3. Clara
Chapter 3
Clara
“ N ice shirt.”
Completely deadpan, Lee stands on the sidewalk outside Deniz’s building, holding the back door to the car open. I look down at my outfit—well, what’s left of it—and shrug. Deniz lent me a t-shirt that says Kraja Golf Resort and Spa in bright green letters across the front. I shrugged my jacket over it for warmth, but my jeans are rolled up inside my purse. The shirt barely covers my ass, which had been the point when I left. Always give them an exit to remember.
“Thanks, I’m into free merch now,” I reply, sliding into the back seat. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but it’s never really dark in LA either. Streetlamps and freeway overpass lighting are part of it, but despite the hour, it also seems like the sun has barely set, the haze of the city skyline oozing purple across the horizon.
That light is what I focus on as we drive back to Los Feliz, the roads as empty as they can be here. I roll down the window and let the cool winter wind run through my hair, soothing my frayed nerves as I come to terms with the decision I’m about to make.
I need a spouse. There’s no more time to wander around social events or seek out friends of the family. Charlie’s already legally married to Gwen, not that it’ll be official to The Syndicate until they have a ceremony on family land. In a few short months, my brother will be a more valid leader in the eyes of the council than I am, despite my dedication to our family and its mission during my mother’s recovery. I’ve known this reality about my future for my entire life, but every day the inevitable crawls closer and closer, and the claustrophobia and panic set in.
There is no room for error. If I had more time, maybe I’d make the effort to get to know Deniz, learn about him like normal people do. Go on dates, slowly introduce him to the world we live in, see if he could withstand the storm. But I don’t have the luxury of any of that.
Pure luck put Deniz in my path. I don’t believe in fate, but I refuse to ignore an opportunity when it presents itself. His experience and career field would be invaluable attributes for The Syndicate to acquire, and he’s cunning and clever enough to thrive in this world. I only have to ensure his involvement, one way or another.
I slip my phone out of my bag and scroll through the messages that Charlie and Gwen have sent to the group chat since the mission ended. Confirmation of clean up, hand off of names and dates to local non-profit organizations assisting the victims of this trafficking operation. I trust them with the finer points, so I skim to ensure there are no red flags before calling Emily.
“This family needs to learn what the appropriate hours for phone calls are,” my favorite cousin grumbles as she picks up the line. I hear her sheets crumple as she rolls over .
“Being in this family is a 24/7 on-call position,” I reply, putting my phone on speaker and adjusting my jacket. My pistol is digging painfully into my side, and I half-wish I had left the damn thing at home.
“And what does her highness need at two o’ clock in the fucking morning?”
Emily and I are close, in a different way than Charlie and I are. My brother and I were always held apart. An heir and a spare, a crown and a sword, taught separate skills to most effectively serve our generational duty. But Emily was a friend . Smarter than me by a mile, she was the one person who could ever challenge me in a way that wasn’t threatening. So she gets a little more grace than anyone else with her tone.
“I need you to check into someone for me,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. I will not feel guilty about this. I am in an impossible situation, and this is a viable solution. The shame burning me from the inside out—borne from the fact that I let this man make me come twice, left him with his clothes on, and am about to dig so far into his life I’ll know him better than he knows himself—will need to be extinguished.
“Can this possibly wait until the morning? This is my third night without sleep, and I think I might start having delusions soon.” I don’t press Emily about what’s keeping her up at night. She’s got a history of running off on her own to research some strange poison or long-range weapon, and it’s never been anything but a boon to our operations.
“I can give you a short brief, and you can have thirty-six hours to get an initial report back to me,” I acquiesce, realizing I haven’t checked on her in a while. My focus has been so fully consumed by Syndicate operations, hunting down leads on my mother’s attack, and fucking dating , that I’ve ignored a lot of my other responsibilities. Namely, nurturing this family.
“Fine,” she groans, clearly pulling herself back under her blankets. “Is there a reason you and your brother refuse to use the security company we pay an outlandish amount of money to?”
“Some things need to be kept in the family,” I reply. “Plus, I don’t want this available to the rest of the council yet.”
That seems to pique her interest. “Okay, friend or foe?”
“Not sure yet,” I admit, staring out the window. “I’d like you to do a deep-dive on Deniz ?imsek.” Easy enough to figure out his last name—he signed the check at the bar in plain view. “In his thirties, lives off Fareholm in LA, works in systems security and surveillance technology. Full work up on him, any relatives, and his close network.”
I fucking know Lee is raising their eyebrow at me in the rearview window, but I ignore it. Lee is one of the few people I’m not blood related to that I trust, and I don’t need them questioning this plan right now.
“Is this for business or for pleasure?” Emily asks, her voice a little garbled, and I’m pretty sure I’m on speaker while she types notes into her phone.
