25. Tiia
Heartache is supposed to make a hard woman soft, right?
Like solid steel hammered until it becomes weak. Like strips of metal bent at the same stress line, time and time again, until eventually, it snaps.
Heartbreak should make me softer. But all it did, I think, was make me numb.
“The hold this summer has had on New York City is finally backing down,” the weather reporter yammers on the television, her red suit, a power move, and her sleek hair, proof she has money. Glitters dangle on her wrists, and lipstick glints under studio lights. If she’s not careful, some entrepreneurial soul might meet her in the parking lot after work and take what they want. “We can expect relief in the coming days,” she continues, “with a cool front moving in and rain, breaking that humid spell we’ve been experiencing lately.”
“Are you hungry, Tiia?” Jazzy wanders from my tiny kitchen and stops at my couch, her eyes, somehow, impossibly, sadder than mine. Like she’s taking my pain and swallowing it down for her own greedy consumption. “Tiia, honey? Did you hear me?”
Slowly, I break my stare with the television and look at my too-tall, too-beautiful friend and frown, because she wears a baggy shirt three sizes too large, and little shorts that cling to her like skin. It’s not like her outfit is bad. It’s just… not her. Not flashy enough. “Huh?”
“You have to eat.” She comes around to the front of the couch and plops a plate on the coffee table. Her sweet perfume filters past my numbness and tickles my nostrils. And because that penetrates, the smell of fresh-cooked egg rolls follows, stirring what may distantly be described as hunger somewhere in the depths of my stomach.
My eyes follow the smell over to the dish my best friend set down, until I notice the pyramid of fried snacks and the tiny bowl beside them, filled with sweet chili sauce.
“I haven’t seen you eat in days. It’s not healthy.”
‘I’ve eaten.” Defensive, and yet, not all that enthusiastic in my rebuttal, I frown and bring my focus back to the TV. “Not eating for days would make me weak. I would end up in the hospital.” I drop back against the cushions and just… breathe. “Sending myself to the hospital for no reason at all would be foolish.”
“Did you go to that clinic today?” She sits beside me, her knee touching my thigh and her shirt fluttering against my skin until I feel the print on the front, cooler than the rest of the fabric. It’s an odd detail to notice. A peculiar element for my mind to stick to.
But the alternative is undesirable.
And these days, I’m all about avoiding the unwanted.
“Did you get the results from your tests?”
“Yeah.” I blindly search the cushions for the television remote, then flip the channel to some other news station that, thankfully, isn’t reporting on the weather. “My hearing isn’t getting much better. But I’m not so deaf that I need to learn sign, so…” I listlessly lift a single shoulder. “It’s fine. I can still hear.”
“Yeah?” She stands again, still talking, but she purposely walks away, knowing my ears won’t register the words she speaks when facing away from me. Something about tests. Pigheadedness. There might even be mention of my ass melting into the sofa.
“You’re being an asshole,” I mumble. But I don’t get up and chase her down. I don’t even turn in search of the lips we both know she hid so I can’t read. “We adapt, Jazzy. It’s not such a big deal for you, my best friend, to look at me when you speak to me.”
“It’s dangerous!” She stomps back my way, her feet clapping the floor and her weight… well, she doesn’t weigh enough to make a lot of noise. “The job requires you to hear!”
“My job is just…” I set the remote on my thigh and drop my hand to the couch cushions. “Not something I enjoy, anyway. They hung me out to dry after the Carbone case, then they sent me into a new project, no cares at all whether I live or die.”
“Tiia…”
“The only people who gave a shit were you and Roscoe. The Bureau wants Malone alive more than they want me alive.” I hate that his name burns on my tongue. That speaking of a certain family is like acid in my throat. “It’s always about money, Jaz. That family keeps the economy running, and the Bureau wants them protected. Even as they investigate and build a case around them.”
‘Tiia—”
“I’m bored with the hypocrisy.” I lay my head back and lick my dry lips. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“What the hell happened inside that house?” She grabs an egg roll and wraps one end in a paper towel, then she slaps the small package in my hand and rolls my fingers around so it doesn’t fall away. “You went in as the old you, and you came out this…” She waves me up and down, “this. You haven’t been the same since.”
“And I said I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Honey…” Her voice comes out sharp. Exasperated. And yet, totally and completely gentle. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what happened.”
“I didn’t ask for help.” I bring my dinner up and study the unoffending pastry in my hand. “I asked to be left alone. You seem to have misunderstood my request.”
