Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
EMORY
When the parlor clock chimed nine, Emory counted his blessings with each resounding toll. They returned to an unscathed home front. The fallout was contained. The battle won.
But fate was sufficiently tempted with the ticking of time and whispers of gratitude. Dr. Gordon, physician to the Moriarty family, called with tragic news. Gio didn’t make it. He was too frail, the injuries too severe, the blood loss too much.
Midnight approached, but no one found solace in sleep. Emory walked the halls and observed luminous distractions on repeat—bedside light spilling beneath shuttered doors, the blue bleed from TVs, cigarette flickers in the dark.
When the sun went down and the other lights—those desperate beacons for some kind of peace—came on, most Moriarty men just wanted to forget. The ones with wives found comfort there. The ones with no one to call their own plucked a pick-me girl waiting in the wings.
Years ago, Emory had thought their open arms and parted thighs had everything to do with him. Mostly, it hadn’t, not until he achieved some status in their eyes.
He’d long since departed with burying his fear and frustration between the legs of a woman he hardly knew. Of the ones he did know, he’d loved deeply only a few. Their tolerance of his world invariably faded, though, and when they wanted out, he set them free.
Emory sought refuge in the courtyard. It was a shadow space, shaded by day and forgotten by night. With nowhere to sit and no reason to linger, it functioned like a thoroughfare that connected the house’s wings and the terrace down below.
In the courtyard, the wind danced amongst the honeysuckle vines, and the stucco walls bled back warmth from the day. Beyond the courtyard’s fountain, he found Amelia perched at the railing overlooking the terrace. Barefoot, she drowned in an oversized t-shirt that doubled as a nightgown.
She didn’t stir at his startled double step but stared in tranquil fascination at the desert road where headlights glittered. Not so long ago, she would’ve stiffened at his approach as if bracing for a fight.
Amelia patted the railing beside her for him to join, the gesture a bellwether to how far they’d come.
“I was just wondering where that road leads,” she said and twirled the end of her ponytail around her finger.
Emory had pondered it himself a time or two, but some other thought—duty and business and who’s killing who—pummeled his daydreams until they stopped coming around.
All he knew was it ran like an asphalt artery through dying towns.
The years went by, and the heartbeat faded.
Ashes to ashes, they’d all turn to dust.
“It leads out, I guess,” he said and folded his forearms on the railing.
Amelia scooted closer. “That’s as good a direction as any.”
“It was always my favorite.”
She lifted a hand to present the road, but Emory shook his head.
“I’d have to figure out how to get down from up here. The logistics are messy.”
Messy, yes, but treacherous too. A free fall from these heights meant sure death. If he survived, it’d be broken at the bottom, carrion for crows. Amelia regarded him with a doleful smile as if searching for some consolation to offer. Emory spared her the hunt.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, though it seemed obvious. Earlier, she’d absorbed the news of Gio’s death with quiet poise, but the sun set on troubled times that undoubtedly haunted her too.
Amelia shook her head and bent forward against the railing.
The thin t-shirt rose up the back of her legs and revealed the slope of her ass.
Emory’s blood heated with typical visions; her clothes on the floor and his mouth grazing the inside of her thighs.
The fantasy had evolved, though, and he entertained how she’d feel curled against him as they slept.
“What’s the opposite of claustrophobia?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“I have whatever that is.”
“You fear open spaces?”
“Not so much the openness, but that there’s nothing to hold on to. It’s like being dropped in the middle of the ocean with no anchor. You’re just lost in all directions and at the mercy of the tides.” Amelia studied the courtyard for a moment then added, “This is an anchor space.”
Emory shifted nearer to her, both intrigued and bemused at the paradoxical places where she sought solace. He admired her up close—the faint freckles that dusted her cheeks, the way one auburn brow arched more than the other, the crease in her bottom lip he was dying to kiss.
He shook his head with a soft chuckle. Amelia laughed too, a rarity he’d come to cherish. He could stay there forever just to soak up the sound.
“You know,” he said, “Arizona is about as wide open as it gets.”
Amelia mulled it over with her eyes to the terrace below. The pool’s murky glow didn’t quite reach the table where she first met him in the dark. That past seemed so distant.
