Come With Me (East Coast Mafia #11)

Chapter One

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT I admire most about you, Ms. Tyndale? You're so brave."

Coming from anyone else, it might have been a compliment.

"Most mothers would rather stay home than attend an event like this in...

" Amybeth Schnapp stirred the air with one diamond-heavy hand, as if the right word for Aislinn's dress could be summoned out of it if she stirred long enough.

"...that. But not you. You wear it like you simply don't care what anyone thinks, and I find that so inspiring. "

"Thank you," Aislinn Tyndale said warmly, choosing the one reply that would end the conversation soonest, and also the only one that was technically true. "It has pockets."

A titter went around the circle of silk-wrapped, champagne-armed mothers, and Amybeth's smile thinned the way it always did whenever Aislinn declined to supply her with tears. Aislinn excused herself before the woman could reload, and went to find her son.

The party had swallowed the grandest ballroom of the grandest hotel in the city and was still chewing.

A chocolate fountain taller than most of the guests of honor burbled away near the terrace doors, a string quartet in white tie sawed earnestly through the theme song of a cartoon about racing snails, and in the center of everything, on its own velvet-roped pedestal, sat a six-tier birthday cake shaped like a Lamborghini, because Brooklyn Schnapp, the birthday boy himself, had reportedly wept until the baker agreed to working headlights.

There was an ice sculpture of the number eight.

There were waiters carrying trays of tiny hamburgers that no child was tall enough to reach.

Three hours in, and Aislinn had personally transported eleven beverages and zero tiny hamburgers, which felt like a pretty fair summary of her whole afternoon.

And at the far end of the gift table, seven years old and straight-backed in his thrift-store blazer, her son stood guard over their present.

It was a wooden chess set. They'd spent three evenings sanding and oiling it at their kitchen table until the wood turned glass-smooth under their palms, and Louis had carved a tiny crown into the white king's base himself.

On the gift table, wedged between a tower of couture-wrapped boxes and something enormous from a toy atelier in Milan, their brown-paper parcel with its twine bow looked... well. It looked hand-wrapped.

"You don't have to smile at her, Mama," Louis said with terrible politeness, not looking at Amybeth at all, which somehow said more than any glare could.

"Smiling is free, my love." Aislinn smoothed his collar, which didn't need smoothing, because sometimes a mother's hands simply need somewhere safe to go. "It's the only thing in this hotel that is."

She hadn't wanted to come. She wanted that noted somewhere.

Officially. In whatever book kept track of things mothers put up with.

The invitation had come through the school itself, printed beneath the crest and the motto, with a line at the bottom explaining that attendance at classmates' milestone celebrations was strongly encouraged as an exercise in community, and everyone at that school understood that strongly encouraged was simply Latin for required.

So she'd juggled her weekend shift, and begged a favor she couldn't afford to owe, and here they were, exercising community.

She'd managed to laugh at exactly one part of it, at least. The dress code.

Festive attire, the letter said, so she'd sat up past midnight sewing a satin ribbon to the waist of her one good dress and gone to bed feeling like Coco Chanel's scrappier cousin.

Festive, it turned out, meant new couture.

There was nothing she could do about that, but she could laugh at herself for it, and so she had, all the way up the hotel steps, until Louis was laughing too, and even the doorman cracked a real smile, like he meant it.

"Ms. Tyndale! Oh, good, you're not busy."

Amybeth had reappeared with an elderly guest in tow, and before Aislinn could finish turning around, Amybeth draped a floor-length fur stole across her arms like she'd been hired for the job.

"Grandmama needs this checked, and a lemonade brought up for her grandson. You don't mind, do you, darling?" Amybeth's rings caught against the fur as she arranged it higher, the better for it to cover Aislinn's ribbon. "You have such a natural gift for service."

"Smiling is free," Aislinn reminded herself under her breath, and decided the joke had gotten a lot less funny in the last ten minutes.

Somewhere behind them, one of the mothers whispered, audibly, in that special pitch people use when they want their whispers heard, "Is she staff?"

"She might as well be," Amybeth said, not whispering at all.

The stole was astonishingly heavy, and still warm from its owner, which was somehow worse.

Aislinn carried it anyway.

Any scene she made today would follow Louis into his classroom on Monday, and she refused to hand these people ammunition.

Besides, somewhere in this ballroom was a thirsty little boy, and a thirsty child was a thirsty child, whoever his grandmother happened to be.

And eight years of being everyone's easiest target had taught her one thing.

You can't stop people from treating you like a coat rack.

But you can decide, every single time, who you're going to be while they do it.

The stole and Aislinn got properly acquainted on the walk that followed. It was heavier than her son, haughtier than its owner, and somewhere past the second bank of elevators she gave up on resenting it and named it Gordon.

