Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Elena
I fill the glass nearly to the rim and won’t apologize for it.
The wine glugs out of the bottle in a neat, expensive ribbon—something my mentor gifted me when I transferred down here. The cork sits on the counter. I won’t be putting it back in this bottle tonight.
My kitchen is the kind of place you get when you rent fast and promise yourself you’ll buy someday. Sleek and unused. Two blocks from the ocean, which I still haven’t had time to visit since moving here two months ago.
Boxes still lean against the hall. Open and rifled through when I’ve needed something. Forgotten otherwise.
I unpacked the suits, my files, and coffee equipment. And, of course, wine glasses. Everything else could wait.
I take the glass to the window and look at a slice of Atlantic City that doesn’t look like a postcard. The strip is a glittering thing in my peripheral vision, all neon and the promise of big wins.
Closer, it’s tired awnings and delivery trucks, a man with a backpack scratching a lottery ticket under a streetlamp. The ocean is just out of sight.
He walks free.
The words scrawl across my eyes in clean typeface, like I’m writing them on a report.
Then I drink to wash the taste of disgust out of my mouth. It’s an honest feeling—rare, these days, in a profession where you learn to tailor your reactions to the courtroom.
You keep the outrage quiet. You file the fury under “professionalism.” You leave with a neutral face and go home to pour something red.
I sit on the arm of the couch, my jacket already slung across a chair, my heels somewhere near the door in a small pile of who-fucking-cares. I keep the blouse on because changing would mean admitting the day is over. And I’m not ready for that.
The silk collar of my blouse is cool against the back of my neck, my hair is down now, cascading down the back of my shirt, and my pants are a bit rumpled.
But I’m not in my apartment right now. I’m back in that courtroom.
It’s designed to make people feel small and important at the same time. Wood that smells like legacy. A ceiling that throws your voice back at you in an echo. The lights that buzz and burn your eyes.
And him—Luca Conti—standing where men like him should be standing. But not to be released. To be put away.
Yet he was released. He’s not in a cell anymore. He’s in his cushy home, no longer suffering the consequences of his own actions.
Even a man like him couldn’t hide his smug satisfaction as he walked out of the courtroom today a free man.
It suits him.
I hate the thought as soon as I think it. It’s vain and shallow. It’s also true. I’ve only seen him in person once, long ago. Since then, it’s just been pictures and news clips.
But there’s no hiding it. He’s fit in the way that says he won’t tolerate softness, even at fifty. No slack in the line, no wrinkle in the suit. Dark hair. Dark eyes, steady, and not the kind that cut wildly to every movement. He doesn’t need to check the exits.
He scans a room once and owns it. The photographs and news clips did not prepare me for what it felt like to be in his orbit: the physical gravity of a man who knows exactly how to make others bend to his will.
I noticed. My body noticed first, which is offensive enough that I drink again to wash the taste out of my mouth.
I’ve stood across from men whose hands shook while they threatened me and men who tried to turn charm into a weapon.
I’ve dealt with the kind of anger that hopes you’ll flinch and surrender.
Attraction isn’t a stranger; it’s a stray cat that shows up sometimes, and you ignore it until it leaves.
But today, for a single breath, it was a wire under my skin, pulling tight.
It thrummed and made me itch. It annoyed me because it was automatic, because it had nothing to do with intellect, because it made me aware of my own pulse in a room where I wanted to be all spine.
He looked at me exactly once. It wasn’t leering. It wasn’t even assessing. It was… acknowledgment. Of whatever the hell the current I felt flowing between us is.
Then he put the look away like a man sheathing a knife. I could have respected him more in that second if respect weren’t a luxury I refuse to spend on men like him.
He walks free.
I roll my neck until it pops and set the glass down on the sill.
The wine leaves a red half-moon print when I lift it again; my thumb smears it clean.
My reflection in the window is flattened by city light: a woman with dark hair and blue eyes, a woman whose shoulders are squared because they have to be to do what I do.
A woman who came to this city for one reason.
I’ve known men like him for a long time. That is to say—professionally, academically, clinically. Law school taught me how to parse doctrine; the courtroom taught me how to read dominion.
I still remember the first time I saw him in person—eleven years ago, on a day I skipped a property lecture and took the train from New York to Atlantic City, because sometimes you must witness history instead of reading about it in a book.
I stood in the back in a borrowed blazer that didn’t quite fit and watched a daughter turn her back on blood for the sake of justice.
I didn’t feel triumph then. I felt respect.
And inevitability. The system grinding into place.
I didn’t know then I’d build my career chasing the echo of that feeling.
Back then, I was the student who showed up early to sit in on arraignments. I clerked for a judge who liked to ask me, “What will the newspaper headline be?” before I wrote memos.
I joined the Southern District because I wanted to work where the real nitty-gritty was. Because I didn’t want to ease my way in.
I took the gun cases, the drug cases, the fraud cases, and the rackets that bound them together. I second-chaired my first RICO trial with a senior AUSA who kept gum tucked into the corner of her mouth and taught me how to make a jury care.
I learned how to ask the right “why” of a witness without letting it bleed into pity. I learned to love the paperwork—bank statements, ledgers. Numbers always tell the truth when men won’t.
I also learned how to stand my ground when a co-worker with an important last name tries to step in and take over.
I learned how to make myself heard without raising my voice.
And then they reassigned me down here because sometimes the world really does take you in circles.
The Conti name still straightens spines, and the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office needs a win. We didn’t get one today, but we will.
I’ll make sure of that.
I breathe out now, slowly, and watch my own breath cloud the glass. I need to turn the air down.
On the table behind me, my laptop glows with a half-written memo: Immediate Post-Hearing Risk Assessment—Conti, Luca.
