Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
MIRA
“ T hanks,” I tell the Uber driver and get out, looking up and down the street. I don’t see any other cars but now I’m all freaked out and not convinced Enzo doesn’t have little spies all over the place and all he has to do is say the word and someone will be following me.
While that might be true for someone like his father or maybe even one of his cousins, I don’t think it would be true for him. He doesn’t seem like high-ranking material…which also can mean he has less to lose.
“This place looks sketch,” Elsie loops her arm through mine as we walk up the uneven, cracked sidewalk. I can hear a train in the distance and music thumps from one of the apartments on the third floor. The balcony is open and a few guys leans against the railing, smoking. I punch in the code Mason gave me and close the entryway door behind us as soon as we’re in.
I lived in an apartment similar to this when I first moved to Chicago after college. I was engaged to Cory at the time and he chastised me for having an apartment because he had always “owned a home”, though his owning a home was actually him living rent-free with mommy and daddy. I rented a little apartment not too different from that first one right after I filed for divorce, back when I decided to sell the house we had bought together—with money I had made—but Cory kept the proceeds of the sale tied up in court for nearly two years.
I blink and get hit with the memory of walking into the little foyer and feeling a sense of peace wash over me. Yeah, it was run down and always smelled like stale coffee and urine, but it was my space and Cory hadn’t touched, though he still haunted me every chance he got. It was raining on this particular day, a full month or so after I had filed and left.
He sent me a gift card to a spa via email, telling me that I’m his “beautiful princess” and that he was so sorry and he was going to get anger management help he clearly needed. I finally broke the cycle of abuse and just rolled my eyes and went up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. Later that day, a friend saw him out to dinner with Noel—the woman he’s still dating. I still wonder if she’s incredibly naive or dumb, though I’m sure it’s a mixture of both.
Overall, I feel sorry for her because I was that girl once. I was that girl who stayed with someone horrible and abusive out of fear of being alone. I was that girl who believed the lies. Hell, I even believed it when Cory told me that my dad thanked him for marrying me because he was so worried no one else would. I believed him when he told me my sisters hated me and that if it wasn’t for him, I’d have no family.
I was the frog in water slowly being heated up, not realizing my life around me was disintegrating in boiling water.
But that woman has to have something wrong with her head to believe all the lies now. I’ve never once given her any sort of warning. She’s an adult and can figure things out on her own. But I would think the protective orders and pictures of my black eyes and bruises would speak for themselves. The fact that the police were called multiple times means nothing, I guess.
But mostly I feel sorry for her for being a backup plan.
He took her out for a romantic dinner while at the same time was texting me, begging me to take him back. He even went to my parents’ house to tell them how he was going to treat me better, though he failed and just started rambling about how it’s my fault he gets so mad and blows up, screaming and throwing things.
The psychologist in me just can’t help but wonder how she compartmentalizes everything and justifies the fact that she started dating a married man—with a history of abuse. Though over the last year, she’s grown so obsessed with me I legitimately think she’s only dating Cory because it’s the closest she can get to becoming me, which is tragically fascinating with major personality disorder vibes.
Inhaling, I look around this little entryway and feel the same sense of peace, though I need to remind myself that while Cory was physically dangerous too, he didn’t have the connections Enzo did.
“Three-oh-four,” I say, and Elsie nods. We get in the elevator and go to the third floor, walking down the hall just a bit until we get to the door. It has an electronic keypad and I punch in the code Mason gave me. The lock clicks open and we step in.
He warned me there would be cameras, lights, and an alarm that he would disable once we were in and that he verified it was me. My heart speeds up a bit when the alarm starts to blare. We step in and close the door behind us, not moving until the alarm stops beeping.
“Now what?” Elsie asks, jumping as the door locks itself behind us.
“Now you wait.” Mason’s voice comes from a camera mounted on the wall right above us, startling us both. “I’ll be there shortly. Just sit down and act natural.”
“So natural with you watching me,” I grumble and take a minute to look around before walking into the living room. The place is set up to look like someone lives here, but it’s all wrong. The furniture is too new and clean, and there’s no evidence of daily life. There needs to be shoes by the door, a coat or sweatshirt tossed over the bench next to the door, and mail on the counter.
It looks staged, like something you’d see walking into an open house. There’s just enough to give you an idea of what living here could look like, with nice, high end furniture that someone living in a little, run down apartment couldn’t afford.
