7. Are You In Trouble?
Chapter seven
Are You In Trouble?
Kira
I might not be a New Yorker, but I knew who the Greens were. Better than most. I had been briefed on him before I took this assignment. Before my cover began. I was supposed to avoid him and all the other mafia men. That was the job: to be in their proximity, to watch and observe, but never to enter their world. Certainly not to kiss the heir of the most powerful mafia in town!
This was a terrible idea. My handler would be pissed!
Eoghan Green was the stuff of New York lore - there was talk of cement shoes, broken kneecaps, and a war with the Russians that left men dead. There were reports of children hung by their thumbs on the docks. They were like the boogeyman, or Krampus. A thing to scare little children into not going out after dark.
Defying him had been a big mistake, and I had doubled down by literally spitting in his face!
What the fuck had I been thinking?
He had sexually harassed me, and that was wrong. I had a right to defend myself, and my body, whether he was Green, Blue or Magenta. But the rules were different if you were undercover.
I was surprised when he let me walk away. I was even more surprised when no one had stopped me as I stomped out the glass doors into the sleety winter evening.
A brown-haired man in a long coat came out, standing beside me as he slipped on his brown leather gloves. His shoulders were hunched, making his otherwise tall frame medium height. Even his arms dangled in a limp way, looking like any other middle-aged desk jockey who probably wanted to go to the gym more, but didn’t.
Without looking at me he said, “Are you in trouble?”
His British voice was lightly disguised - more subdued than how he normally was. I wouldn’t have heard it if I didn’t know what he sounded like when he wasn’t faking an accent.
I shook my head, but said nothing, wrapping my arms around my torso and tightening my coat.
“You’ll need to signal if you need an extraction. You showed up with him?” He mumbled, staring up and down the road, as if ready to hail a cab. “Did he try something?”
I gave a slight nod, as I looked down the street as if I was also waiting to find a yellow taxi.
But there were none.
“I can handle it,” I said through lips that barely parted.
This was a ridiculous game of speaking, but not speaking. Two people a good distance away from each other, mumbling into the wind.
“You’re not trained for this, Picasso,” he said, using my call sign. Picasso. An impressionist I didn’t like. But my handler couldn’t tell an Art Nouveau from the Grotesk.
“I’m fine, Blink.” I used his code name as well. A code name he hated too. Did any of us like our code names? Or did we all hate them in equally? “I can handle myself.”
Blink looked up and down the road, before letting out a sigh, staring at the sky. To the casual observer, he was a man trying to find a cab, but resigned to the fact that there weren’t any. He pulled his collar up and trudged towards the subway entrance at the corner of the street, needing to pass behind me to do so.
“Watch your back,” he mumbled behind me.
“Fuck,” I said, rubbing my forehead, looking up and down the street in a real search for a cab. “Shit. It’ll be impossible to find one right now. Damn it!”
Call me a pussy, but I hated taking the subway. Enclosed spaces, underground, trapped, with only one way in and out? No, thank you.
“I’ll drive you home.” I almost screamed in surprise at the voice that was only a few inches behind me.
I whirled around and he was there, his jacket on, his green plaid scarf in his hand.
Without preamble, he put the scarf around my neck, tying it beneath my chin.
“It’s too cold, Miss Kekoa.” He held on to the ends of the forest green scarf, and it lightly pulled me towards him. “You’ll catch your death out here.”
He took off the glove from his hand, grabbed my wrist, and put one on me. Then the other. They were too big, but they were warm, and I balled my hands into fists, clutching them to my chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my breath coming out in steam.
“I may have misstepped with you.”
I snorted. “Misstepped?”
“Aye, Miss.” There was that grin again. A slight tilt at the corner of his mouth. “Let me drive you home, just as I said I would.”
He wrapped an arm around my waist, escorting me down the curb to a black town car. I stopped, pulling my arm away.
“I don’t trust you, Mr. Green.” That was a rare truth. I definitely did not trust him. No one should ever trust him.