“Arizona was about escape. I was feral for freedom. From Oregon, my dad, the internship. My mom used to tell me not to wish time away. Burt was always good to me. I feel bad that I wished away my time with him, with everything.”
She stood from the railing to face him, and Emory did the same.
“You were right, and I was wrong not to tell you,” she said. “There was a folder, and I saw what was inside. If it could’ve prevented what happened to Gio—”
“Amelia, this wasn’t your fault. I brought you with me today. That’s on me, not you.”
“And it’s me they came for, whatever they think I know.
” She laughed again, this time without amusement.
“The irony is it’s nothing. You could’ve asked me at the party, and I would’ve told you, and you would’ve said, ‘That’s basically worthless,’ and we would’ve gone our separate ways, and this never would’ve happened. ”
Her take on their imagined conversation endeared.
In reality, she might’ve sidled up to him, and he might’ve done the same, but it would’ve been over before it began, as soon as Emory told her his name.
When he was a street soldier, women readily dismissed his sins.
As a captain, that task grew harder. As chief, his role was too big to overcome.
Amelia chewed her lip and looked as though one weight lifted from her shoulders while another piled on.
“Today in the car,” Emory said, “you reacted to my brother’s name. Did you see it in the folder?”
Amelia nodded. “It’s uncommon enough that it stood out, but it was just a name. I didn’t know who he was or how he fit into anything.”
“No reason why you would.”
Emory drew a hand over his face and through the length of his hair.
Tendrils of unease spread as the worries and what-ifs amassed.
They didn’t pay him the dignity of an orderly onslaught but came in an unrelenting barrage.
War was war, but that was the bright line he’d be a blind fool not to see.
Ivan had crawled from a shallow grave and was comfortably seated at the top of the Velascos.
Leaned against the railing, Amelia’s gaze skimmed his forearms, tracing the ink there with heavy interest.
“Nothing I saw in the folder made sense to me, except…”
“Except what?”
“You,” she quietly confessed, and even amongst the shadows that shrouded them, Emory discerned the blush painting her cheeks. “Your picture was in the folder and details about you. The places you go, the people you’re close to. I knew who you were at Richard’s party. I knew the things you’ve done.”
A part of Emory wanted to believe her and invest in a fairytale where their paths crossed one fated night and, behind her soft touch and sultry gaze, she understood him in his totality.
Emory couldn’t keep with that narrative, though.
Amelia didn’t know the extent of his crimes, the ones that earned him his reputation.
In his world, no one rose to the top without blood-soaked hands.
“What else did you see?”
“They want to kill you,” she said on a worried hush as if to let him down easy.
Emory laughed, the revelation hardly a surprise, but the irony too good to ignore. Her secret laid bare was hardly a secret at all.
“Somethings never change. Anything else?”
“No. I didn’t make it past you.”
Amelia peered up at him through her lashes, and the corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. Though she said nothing else, Emory understood that that was her ultimate confession, the one she’d safeguarded so fiercely.
He sidelined his flattery and asked, “You sure there’s nothing else?”
“Not from the folder, but there is something that happened at the party. Martin Kranski said someone is pulling the strings in the Velascos from the great beyond. It didn’t make sense at the time. He meant Ivan, didn’t he?”
Emory nodded and, unsteady on his feet, looked to the sky, but there was no anchor there, only clouds that blighted the moon and delivered a chill. The abyss below beckoned, and the fall seemed less treacherous. Broken at the bottom was perhaps a kinder fate.
“Emory,” Amelia ventured softly, “my first night here you told me there are real monsters, ones who would tear me apart if they got the chance. Both you and Mirabelle talk about Ivan that way. Why?”
Emory eyed the terrace steps with a bullish need to take his exit. A worn-out voice within warned him not to breathe this to life. Then again, it was easier to talk to strangers. Maybe he’d trot out a little tale like some fucked-up vaudeville.
“You can tell me,” she encouraged with a hand on his forearm, her palm warm against his skin.
Good women promised their silence, but it wasn’t about that.
It was about trust. Hadn’t he asked the same of her, to put faith in him when she had no reason?
And Amelia wasn’t a stranger anymore. Strangers didn’t look primed for heartbreak on his behalf or part their lips with words of comfort at the ready.