“When have those ever been separate things for me?” I ask, and she chuckles.
“I’m just saying, if I’m screening this guy for a job offer or a second date, my search is going to be a little different.”
I want to tell her that it isn’t different, not with us. A future with me is accepting a lifetime with a target on your back and a mission you weren’t born into on your shoulders. But there’s no point with Emily. She compartmentalizes our work the best out of all of us.
“I need leverage. Whatever you can find that I can use in a negotiation,” I offer, tilting my head up to the ceiling of the car. We’re almost back home, and I’m desperately looking forward to crawling into my bed and attempting not to relive the feeling of Deniz’s face buried between my thighs.
Lee clears their throat. It’s a small sound, but I realize I still have my phone on speaker, which means Emily heard. The other side of the line is silent, and I glare at my driver through the rearview.
“Oh, so Lee has opinions about this assignment, huh?” Emily asks, and I can hear her fucking grin.
“Lee has absolutely zero opinions about this, if they want to keep their job,” I snap, but it’s a mistake. It’s fuel to Emily’s fire. She has to know, has to dig, has to understand. It’s so fucking annoying, and the reason she’ll always be smarter than me, no matter how much I push myself.
“No opinions at all,” Lee mumbles, flicking the turn signal and idling on a corner as a truck passes by. “You did seem to enjoy yourself, for once.”
“Oh, so this was a date,” Emily croons, suddenly much more awake. I roll my eyes as she gets revved up, nearly giggling into her phone. “Man, this even gives Charlie a run for his money. At least he met Gwen twice before he asked me to dig.” She pauses, and I can hear the cogs turning in her mind. “But if this was a date, why would you need leverage…”
I clench my teeth as Lee finally pulls up to our building—they live on the bottom floor, and I live above them in the other unit. The gates to the underground parking garage slide open as I hear Emily take a few deep breaths.
“Clara, please don’t…” she starts, but I cut her off.
“This isn’t up for discussion. Look into him like I asked.” I convince myself that I’m doing what’s necessary, what’s right for my family and for our future.
“Lucia won’t like this,” Emily whispers. My throat clenches. I know she’s right. My mother would be furious. There may have been a history of Costa spouses who weren’t exactly enthusiastic participants in their marriages, but that practice ended long before my mother’s reign. Regardless, she gave us so much time and freedom to find someone we truly cared about. She always said she didn’t want to have to rely on luck, like she had with our father. They love each other, but it was by chance that their arranged marriage turned out so fortunately. She wouldn’t push her own children to those extremes.
Yet here I was, directing a council member to assist in the blackmail of the potential future father of the heir of The Syndicate of Fate. Lucia would be livid. But when I weigh what’s more likely to lose me my position as heir, being unmarried comes out on top. Especially considering my mother never has to know.
Of all my strengths, strategy has always been my foremost. The world is one large Go board, and if I focused, I could always see every piece that would be moved. This was my best opportunity to use them to my advantage.
“Lucia won’t know,” I say, voice clipped, unbuckling my seatbelt and avoiding Lee’s gaze as I step out of the car. “It’s an order. And it stays between us.”
She mailed me a fucking file. A manilla envelope, sitting on my doorstep, like I’m in a fucking spy movie. A pink sticky note on the front of the file reads this is a terrible idea!
I toss the package on my kitchen table as I walk inside, avoiding its contents. Emily took a week to get me this information, despite my explicit fucking instructions; I can avoid reading it for a few more hours.
I start my laptop and listen to it groan and whir to life as I change. I’m soaked to the bone in sweat, but I don’t have time to shower before my meeting. Instead, I strip off my clothes and splash my face with water, avoiding the blooming bruise on my cheek, before scrounging sweatpants and a t-shirt from the bottom of my dresser. Once I’m presentable, I slip into a chair at the table, still avoiding the envelope that seems to be screaming my name, demanding to be opened. Or maybe burned and forgotten, I can’t decide.
When I log into the secure video conferencing app we use for Syndicate meetings, Emily’s already there. Waiting. She barely allows my audio to fully connect before she’s grinning through the screen.
“Did you get my delivery?” she asks, her tone syrupy sweet and grating. I grab my notebook from the chair beside me and open it to the next blank page. Little ridges of leftover paper line the inside of the spine, like a tiny mountain range pressed flat against the page.
“You know, I technically do have the authority to excommunicate you,” I sneer, staring down at my notebook. I won’t give Emily the pleasure of letting my eyes wander to her delivery.
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” she says, and I watch her wave her hand dismissively out of the corner of my eye. At least I trust she’d never act so casually if there were other council members on the call.