“Call me Eoghan,” he said, as he bent down to open the back seat.
“I don’t trust you, Mr. Green. ” I refused to call him by his name. I did not want to get more familiar.
He stopped and looked to the side, letting out a slight laugh. “A’right, get one of your girlies on the phone, and have them stay on with you until you are safely inside your apartment. Go on, now.”
I… didn’t expect that.
I actually didn’t know what I expected. That he’d give up and let me go? No, that would be na?ve considering how persistent he had been.
“Isn’t that something young women do, now? To keep safe?” He put his hands in his pockets, stepping to the side, giving me a clear path to the back seat of his ride. “Call one of your girlies. I’ll wait.”
He gave me the slightest wink and smiled.
I fished into my pocket for my phone. I bit down on the middle finger of his glove to slip it off my hand so I could use the touch screen. I heard him groan.
When I looked up, he was staring at the sky, biting his lower lip, his Adam’s apple exquisitely bobbing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He turned back to me, and his eyes burned with a lust that was frightening, and … enticing.
“Nothing, love,” he said, as he took in a ragged breath. “Nothing at all.”
I shook my head, as if to deny the feeling creeping up my arms, and to my chest. The way my mouth tingled with the memory of tonight’s kiss.
I didn’t have anyone. No one I could call, at least. Blink wasn’t someone you called in these situations.
So, I called Cosima “Cosa” Durante, thinking that maybe she’d offer me some protection. I just had to pretend that I didn’t know anything about their families. Surely, if something happened to me, the heiress of the Italian Mafia would be able to take action against the Irishman. As powerful as he might be, she was just as strong. At least when it came to influence in the underground crime scene.
“Hey, where are you?” Cosima answered without greeting. “Want to come over to watch Casablanca?”
“I’m… I’m with someone, and I need you to stay on the phone with me,” I said quickly, staring at Eoghan who tilted his head with a lazy smirk.
“Are you on a blind date?”
“No, not as such…” I watched his eyebrow go up, as his smirk turned into a grin. “I just… he’s going to drive me home. I just want you on the phone with me…”
“Put her on speaker,” Eoghan mouthed, as he lifted an amused brow.
I don’t know why I complied.
Despite what happened in the gallery, I didn’t think he’d hurt me. Not really.
“Oh my God, are you afraid of ending up on one of those murder podcasts?” Cosa sounded like she was enjoying this. “Who are you with? Is he handsome? If you’re going to get murdered, he better be handsome…”
“Cosa!” I said through my teeth.
“Tell me who he is and how you know him,” she said, with a sigh.
“His name is…” I swallowed, hesitating, before letting out a long breath and giving an Oscar-worthy performance. “Eoghan Green.”
Eoghan nodded in approval as I said this, then stepped out of the way as he bowed, beckoning me into the car.
“Eoghan… Green?” Cosa said, as I shimmied into the back seat.
Eoghan slipped in, closing the door behind him.
“Yeah, you know him?” Of course, she knew him…
Eoghan reached over and grabbed my seatbelt, buckling me in.
“Safety first,” he said, with a wink.
His driver pulled out into traffic, just as Cosa screamed, “Get out of the car!”
“What?” I reached to the door handle, as if ready to tuck and roll if I had to, even though I knew I wouldn’t.
Eoghan raised a quizzical brow. I wondered if he believed my lie or if he was just humoring me.
“Get out of the car, Kira!” Cosa was frantic, her voice hitting a level of distress I wasn’t used to. “You don’t understand! He’s not a good man. He’s a very, very bad person. You need to get out of there now. Where are you? I’ll come get you! Tell me what cross street, and I’ll be right there!”
“Cosima…” I gritted.
Eoghan sat up, his eyes narrowing.
“Cosima …” he repeated her name. “Durante?”
Without a word, Eoghan plucked the phone out of my hand and held it in front of his face, his voice speaking right into the microphone.