“And you seem to misunderstand the purpose of my fists! I’ll be happy to reintroduce your face to my knuckles if you don’t shake yourself out of this funk.”
“Not in a funk.” She has energy for days. Righteousness. Doggedness, even. And I… care less about this conversation than I’ve ever cared about any conversation in the history of my life. “You seem to assume something is wrong when it isn’t. I didn’t ask you to come over, Jaz.”
“I don’t need you to tell me you’re going through some stuff,” she snarls. “A best friend knows! So how about you drop the coy shit and just talk?” She reaches across when I refuse to look her way, and grabs my jaw between her fingers, yanking me around until our eyes meet. Instantly, mine sting and water. My emotions, too close to the surface for me to hide for more than a few minutes.
Which is why I prefer solitude.
“What happened?” she begs. Her eyes burn red, tears forming in the corners that chip away at my soul. “You’re scaring me, Tiia. This isn’t normal.”
I’m scaring myself.
But I’m not sure I’m capable of doing anything else but sit here and rot away.
If I move, it hurts. And if I think, it burns.
“I’m going to quit my job,” I admit. “Take the medical pension they’ve offered because of the ear thing and just…” My voice rasps. Crackles and breaks. “I dunno. Become a bum.”
“Okay, well…” She snatches my egg roll, since it’s clear I’m not eating it, and tosses it back to the plate. “That’s a start. A conversation opener.”
“You’re not surprised? Or horrified?”
“I’m mostly horrified you haven’t showered since the day before yesterday.”
Curious, I bring my nose down and sniff my armpit. “I don’t smell. I haven’t left the air conditioning in days.”
“Exactly. You don’t smell, but going a day without a shower isn’t who you are.” She glides her thumbs over my hand. A massage, I suppose, absent-mindedly given in her determination to soothe me. But she has no clue the action reminds me of Micah. That I’ve rubbed his hand like this a hundred times when I’ve noticed he’s in pain. And he’s rubbed his own, a million times more when he thought no one was paying attention. “What the hell happened? You were doing the job. Sidling in close to the Malones, despite mine and Roscoe’s objections to the dangers it posed. You slept…” She pauses and leans closer, lowering her voice, “you slept at his place, girl. I wasn’t saying anything, and Roscoe was locking it down. Barely. You were doing it, and we didn’t want to blow it for you. No one in the Bureau’s history has ever gotten as close to Micah Malone as you were, so everyone left you alone to do your thing, but?—”
“Do you think I sold my body for the job?” A pesky, painful lump settles in the center of my throat. Tormenting me. Making it damn near impossible to breathe. Carefully extracting my hand from hers, I set it beneath my leg, purely so she can’t grab it again. “I fucked my mark, Jazzy.”
Her cheeks pale, her suspicions confirmed. I mean, we all knew it. But to hear me say it out loud…
“Several times. I slept in his bed, and he slept in mine. He stole my plant.” A stupid, ridiculous tear escapes my eye and slides along my cheek. Why, when I speak of a dying plant, do I want to sob and laugh, all in the same breath? “I fell in love like an idiot,” I groan. “With a man I knew to be New York’s most dangerous enforcer.”
“Is he… Did he…” Hesitant, she swallows and studies the side of my face until I feel it warm. “Did he do any of that stuff in front of you?”
I scoff. “No. And he didn’t actually admit to it. Not in plain words, anyway. But it was in the brief, right? It was in all the files I was given. Just because he didn’t murder a man in front of me doesn’t make him any less a killer.” I draw a deep breath, filling my lungs and expanding my chest. Then I release it again, sniffling and pushing emotion aside. I’d rather be that unfeeling robot again. That machine I’ve clung to for weeks.
It hurts less.
“I fell in love with a killer.” I meet my best friend’s dismayed stare. “And I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information. Because he’s more than what his family made him be. He exists outside of his life as a Malone. And that part of him, the part that is more Micah, and less Malone, deserves better than the life he’s been given.”
“Holy shit.” She rests her head against the cushions and mirrors my pose. “You seriously fell in love?”
“Like an idiot. And even if I saw him murder someone, I don’t think I’d arrest him for it.” I turn just my head and look into her eyes. “I have a badge, Jazzy. One I worked really hard for. I have a duty to the law. An obligation to uphold it. And yet…” I chew my bottom lip and pray no one has bugged my home. “I’d rather let him do his thing, and remain a free man, than be the one who claps cuffs around his wrists and earns a promotion.”