“Are we safe?” Elsie asks softly as we sit on the living room couch. I pick up the remote and turn on the TV, thankful there’s at least cable. I don’t want to watch something, but if I put on the news, it’ll make it harder for Mason to discern what I’m saying.
“Yeah,” I tell her right away and realize that I’m going to have to tell her the full story. Because all she and Zara know is that I went out with some guy on one of my typical fake dates, the guy turned out to be a total creepy-ass loser, but I might go back out with him again to get some more “pressing details” to really put the nail in the coffin.”
She inhales, slowly shakes her head back and forth and then blinks. “What the actual fuck is going on, Mira? I didn’t want to say anything inside the Uber, but you have a cop on speed dial and we’re at his house and he’s watching us from the cameras?”
“Kind of,” I say with a wince and turn the TV volume up. “That guy I went on a fake date with is actually in the mafia and I’m working with the FBI to try and get info that could lead to a ground breaking arrest because they think he’s one of the guys involved with those really gruesome murders that involve bodies found with like a lot of broken bones and left out in public places.”
She stares at me for a good ten seconds and then holds up her hands. “I heard you, but what?”
“The guy I was talking to,” I start, “is an FBI agent and kind of blackmailed me but I mostly agreed because, well, you know how I enjoy stuff like this.”
Slowly inhaling, she puts her hands together and brings them to her face. “What? No, why? The mafia? That guy? Really?”
“I know. He doesn’t give off 365 Days vibes at all.”
“That’s almost as disappointing as the fact that most billionaires are old, fat, white men.”
“It’s a cruel, cruel world.”
She laughs and leans back, eyes still wide. “I’m gonna repeat my question: are we safe?”
“You are perfectly safe,” I tell her, not wanting to lie. I feel bad enough that I withheld the truth.
“And what about you?” she asks pointedly. “Are you safe?”
“Yeah,” I say, telling myself I am. “He thinks my name is Mya and he has my fake number and everything. He’s interested because I’m probably one of the first women in a long time who hasn’t fawned all over him for money. He doesn’t strike me as a man who’s actually got game so he eats up the gold diggers.”
“Like literally eats them.”
I make a face. “No, they just dismember and maim. They’re not total savages. Look.” I get out my phone and pull up an article on the Moretti family. Elsie follows one of the cousins on TikTok and like a lot of the general public, wasn’t sure if the mafia rumors were true or not.
Not long after, Mason texts me to tell me he’s at the door. He’s just doing his job, I know, but the man is considerate. Elsie and I both train our gazes to the door, waiting for him to come in. And when he does, Elsie elbows me and raises her eyebrows.
“Now that’s what I imagined a mobster to look like,” she whispers. I just shake my head, not wanting to agree with her. What’s even worse is that my body reacts to the sight of that muscular man standing before us in gray sweatpants and a tight white t-shirt that shows off his biceps and tattoos.
“Did anyone follow you?” I ask, lips curving into a small smile.
Mason raises one eyebrow, clearly not finding any humor in my question. “No.” His eyes flit from me to Elsie then back again. “What does she know?”
“The truth,” I offer with a shrug and Mason just slowly inhales, crossing the little entryway and going to the windows on the other side of the living room. The curtains are drawn, not letting any light in or out. “I’m waiting for someone to get eyes on the target and then your friend is good to go home.”
“Am I safe?” Elsie asks again and annoyance crosses Mason’s face. He’s not annoyed with her, but with me for getting her involved. Though it’s not like I planned it.
We sit in awkward silence for a few minutes, pretending to watch the news. Then I get out my phone—my real one—and start looking through photos I took of the four of us tonight. Elsie is scared and needs a distraction.
“You take better pictures than me,” she laughs, swiping past one of them where her eyes are closed.
“Oh please. You have that classic American beauty thing about you with your blonde hair and blue eyes.”
“Funny since I got that from my Swedish mother.”
We laugh and keep looking at pictures. I pretend to be looking at the four of us besties, but really, I’m inspecting the crowd around us to see if Enzo was there. A while later, we pick the best group photo, do a little editing to enhance the lighting and brighten our eyes, and I post it to my Instagram stories. My latest reel talking about how Karen, my former mother in law, hid Cory and Noel’s affair, went viral. Which is amazing, of course, but now a little bit of dread is starting to form in the pit of my stomach.
Because out of the two million viewers, who’s to say one isn’t Enzo? Yeah, he gave me a fake name and a totally made up persona, but something tells me he won’t like it if—or when—he finds out I did the same.