast enough to make a move for his gun before I’ve put a bullet in his brain matter. He dies with empty hands, spread-eagle, like one of those cartoon chalk drawings. I walk over to the one still squirming and gasping and finish him off with another pop in the pouring rain.
I turn to Nadia. Her face is pale, a mask of silent shock. She stands frozen, dripping wet, shivering—maybe not from the cold.
Sirens wail from one street over, from the site of the car crash. Blue and red lights paint the distant buildings as I step up to Nadia again. She flinches. But I only peel off my jacket, drape it carefully over her dainty shoulders. I draw her away from the scene, my hand on her back, her body at my side. We walk away and leave two corpses behind us.
Those big eyes look up and search my face again as I put her in the car. I wonder what she sees—the anger, the fear, the past all simmering there in her gaze. I slam the door between us before I fall into those eyes again.
Six years of agony ends just like that. The relief is as sweet and cold as the rain, like that first hit of morphine after the pain has set in. I know too much about that. I tap the driver’s side window.
“We split cars. You take her,” I tell Marco. “Get her out of here. Sink the car when you’re done. I’ll catch up.”
The car speeds off into the night without question, leaves me and the cacophony of sirens barreling down on my location. I barely have time to wonder if Elijah is as clever as I give him credit for before he pulls up on perfect cue, headlights cut.
We speed away into the night, the engine humming smoothly as we gain distance. We watch the rearview in silence for a long time, waiting to see if we are followed. The roads are dark, or what counts for dark in New York. All shadows and streetlights, the rain muddying the windshield. We drive using muscle-memory toward the handful of places that we can lose the CCTV cameras. Going through the usual motions after an incident like that is our plan for the unplanned.
“…Was that necessary?” Elijah finally asks, his disapproval subtle.
“Do you have a complaint, Elijah?” I ask him, softly. I flex my hand, the burning pain aching in the skin and settling deep in the bone.
He keeps his eyes on the road.
“No, sir,” my brother says quietly.
He doesn’t question me again.