“Honey…”
“It’s a crime for me to even admit that.” I glance back at the television when the news jumps to sports. Some big game. Basketball. Football. Something-ball. “Literally a jailable, and certainly a fireable, offense. Do we really want me to continue the job when I carry such loose convictions?”
“I mean?—”
“He said I was a whore and that I sold my body for the job.” My voice cracks as some sporty-looking reporter shouts from the stands of a baseball game. Could be volleyball. “He said the government was my pimp, and I was nothing but a slut.”
“He discovered you were undercover,” she breathes, learning things about my case she’s yet, to this date, to be told. Roscoe knows. Because I tell him everything, always—though not the specific details of Micah’s actions inside the bunker that night.
I didn’t share that his hands touched my body, even when I asked him to stop. Or that his lips took mine, even when I begged him not to.
There are some things best left unsaid between a man and a woman.
“I don’t know how he figured it out.” I bring my hands up and press my thumbs to my eye sockets. “We were fine. Everything was normal. Then he got a phone call and everything came undone.”
“Who called him?” She grabs my wrists and yanks them down until my eyes open and stars dance where I’d rather see. “Whoever called him narced on you.”
“Yeah, well…” I peel my limbs from her grip and stare up at the ceiling. “I don’t know who. I don’t know how. I don’t know what triggered it. But once he knew, he knew it all.”
“Could there be a leak at the Bureau?”
“I dunno.”
“Could there be?—”
“Jazzy. I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?” Her eyes flare wide. “You’re not pissed this person blew your cover?”
“They exposed the lies I’d been telling. It’s not their fault I was a liar.”
“They put you in danger!”
“I put myself in danger. Working when clearly,” I point up to my ear, “I wasn’t medically ready to. Determined to bag a big fish and some respect after that botched case from last year. I didn’t want to be known as the agent who fucked everything up and couldn’t close on Carbone. So I jumped in to the Malone file. I dove in head-first, excited at the idea of going down in New York’s gangland history books. I never had to sleep with him to do the job, though.” Firming my lips, I shake my head. “I never even had to go to his home. Or enter his club. I could have said no to all of that.” I swallow as a pathetic sob rolls along my throat. As it threatens to come out on a squeak that would only strip another layer of self-worth from my soul. “I was in it for the wrong reasons, Jaz. And then I fell in love, which means I was really in it for the wrong reasons.” I trap my bottom lip between my teeth and bring a hand up to swipe beneath my eye. “I can’t tell if I sold my body for the job. Or if I traded my job for love.”
“What do you…” She gulps, noisy and nervous, as her eyes flicker between mine. “You keep saying love, and I just… what do you expect to do with that?”
I drag my gaze back to the television and shrug. “Nothing.”
“Do you want permission to be with him? Do you want me to tell you no? What is it you want?”
I want it to not hurt so much.
“Neither.” I draw a long, shaky breath, and release it again on a sigh. “I can’t be with him. It’s impossible. And I don’t need you to tell me no; I wouldn’t listen anyway.”
Her brows pinch in my peripherals. “So you’re going to be with him?”
“No.” I exhale. “I just meant, my heart wants what my heart wants. So if I was walking along that path, your permission would change nothing. Even though you’re my best friend,” I admit. “Even though I love you and respect your thoughts?—”
“This isn’t one of those times,” she concedes. “The heart wants what it wants.”
“Yeah.” I set my elbow on the arm of the couch, then my chin in my upturned hand. “Too bad he would kill me if I dared walk inside his property again.”
“You don’t think he’d?—”
I choke out a laugh, the first I’ve experienced in weeks. Though it verges too dangerously close to hysteria for me to enjoy it. “I don’t think, I know. There’s no coming back from this.”
“Did he hurt you?” She looks down at the hand I leave resting in my lap. Then to the yellowing bruise circling my wrist, finally healing after weeks of tenderness. “Besides tying you up,” she rasps. “Did he hurt you?”
Yes.
“No. He was interrogating me, but he didn’t hurt me. He couldn’t do it.”
“Because he loves you, too?” Her voice rises an octave. Two. “That’s got to mean something, right?”
I’m walking away, Tiia, and I’m never coming back. I suggest you free yourself and leave, because Felix knows what you are, too. And he’s not above letting his soldiers fuck a whore before they slice her throat open.
“No.” I swallow the painful lump in my throat and force myself to stare at the TV. “It means nothing, except, perhaps, that he didn’t want the heat that would come with killing a badge.”
