Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
LUKA
Orton slides onto the stool beside me with a scrape of wood against linoleum. The bartender barely looks up before setting down a glass.
“I assume you got a picture,” I say, voice low.
“Already sent it.”
No need to say where. The facial recognition guy—our inside man—will run it. A Fed we have in our pocket.
“This is some fucked-up bullshit,” I mutter.
Orton grunts in agreement, his fingers tightening around his glass.
A cop. At our meeting.
It shouldn’t have been possible. We put this together fast, and only a handful of people knew.
Someone leaked. That’s the only answer.
My guys were vetted the way I vet everything—blood loyalty, tested in fire. Aleksio’s crew is hardened—men who’ve lost everything to stay by his side. And Razvan? He’s a ghost. No face, no name, just a whisper in the right circles. He’s careful.
We drink raki and talk business, but something else gnaws at the back of my mind .
“Circle-shaped cookies in the lobby. An hour before our meeting. That’s too much of a coincidence.”
Orton scowls. “What the fuck good is a message from the unseen world if we don’t see it?”
“A bouquet the size of a Range Rover isn’t exactly subtle. It’s a fucking neon sign screaming to cancel the meeting.”
“The spirits use whatever tools are available. You got a problem with it? Take it up with the Bogomils.”
The Bogomils were Albanian mystics; their ancient cave church is shrouded in lore to this day, though the Bogomils themselves are long gone.
I set down my glass. “Find out who sent the cookies.”
He exhales sharply. “Seriously?”
“I wanna know.”
He thinks it’s a waste of time, but he’ll do it.
“It’s too something,” I say.
“Everything is too something.”
I smirk. “I’ll put that on your gravestone.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
His phone vibrates. He checks it.
“Aleksio thinks Razvan might be open to giving it another try.”
That surprises me. Did he not see the cop? Maybe Razvan never made it that far inside. Maybe the cookies kept him out.
“You extended my apologies?”
“From all of us.”
“See about rescheduling.”
We talk dates and places. Obviously, not at the hotel.
Orton starts working his phone, and I work my drink, letting the alcohol burn as it goes down.
My thoughts return to Edie. The sharp glint of her green eyes. Her stubborn scorn. How badly she wanted to despise me but could never quite bring herself to.
Doesn’t matter. I’m done with her .
Orton’s phone dings. He checks it. “Fingerprint results for your mystery lady.”
“I don’t wanna know. She’s nobody.”
“Edie Maureen Carson,” he reads, slowing, squinting. “Age twenty-three. Born in Hartford, Connecticut.”
“In the system. There’s a surprise.” The fact that he can get anything off her fingerprint means she’s in the system.
“She’s in the system, but she doesn’t have a record.” Orton scrolls, then stops, eyes narrowed at whatever he’s reading. “She’s a college student?”
I frown. “Edie?”
“Columbia University as of eight months ago when she was fingerprinted as a condition for campus employment. Master’s program. There’s not much more than that. I forwarded it to you.”
“A college student?”
“Knew she wasn’t right,” he mutters.
Moments with her replay in my head. The way she’d suck in a breath at the slightest touch like an innocent and untouched maiden. Her sometimes nerdy choices, so out of place. Her berry-scented lip gloss and clean soap that were so different from the perfumes I was used to.
The naive act. But it wasn’t an act.
Edie Maureen Carson. A fucking college student.
“What the fuck.” Why walk into my world that night in that red dress? Why sit down with a man like Iron Jaw Dardan, of all people? Even a sheltered virgin could take one look at his cold, dead eyes and know he was trouble.
Fuck. I drain my drink and bang the glass down.
College is expensive. Is that why she did it? For the money?
I think back to the hungry way she watched the food, how her eyes would follow each dish, how she’d unconsciously lean forward when the warm scents of rosemary bread and spiced meats wafted past. The way she cradled the stack of bills I gave her that first night, eyes wide like she’d never seen so much money in her life.
“We should send someone to talk to her.” By talk, Orton means a very enthusiastic warning not to tell tales. The girl sat with us and saw our operations.
“She’s got nothing that isn’t public knowledge,” I say.
“She misrepresented herself.”
“She’s got nothing,” I grit out.
Orton holds my gaze a bit too long, then looks away. He knows when not to challenge me. He takes off soon after, but I stay to deal with a few emails. Business to handle. People to manage.
An hour later I’m searching her name in the Columbia Academic Commons.
It’s a lot of student stuff—honor roll and extracurriculars.
Reviews of professors—all of them very positive because Edie would be like that.
She’s the girl who sits in the front. Never misses a day of class.
I find three research papers she wrote and dip into one, telling myself I’m just going to see what the fuck is so important that she’s writing her papers on, but I end up reading all three of them from beginning to end.
Edie is obsessed with medieval castles. The day-to-day activities of peasant women.
Old languages. Bloody battles fought with swords forged in fire.
That’s how she knew Arianiti’s eagle.
A college student.
I was right to send her away. Best call of the week.
Two days later, I’m strolling onto the bustling Columbia campus. My tech guy has come through with her class schedule and daily habits, not that he had to hack into much, being that the kids today put everything out there for the world to see.
I linger in a shadowy nook near a hot dog vendor off from the pathway she’ll take from art history to the library where her study group meets .
The late afternoon sun bathes the old brick buildings in a warm glow, and students mill around everywhere. Soft, young faces. Stupid ideals.
These kids have never seen a man die, never had to fight their way out of a jungle prison.
The hot dog vendor is popular, and the kids have elaborate orders involving baked beans and pickled carrots and even pineapple. One of them storms off, personally offended when they find out the guy’s out of crumbled bacon bits. A fucking tragedy in their pampered lives.
Then I spot her.
She’s wearing a fuzzy beige sweater and jeans with a light blue bucket hat, her light brown hair curled loosely around her shoulders.
No trace of the seductress in the red dress.
This is pure Edie—backpack slung over one shoulder, laughing with a friend as they walk.
She probably has that cherry-smelling lip stuff on.
This is who she is. What the fuck was she thinking, stepping into that bar?
A group of college boys pass by her, and one of them—tall, preppy type—clearly checks her out.
Something dark and possessive coils in my gut.
These innocent, doughy boys have no idea what she’s capable of or what she needs.
They’ll never appreciate her sense of right and wrong or the way she’ll go to war if you fuck with her people.
Not that I’m her people.
These college kids are her people.
I follow at a distance as she heads into the library. Through the windows, I watch her claim a spot near the stacks, spreading out books and notebooks with careful precision.
She tucks her hair behind her ear as she reads, biting her lower lip in concentration. That mouth.
I think about the way it felt against my skin, the way she gasped when I touched her and tried to pretend she wasn’t unraveling under my hands .
I thought it was an act. I fucking ate it up.
I sit there a while, watching her through the windows like the predator I am. Memorizing her movements, the way she takes notes, how she absent-mindedly twirls her pen when she’s thinking.
Getting my fill.
And then it’s time. I head back out the gates and down the two blocks to where Storm waits in the Range Rover.
“Let’s get out of here.”
He pulls out, taking 116th Street to Morningside. Twenty minutes later, we’re over the Madison Avenue bridge.
The familiar streets of the South Bronx fold me back into their shadows, but my mind stays in that library, thinking about Edie and how that fuzzy sweater would feel against my face.