Chapter 7
“This is all you’ve got for me?” Estella raised her chin and stared down the young man standing in her office before her.
He looked back, belligerently and she felt the kick of rage in her gut.
He was probably double her size, beefed up on steroids and too much gym time, tough guy tattoos writhing around his neck, a moronic FTP across his throat, like a walking target for police to glare at. Where had Mike found these arseholes?
“I told you, there’s fuck-all visible from the street—”
“From the street?” She cut him short. “If I wanted to know what I could see from the street I’d drive past myself, you oversized moron.
” She was goading him now, just daring him to lose his temper.
He was someone’s son — Steve’s? Kevin’s?
— Estella couldn’t keep track of them all.
Somedays it felt like the Grant business’s human resources were nothing more than an unlimited supply of sullen entitled men as far as the eye could see.
“What do you expect me to do? Climb the fucken fence? He’s got dogs and cameras and barbed wire—”
“Enough excuses!” Estella stood up from behind her desk, as if her five feet and five inches would intimidate this mediocre sack of meat.
Honestly how many men did you have to terrify before the rest of them would take you seriously?
“I expect you to do your goddamned job. Use your brain and figure it out yourself without expecting me to hold your dick the whole way through the process. At this point I’d happily sacrifice you to Gio Florelli’s pitbulls myself if you don’t give me a reason to keep paying you.
I’m not running a goddamned charity here—”
“If Uncle Mike was here, he’d make you shut up.”
The words Estella knew he had brewing in him slipped out, hot and sour in the refrigerated air of her office.
It didn’t matter that she was the boss, that he’d been hauled in before her, that her office was fucking magnificent after the revamp — all dark gleaming wood, fresh leather and heavy curtains straight from Italy — these young men couldn’t get past the fact she was a woman, so steeped in the sexual politics of the thugs who’d raised them they still couldn’t see the threat she posed to them.
She knew what this kid expected now. He knew she’d lose her shit, use her sharp tongue to lash his eardrums for his disrespect, maybe a fist from her bodyguard in the guts on the way out. No price he wouldn’t be willing to pay.
Unfortunately for young Aiden, he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the sheer amount of yoga she’d been doing.
She was quite still, calm even, feeling her breath unfurl through her upper body and down to her fingertips, her next inhale reaching all the way to her pedicured toes. Then, she smiled.
It took him by surprise. As if on a long-forgotten instinct, he smiled back.
She almost felt bad. That smile had been gifted to him once as an innocent baby, passed on from his mama as he cooed in her arms, echoing the adoration in her face.
The thought of the woman who’d birthed him — long since discarded and degraded — further fuelled her.
She watched patiently as his smile lost its cockiness, became uncertain, faltered and faded. She didn’t drop her gaze.
She barely had to twitch her eyebrow before Kenneth had the man’s throat in his hand, cutting off the oxygen with a squeeze, his other arm locked around those useless gym-pumped arms like he was subduing a yappy dog.
Aiden’s eyes bugged in terror as his mouth gulped silently for air that wasn’t forthcoming.
She stopped looking now, quite done with him. Instead, she addressed Kenneth.
“Remember how you cut Jimmy’s testicles off for me and shoved them down his throat?
” She felt bored by this whole routine, and it showed in her voice.
Aiden bucked hard, frantic, to no avail, his face turning purple.
Kenneth just nodded serenely. “This time just tuck Aiden’s in his pockets for him, so he can show all his friends what happens when you talk down to the woman who’s fucking in CHARGE!
” Her last words came out in what, unfortunately, could only be described as a yell.
Goddamnit, more yoga was going to be required before she could keep her equanimity in the face of her company’s structural misogyny problem.
Kenneth simply nodded and dragged the half limp thug out of her office.
Estella waited for the door to close delicately behind her bodyguard. Then she sank back into her leather desk chair, finding herself smiling. She wondered idly if maybe, she should take up smoking cigars, just for the look of it. She thought of her 3PM vinyasa class and sighed. Probably not.
By 4:30 all thoughts of Aiden and his testicles had been vanquished.
Flow classes were her favourite; her body feeling deliciously limber and increasingly strong.
Mike had always liked her at peak feminine petite, but now he was gone she enjoyed watching the muscle definition appearing in her arms and thighs.
In the lead-up to his death she’d started exercising harder, for strength and stamina, seeing herself as an athlete now, perhaps even a warrior.
She wanted to be ready for anything, to be a force in her own right.
Stepping out from the yoga studio and onto the street, the fresh air hit her cheeks and she felt herself glow with contentment.
“Bye, darling,” she kissed the cheeks of her classmates as they all separated at the carpark.
Sophie, Olivia, Zoe, Olivia, Amelia, Olivia, not a one of them failing to delight and preen in her presence each session.
She’d always been somewhat of a notorious celebrity, but last week one of the Olivias — she couldn’t discern between them — had called her a girlboss and Estella had quite enjoyed the illusion she could be an inspiration to this crowd of boutique florists, osteopaths and clothing designers.
There was such a gap between the business advice she could share and that she could not.
Find an accountant you can trust, she could tell them, one who knows where all the bodies are buried, she could not.
Still, she enjoyed the feminine camaraderie that had been so lacking within her own empire all this time.
Hovering for a second on the pavement she immediately felt the eyes on her.
That, of course, was not uncommon, especially in areas of town where she was known to frequent.
In other parts of Melbourne, she was sometimes mistaken for an actor or another more benign brand of celebrity, women in upscale clothing stores saying where do I know your face from before the blood would drain from their faces and they’d apologise profusely and carefully start to fawn, as if Estella Grant were somehow in the habit of murdering innocent passers-by.
But here in Armadale, where she regularly attended yoga, bought coffee and perused the upscale corner boutiques, most sets of eyes were knowing.
Estella Grant, notorious crime boss— at least, that’s what she hoped they were thinking.
Not mobster’s wife, still, for god’s sake.
She hoped that someday she’d slip the mantle of Mike’s hold on her.
Still, it didn’t do to let her guard down.
Kenneth was parked along the street verge, his eyes always on her surroundings but even he wasn’t omnipotent.
She didn’t falter, but casually let her eyes scan her surroundings behind her sunglasses.
Oh, there, yes, a young woman in a parked Toyota to Estella’s left.
She had glossy brunette locks and was casually dressed, her own sunglasses now studiously focussed down on the phone in her hand as she sat behind the wheel.
It would have been entirely innocuous, except for how she was parked directly outside the door of Estella’s yoga studio, and that Estella’s senses were rarely wrong.
She continued along the little shopping strip, running her fingers over the beautiful fabrics of the clothing boutique, her movements languid.
She wouldn’t let this journalist, this tragically slipped-cover cop, this wannabe Florelli lackey or whoever this woman was put her off her day.
But when she slid into the back of her own car, a few minutes later, she nodded at Kenneth, her head tilting toward the still parked Corolla.
“Keep an eye on that,” she instructed. His almost black gaze sought out the interloper. His eyes narrowed. He nodded.