“Is this Eugenio’s girl?” he said, with a smile that looked like a snarl.
The line was silent. I blinked, waiting. I looked at the screen to see that the seconds were still ticking by. The call was connected.
“Eoghan, let her go. If this is about me, or my father…”
“This has nothing to do with the Durante’s.” He said her family name like a curse.
“Let her go, Eoghan.” Cosima’s voice took on a commanding edge I had never heard before. “What do you want? I’ll trade it. The docks? The East side warehouses? What do you want? Just drop her somewhere, and let her go…”
I noted all of that information. Cosima Durante had the influence to trade property. That was interesting.
Almost as interesting as the fact she’d make a trade for me. I didn’t think we were that close.
“Sweet, dear Cosima,” he crooned, “My interest in Kira has nothing to do with the business you and I were born into.”
“Eoghan, you evil bastard, let her go…” She spoke right through him.
“I don’t think I will. I’m going to take her home. You’re going to stay on the phone with her until she’s safely in her apartment, with me locked on the other side.”
That silenced Cosima completely.
“Tell me what you want, Eoghan. I will make sure you get it. I will make my fa–”
“Don’t talk about your Da’ to me,” he growled into the phone. “This isn’t family business.”
“Eoghan…” Her voice was a warning, and I could imagine her suddenly declaring war.
“Cosima, darlin’...” he said, suave as ever. “Don’t make me change my mind. And don’t put her in danger by drawing back the wizard’s curtain.”
I had no idea what that meant. Whatever he thought, he definitely spoke to Cosima as if she was a power player, and not just some mafia princess.
“Now be a doll, and sit there quietly, as I have a conversation with Miss Kekoa,” he said, handing me the phone.
I took it with both hands, making sure I didn’t accidentally hang up by touching the wrong place on the screen.
“What does she mean?” I asked.
“If you truly thought I was a scary man, you wouldn’t ask me that,” he said with a smirk. “New Yorkers, for all the modernity and urban decay, are really as superstitious as the old worlds we come from. We believe in ghosts and shadows, oaths and fairies.”
“That’s not…” Cosima started to speak, but Eoghan spoke right over her.
“You see, we all come from other places. Me, from Ireland. The Durante’s from Italy. The Vasiliev’s from Russia. We all come from somewhere else, and with it comes legends and myths.” Despite the fact that he had fastened my seatbelt, he hadn’t put on his own. He shuffled in the seat towards me, until our hips touched. “Old superstitions need to go, if we’re to move into the future, away from our troubled pasts, don’t you think, Cosima?”
His black eyes didn’t leave me for an instant.
Was he making a truce? It sounded like it. Like he was offering an olive branch without offering one.
“Do you hear me, Cosima?” he said, his eyes still not leaving mine.
I was too scared to blink.
“I hear you, Eoghan,” she said, and I almost dropped the phone, surprised that she had spoken at all.
“It won’t happen until the past dies,” he said, his hand reaching up to trace a lock of curly hair from my temple, pulling it behind my ear. “And the past always dies.”
I trembled at his warm touch. The simple brush of his knuckles on my cheekbones was more intimate than when he had ravaged my mouth in the gallery in front of everyone.
“Sweet Kira seems to be the angel that will unite us all. Like a Tudor rose that joined two houses,” he said, as the car came to a stop. I looked past the windows to see my decrepit apartment building with the broken light outside the entrance. “Don’t you think, Cosima?”
“Eoghan, please, just leave her alone…”
Cosima really seemed to care about me. That was a surprise.
Other than girls’ happy hour, and the piece of art I might put aside for her once in a while, I considered her a well-liked customer more than anything. We were casual acquaintances but not friends.
But here she was, bargaining for my life.
“I shall, Miss Durante,” he said, as he shuffled to the other side of the back seat, opening the door. Then he held it open for me. “She’s almost home.”