“Joseph Wilkes has become a household name in the past year,”the news reporter reads, checking her notes as she sits behind a massive, bean-shaped desk inside a studio somewhere in the city. My heart thuds, painful and breathtaking in all the worst ways. “A transplant fromNottingham, England, the authorities have had the daunting task of controlling what may already be uncontrollable floodwaters now that Wilkes has his foothold in the city flailing for leadership. It’s no secret New York has a long and rich history of criminal enterprise and an underbelly unlike most others.” The reporter looks at her colleague on her left, “The last thing we need, now that things have started to calm down, is another family moving in and stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble, right, Rick?”
“Right you are,”Rick agrees, overly enthusiastic and excited to talk on things he really has no clue about. “With Emilio Pastore now dead and buried, Tony Mancino’s empire dissolved for the entire city’s viewing pleasure, and Timothy Malone’s alleged, albeit, not formally confirmed demise, it seemed New York was destined for clearer skies. I had hopes for the end of New York’s criminal cartels. But where there’s money to be made, I suppose, there is always someone running in to take his share.”
“He’s a tool.” I nestle back and allow my eyes to droop. Not close. But… rest. “Dude literally has no clue what he’s talking about.”
“Why do you think the Malones have yet to confirm their father’s death?” Jazzy reaches across and fingers the hem of my shorts. “He’s dead, right?”
“Yeah.” I squish my cheek up in the palm of my hand, creating wrinkles and stretching my skin. An action I’ll regret when I’m older. When age catches up and lines my face. “And I suppose they simply consider it no one else’s business.” I shrug. Just one short, sharp lift of my shoulder to explain my lack of interest in this conversation. “The Malones don’t share information with people outside of their tidy circle.”
“Mr. Wilkes is wanted for questioning in relation to a string of deaths in Harlem,”the reporter continues. “His specialty, according to our sources, seems to be sex workers.”
“His specialty is buying and selling women,” Jazzy grumbles. “And he doesn’t mind if they’re underage.”
“Doesn’t mind,” I scoff. “Seems he prefers them that way.”
“Our producers have reached out to Mr. Wilkes in search of a statement. But to date, no reply has been received.”
I roll my eyes and grab the television remote, turning the volume down before I send myself crazy. I don’t want to hear about them anymore. I don’t want to know about them. If I had a magic wand and the ability to go back in time and never step foot in that mafia world, I would.
“I strongly doubt Mr. Wilkes is going to make a statement on his guilt on such a delicate matter,” Jazzy drawls, turning on the couch and resting her elbow on the back cushion. “Or any other man mentioned in that report.”
“I’m done talking about it.” I toss the remote down and push off the couch, groaning when every limb, every muscle and bone and tendon, protests the movement after hours and hours of sitting. “And I’m especially done thinking about it.”
I glance over when my apartment door opens. No knock. No hesitation. I’m given no indication or warning that my space is to be invaded—more than it already is—but when Roscoe crosses the threshold carrying a bag of Chinese food and a bottle of wine, my heart gives a painful knock that surely bruises the inside of my chest.
My eyes burn and fresh tears well up, making me look and feel foolish. But it’s not his presence that hurts most of all. It’s not the gentleness in his expression, or the way he crosses my tiny apartment and sets his things down, freeing his hands before finally tugging me into his arms and crushing me to his chest.
No.
None of that breaks my heart nearly as effectively as the second pair of eyes that stare into mine before the door swings shut. The pair in the hall, the guard who waits outside my door, unobtrusive, but formidable enough to keep everyone but these two away.
Stovic.
The giant, terrifying, watchful guard that came from the Malone home and has now taken up residence outside mine.
He doesn’t speak to me. I never speak to him. Like a concrete gargoyle built outside an ancient cathedral, he simply exists. And if tradition rings true, he guards my home, warding off evil even if his presence sends my brain into a tailspin every time our eyes lock.
“Why is he here?” I sob against Roscoe’s chest when he presses his hand to the back of my hair. “Why did he send him here?”
“I don’t know, Ipo.” He kisses the top of my head, his hot air bathing my scalp. “He won’t leave, no matter what I say. I’ve tried.”
“I start to feel okay again, and then I remember. I see him out there. And it hurts all over again.”
I want to stop feeling. I want to find my numb again, because I’m afraid if I don’t, I won’t survive this new reality where the villain has my heart.