Chapter Thirty
Angela
There are different levels of betrayal. I knew I was betraying my dad when I made a call to the FBI and tipped them off about the clubs.
I also knew that it was unforgiveable. But an even worse kind of betrayal was what my father had done to those girls.
I couldn’t be his daughter anymore, not once I knew what was going on.
I’m my parents’ only child, thanks to a cancer-related hysterectomy my mom had a year after my birth.
My dad had a couple of kids with girlfriends before he married my mom, but only one was a boy and the mother wouldn’t let the kid anywhere near The Business.
You’d have thought the absence of a son and heir would have generated some interest in me on Angelo’s part, but no.
I fell off his radar the day that the ultrasound conclusively showed I wasn’t a son who would carry on his name and his business.
It wasn’t until I brought him my acceptance letter to Columbia Law School that he began to look at me differently. I watched a series of lightbulbs turn on in his head as he read the letter and looked up at me.
I have a daughter.
She just got into one of the best law schools in the country.
She needs me to pay her tuition.
I need a lawyer who I can trust almost as much as I trust myself.
Then came the smile and the hug. Suddenly I wasn’t his pampered and petted but mostly ignored daughter.
I was his adult, future-attorney daughter.
His flesh-and-blood, financially-beholden-to-him daughter.
For the first time in my life, he poured me a glass of sambuca, tossed in three espresso beans, and sat down to talk business. Like I was his son.
That was when I learned about the trafficking business.
What he told me about the strip clubs that night—that he had associates procuring “the talent” for him overseas, that they needed visas to get in the country, and that we needed to pay off law enforcement and vet the clientele to keep things running smoothly—revealed that the clubs were actually prostitution rings.
As he drew me closer into his circle, little by little, I learned that the clubs were staffed by trafficked women and underage girls.
My dad wanted me to replace the lawyer who was currently handling the visas and setting up the fronts as lawful businesses. He had to pay for that guy’s loyalty and silence. I was a lot cheaper. There’s no one you trust more than blood, especially blood who owes you.
I hid my shock and horror as best I could and feigned compliance.
In the few months between getting accepted to law school and graduating from college, while making my dad think I was grateful and excited to be one of the few women associates in The Business, I started to make my plans to escape.
Luckily, my dad never monitored my bank account or really paid much attention at all to how I spent my time outside his presence.
My driver Paul Centanni used his connections to track down Connor Quinn, a small-time forger in the Bronx.
Connor has a soft spot for undocumented immigrants, so he was all too happy to help someone tipping off the FBI about a trafficking ring.
In addition to an ID with a photoshopped picture of me with silvery lavender hair and blue eyes, Connor got me a social security card and a fake court-issued name change order so that I could update my transcripts and Law School Admissions Council documents to reflect my new name.
A few weeks later, I had my documents.
The morning after my last college exam, I put in my new blue contact lenses and took an Uber to Queens, leaving my parents the infamous “I’m going on an international yoga tour” note. I got my hair dyed at a cheap salon, called the FBI, then headed to the airport and flew to California.
Snitching to the feds is the ultimate betrayal, second only to testifying in court.
I knew this when I did it, but as much as I wanted to live, I couldn’t forget the luxury I’d enjoyed thanks in part to those brutalized girls.
Girls my age and younger were being beaten and drugged and raped, all so I could get my nails done and shop on Fifth Avenue and get the best education money could buy.
I couldn’t live with that knowledge without doing anything, even if doing something meant I might not live.
It all would have caught up to me sooner or later.
With or without Brady’s help, the FBI would have tracked me down.
If they hadn’t, my dad likely would have.
But the knowledge that Brady had betrayed me, had sped up the inevitable while professing to love me, hit me with a level of pain that I didn’t even know my limbic system could produce.
That was his big secret. That was the dead end. I’d been so stupid, so naive and, like he said himself, so unimaginative to think that his secret couldn’t be any worse than mine. It was a thousand times worse. My secret was just about who I was and where I came from. Brady had sold me out.
I don’t know what his connection to Agent Rivera is, and I don’t care.
I just know in my gut it exists. It’s too much of a coincidence that they’re both from the Bronx and both had been firefighters.
Whatever Brady owes this guy, whatever the basis of their partnership is, one thing is certain: it’s more important to Brady than anything he might feel for me.
“What was that all about?” asks Elisa.
I’m about to tell her that he was just following up on an internship I applied for back in New York, the lie coming to me immediately. But I can’t do it.
“My mob research is coming back to haunt me a little,” I say.
“Are you okay, Angela?”
“I’m okay.”
“Do you need help? Is there anything I can do?”
Her concern is palpable and genuine. If only my boyfriend had been half as concerned for my welfare. “I’ll be fine. But thanks.”
I keep everything contained as I ride back to Dos Torres with Elisa—the tears that burn behind my eyelids, the betrayal and fury that taste like ashes, the heartbreak that threatens to split me open from the inside.
I close my eyes and lull myself into temporary denial.
It’s the same feeling I had when Brady and I drove back to Dos Torres after the fire.
Even though I can’t face it yet, deep in my mind I know everything will be gone, burned to the ground, unsalvageable.
And I don’t know how I’m going to survive it.