The bulleted lines stare back at me like impatient jurors. Heightened supervision granted. Twice-weekly reporting. Passport surrendered. Electronic monitoring pending installation at the residence verified by Pretrial Services.
Prohibitions: contact with co-defendants, victims, witnesses. It is the kind of victory you say thank you for with gritted teeth because you need the conditions but hate the outcome.
I want to argue, even here, alone. I want to stand up in my living room and sustain and overrule. I want a transcript that says, “The Court regrets the inconvenience; justice is difficult.”
Instead, I have my big ass glass of wine, a still-unfamiliar city outside my window, and a man who smiled with his eyes when the gavel came down without actually smiling at all.
He’s good at making the performance look minimal. The best control reads like absence.
But I see through it all.
I force myself to write instead of just fume. I list names that have been my companions for months: Vito (28), Nico (26), Caterina (25). I note their placements, the way they flanked him, the way the room bent around them, too. Blood recognizes blood; it organizes space.
I add: Roberto Conti—counsel of record—presentation: polished, effective, anticipated objections; likely to pursue appeal of supervision intensity, potentially to manufacture flashpoints.
I add the line that matters most: Lucia—absent.
The word glows as if it can feel the importance. Absence is its own presence. She was there the last time the state closed the door on him. She wasn’t today. The file says she’s married to Nick Dixon—the billionaire casino magnate who bought a prison like most men buy a new suit.
I wrote that memo too, the one that laid out ethical conflicts like neatly stacked grenades ready to go off at any moment.
The state actor becomes an interested party by acquisition; the defendant becomes a man who must sleep, eat, breathe in an institution owned by a person who holds a personal vendetta against him.
It was academic rhetoric wrapped around an ugly fact. It didn’t matter today; none of that was technically before the Court. But it matters to me because people show you what they’ll do when they have enough money to treat our systems as personal toys.
Dixon did not make Conti’s last four years easy. Transfers denied. Comforts revoked. Guards rotated. Small humiliations that add up to a point: you’re not a man in a cage; you’re a toy in a box.
The law does not love it when you point out the defects of its own machinery.
Records. I pull up a spreadsheet that tracks every phone number that has touched the Conti case in the last six months.
I color-code communications that spike on key dates.
I match the map of his known associates to the new ones.
I draw lines in my head to places and people.
Blue for legitimate businesses. Yellow for question marks. Red for… everything else.
I pour another glass and drain half of it because the part of my brain that wants to object has decided to shut the hell up tonight.
“One more glass,” I say out loud. “One. Then water. Then bed.” The apartment does not answer. Just the way I like it.
I scroll to a clean page and write down what my body refuses to forget: He was handsome. Rugged, in the way that shows the planes of his face, the strength of his jaw. His mouth, with its full lips, didn’t move unless he chose to move it.
His posture was loose, but deliberately so. He did not bounce a knee. His hands sat calmly on the table. No fidgeting.
And his gaze was electric.
I delete the whole paragraph because this is a government computer, and there’s a difference between being honest with yourself and leaving an evidentiary trail of human weakness.
Then I write it again as something else: Subject presented as physically fit; affect under control; managed displays of attentiveness; maintained eye contact strategically; avoided unnecessary movement; confined reactions to micro-expressions.
My phone buzzes.
A text from my old supervisor in Manhattan: How’d it go?
I type: Conditions granted. Petition granted. Twice-weekly reporting. We’ll build the walls higher and wait.
He replies with a thumbs-up that manages to be both supportive and infuriating. The culture of this work is to dress patience up as strategy and strategy as inevitability.
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s just an excuse.
I take the wine to the sink, hesitate, then pour it down the drain. I rinse my hands, water cold enough to numb. I want to wash the day off with it. I can’t.
I have a headache at the base of my skull; it blooms there like a flower that nobody ordered.
I dry my hands and sit again. I try not to think about the daughter missing from the courtroom today. I try not to think about the three offspring who were there and the way loyalty flows through their veins. I try not to think about the way he said “Counselor” while giving nothing away.
I try not to think about my pulse betraying me.
Instead, I focus on my contempt and let it do its work. Contempt is clear-cut… and safe.
Men like him pretend the law is a game they have to win. They have all sorts of fucked up ideas.
They call it family when it’s enterprise; they call it business when it’s violence and coercion; they call it honor when it’s extortion.
They teach their sons to pick up guns and their daughters to watch and accept.
And then a man like Luca walks into a courtroom and makes people sit a little straighter.
But it’s all myth.
That’s why I hate him, I tell myself. Not because he’s good-looking in a way that annoys me, not because my body had the indecency to remember it is, in fact, alive and that it’s been way too long, but because he is good at making other people believe that he’s nothing more than an ordinary man.
But he’s not. He’s a man who built a criminal empire.
Calm is not the same as harmless. efficient at making other people believe they are safer near him than far. And the truth is the opposite.
I open the notes app I keep for arguments. I type: Calm is not the same as harmless. Judges are human, not gods. Remind them they are human, a jury of one.
I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. I try to remember the last night I came home this keyed up and whether I slept. I probably didn’t.
Tonight I stack my casebooks into a tower on the dining table that I never use for food. I think about running along the boardwalk in the morning, the ocean spitting salt into my mouth while I pretend that I’m not still replaying every moment in that courtroom.
There’s a knock on a neighbor’s door, footsteps in the hall. Someone laughs, the sound drifting under my door, then disappearing down the hall.
It’s a habit, not fear. Just caution. Fear is a thing that immobilizes you, sits on your chest and stops you from moving. Caution is safety.
Luca Conti walked free tonight.
He will not stay free. Not if I can help it.