I unbuckled my seatbelt, and with the phone in hand, shuffled my ass across the plush leather to the sidewalk. I was careful to step out with both feet together so I didn’t unintentionally flash him, and he stuck out his hand to catch my elbow in case I fell.
When I was standing, he leaned in, planting a small kiss on my cheek.
“I take it back,” he whispered. “A rose, even a Tudor rose, is too common. Every painted damsel thinks she’s a rose.”
He took a step back and stood tall, his smirk still on that wretchedly handsome face.
“You’re an orchid. More beautiful in a single stem than a dozen bundled in a bouquet. Surviving in grace and beauty in every environment.” His eyes cut to the doors behind me. The doors of my apartment building were entirely too poor for the likes of a Green. “Though, even the elegant orchid falls short. A thousand perfect white orchids wouldn’t match your beauty.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck! He was making me swoon.
What kind of guy talked like that? Certainly not the cold-blooded killer that terrorized the New York Underground. He belonged in a fucking novel, not on a rap sheet. The rumors had to be wrong about him.
Or maybe I was fooling myself.
“In you go, love. I’ll stay here until you’re safely inside.”
I wobbled in my heels as I walked to my building, fumbling for the keys in my purse.
I looked back at him, the phone still in my hand as I put the key fob on the sensor. It unlocked with a click. I pushed the door open, and he didn’t move, his eyes on me the entire way, his expression blank.
Eoghan lifted a single finger in a farewell wave, never breaking eye contact until I was inside, and out of sight.
“You still there?” I said into the phone, as I hopped into the elevator.
“Yes, sweety, I’m still here. Are you okay?”
I looked at my reflection on the brushed metal of the doors and sighed. I looked okay on the outside, at least.
“Yeah, he’s staying by his car.” I felt the downward pressure as the elevator went up.
“You should never be alone with that man,” she said as the elevator doors dinged open.
I walked out into the hall.
“Why not?” I said, as I pushed the keys into the door, and twisted the handle.
I was prying for information, to see if she’d break the legendary code of silence that existed between the modern Russian Bratva, Irish Mob, and Italian Mafia. Despite the fact that they were at war, they all operated like clandestine officers.
So much so that real clandestine officers like myself couldn’t break in.
“He’s just not a good man,” Cosima finally said.
“How do you know?” I needed her to give me more. To tell me more.
It only ever took a kernel of truth to get through for the floodgates to open. I just needed a small break. A small crack in the armor to get through.
“Because I know.” She was cryptic, but not mean about it.
“ How do you know?” I pried even further.
Come on, Cosima. If we’re friends, you wouldn’t keep Eoghan Green a secret…
“He’s Irish,” Cosima finally said.
I laughed. “I didn’t think you’d be so xenophobic. Your family is from Rome.”
My corner apartment had a fire escape. I had chosen it because it had two ways to exit – the fire escape that faced the street, the other that went into an alleyway. I could also climb to the roof, and I was one leap from getting to the next building. It also offered the best view of the street, giving me a good vantage point for anyone who might approach from below.
“That’s different.” Cosima sighed.
“I think you’re wrong about him.” I locked the door behind me, putting the deadbolt in place, as well as the chain. “He was really polite, except for…”
“For…?” She pried.
Except for that decided impolite kiss.
I was complimenting him in the hopes that she’d give up more information. People often spilled more than they wanted when they were angry – when they felt compelled to disagree.
I touched my lips, where his teeth had scraped my mouth, my tongue darting out to get what remained of him. It had been a good kiss, until I came to my senses.
“Nothing,” I said, knowing that Cosima wouldn’t understand. “He was just really nice, is all.”
“Kira, please, you have to believe me. Eoghan Green and his father are not good people. You need to stay far, far away from them. Promise me.”
I didn’t promise, though.
Instead, I uncorked a bottle of cheap wine in my tiny apartment and told her that I’d see her for coffee the next morning.
I looked at the $9 bottle of wine, wondering what Eoghan would drink in his home. I bet it wasn’t anything less than three figures.