"Well, Gordon," she informed it out loud, because there was no one in the elevator to witness her losing her mind, "let's see what you're made of."

And if her eyes stung a little by the time they reached the cloakroom, well. That was strictly between her and Gordon.

Louis watched his mother disappear through the ballroom doors with a stranger's coat over her arms, and let his party smile fall off his face, since it had only ever been borrowed for the occasion.

He checked his watch.

2:51.

The watch was a scratched-up digital thing with a strap gone gray and worn, and it lost exactly one second a month, which Louis privately considered the only honest thing in this hotel besides his mother.

Nine minutes.

At three o'clock, the north escalator would carry Mr. Valerio Le Sabre up from the lobby to the mezzanine, where the general manager, two lawyers, and a nervous man from the bank would be waiting to sell him this entire hotel, chandeliers, cloakroom, chocolate fountain and all.

Louis knew the schedule as well as other boys knew the airtimes of their favorite shows.

If anyone ever asked him how, he planned to say he was lucky.

Grown-ups loved calling children lucky. It saved them from having to ask better questions.

The invitation had been meant as a trap, obviously.

Louis had understood that from the moment Brooklyn delivered it with that particular smirk of his, the one he saved for occasions when his mama had promised him a show.

Come to my party so my mother can pick yours apart in public.

He'd been ready to lose the invitation somewhere convenient, like the sea.

But then he'd seen the date.

And the venue.

A calendar he should never have been able to access told him the rest.

Louis was seven. He already understood something most grown-ups never would. When people build a trap for you, the polite thing to do is repurpose it.

He waited until Amybeth's circle had closed ranks around some new victim, then slipped out like he had somewhere official to be. No one stopped him. No one ever did.

The mezzanine was cold and echoing after the ballroom, all veined marble and brass railings, and the escalators rose from the lobby in one long silver climb.

Louis chose his spot between the potted palms and the railing, with a clean line of sight to the ballroom doors, because witnesses mattered.

He'd learned that from years of watching people hurt his mother only in rooms where no one important could see.

2:58. Down in the lobby, dark-suited men fanned out, calm and slow, like people who'd already checked everything twice.

"Two lawyers," Louis murmured to the potted palm, unimpressed. "Amateurs. You only need one lawyer, if he's any good."

2:59. The general manager rushed past without seeing him, tugging his cuffs, wearing the expression of a man about to meet the new owner of his entire life.

"And that," Louis added, watching him go, "is a man who hasn't read his own contract."

3:00.

"Okay," he told the palm, so quietly it barely counted as sound. "Now or never."

Valerio Le Sabre stepped onto the escalator.

It emptied half the party, in the end, because somebody's mother had hissed that name into the ballroom, and it traveled from ear to diamond-studded ear in under a minute.

Le Sabre. Valerio Le Sabre, Italian by his father's blood and French by his mother's name, though the tabloids had only ever managed to spell the second half of that correctly.

The one buying the hotel, the one from the magazine lists, the one the papers called the most private billionaire in the country because no one had ever gotten a full interview or a family photograph out of him.

Women who'd spent the entire afternoon pretending to care about nothing came pouring out onto the mezzanine, champagne in hand, to watch a myth ride an escalator.

He was, they'd all agree later, worth abandoning a party for. Even from a floor away he made every tailored man around him look rented. Tall, black on black, no tie, dark hair pushed carelessly back, and a stillness to him that had nothing restful about it.

Louis stepped out from between the palms. Planted his feet at the top of the silver climb. And waited for the exact heartbeat when the man's gaze finished with the lobby and lifted, idle and gray as winter, toward the mezzanine.

"Papa!"

The word rang across the marble.

Every head turned toward the small boy in the thrift-store blazer, his arms open, his face bright with a joy that no seven-year-old on this earth could've faked.

And then, in one collective motion, every head turned toward the man rising to meet him.

Afterward, none of them could agree on who gasped first. What they agreed on was the silence before it.

The longest three seconds in the history of that mezzanine.

A ballroom's worth of mothers looked from the boy's face to the man's face and back again.

And felt the floor tilt beneath their designer heels.

Because the black hair was the same.

The winter-gray eyes were the same.

The single dimple denting the left cheek. The stubborn line of the jaw. The way one dark brow rose a fraction while the rest of the face gave away nothing. The same, the same, the same.

The most private billionaire in the country stood unmoving on a moving escalator, carried toward a little boy who wore his exact face whether he liked it or not.

Somewhere along the railing, a champagne flute slipped from a diamond-heavy hand and burst against the marble, and not one single person looked away to see whose.

Because the question was already tearing through the mezzanine in a hundred whispers at once, and the question was not who is that child.

It was a different one entirely.

Since when did Valerio Le Sabre have a son?