“You found something I can work with?” I ask, curiosity getting the better of me. It’s been almost a week, and I’ve avoided calling Deniz, despite the fact that the card he slipped into my jacket pocket is pinned to my refrigerator with a magnet.
“Have you reconsidered my suggestion of actually dating him?” she asks, and I huff out another annoyed breath. No, I haven’t considered that, and Emily knows it. Once I’m set on a path, there’s rarely room to convince me to stop. It’s a flaw, I’m aware of that, and the reason I keep my brother and cousins close. They know how to get through to me when I truly need it, and Emily hasn’t employed any of those tactics yet, so this idea can’t be that outlandish.
Emily is also…different. From all of us—me, Charlie, and Bea. When she turned eighteen, her parents gave her the option to leave The Syndicate permanently. Unlike her sisters, Aunt Alessia believed this life should be a choice, even for those born into it. Both Emily’s mother and father, Mauricio, have given her more leeway to find herself than has ever been given to a Costa. Even more than Charlie and I, who have been allowed to control much more of our future than our parents ever were. And much more than Bea, whose mother is perhaps more stringent with her daughter than even her parents were with her.
We’ve watched each other grow up, more like sisters than cousins. But sometimes I wonder if Emily doesn’t truly grasp that difference in the expectations between us, and how much longer the leash that ties her to this family is compared to mine.
I can’t say any of that. Not now, with less than three minutes until the rest of the council logs on to this call. Maybe not ever, when it would push away the one person who has ever seen many vulnerabilities.
So I glare, and she rolls her eyes in response. It’s a predictable yet comfortable exchange.
“He’s not a particularly private guy. He seems pretty normal, other than the whole Co-Founder and CEO of a multinational systems security and surveillance company thing,” she says with a look that asks did you know you were having a one-night stand with someone this well-suited to our lifestyle? “There are some shadowy parts of the business, but that’s pretty par for the course for his field. Obviously, there’s no way I’d be able to get into anything protected, but I brought you everything I could find that you could possibly use.”
I roll my shoulders and crack my neck, scratching thick pen marks into the corner of the page.
“I thought you were supposed to be a researcher,” I press, trying not to be annoyed. I don’t need everything she could find . I need something that will guarantee his compliance.
“Yes. A researcher. I take publicly available information and draw conclusions. Or, you know, sit in a lab and mix biological components together. Just because I’m better with a search engine than you and your brother doesn’t mean I can hack into the inner workings of an actual security company.”
I’d bite back at Emily’s tone, and the incredulous look she has in her eyes, but a notification that Bea is joining the meeting pops up in the corner of my screen. At nine a.m. on the dot, the rest of the family’s virtual faces blink to life on the screen. My mother and father at the family dinner table, the computer placed at the far end so we can see them both; Charlie and Gwen sitting side by side at Gwen’s desk in their home office; Gia in her kitchen, leaning against her counter; Alessia and Mauricio have signed in separately, neither of their locations recognizable; and Bea, in a room I’ve seen in her background a few times but have never been to.
When everyone seems settled, my mother brings the council to order. Her hair is longer than it was when I last saw her in Trani, but she doesn’t use it to cover the burn scars on her neck and face. She sits in a chair instead of her wheelchair, which must be a sign of progress. Every time I look at her, I can’t help but think about how close she came to death. There were others who didn’t survive. She so easily could have been among them.
“Clara, provide an update on last week’s assignment.”
“The survivors intercepted at Mumbai Port last Wednesday have been returned to their families in southeast Asia. Bea has done some digging into the advertisements that lured them into forced labor, and we have the shipping company who was set to retrieve the container they were held in under surveillance. We believe it’s the same organization that set up trafficking operations in Yunnan last fall.” I take a deep breath, my eyes flickering to Charlie and Gwen’s faces before focusing back on my mother. “Although we tried to stage the rescue of the survivors for a time when the traffickers would be on site, when our team arrived, the victims were locked inside the container, and no one else was present. We believe they shifted operations earlier in the day to accommodate a change in the shipping schedule at the port.”
It was not a failure. Our missions were always primarily about getting the victims out of harm’s way. There are always future opportunities to search out the perpetrators of these crimes, but there are never second chances to prevent the harm we know these victims would experience if we waited.
“We have some solid leads from the shipping company,” Charlie cuts in, relieving me of my mother’s assessing stare. “I’ve placed one of our assets in line to be hired by their south and west Asian operations branch, so we should have an inside source soon.”
“And our contact at the port?” Mauricio asks. I avoid looking at my brother and his wife as I clear my throat.
“After a recent security threat, we relieved a portion of our domestic and international port contacts. We’re still placing new staff and developing relationships in most of the Americas, West Africa, and South Asia.”
It’s funny, my mother and her sisters rarely look alike, but they all raise their eyebrows the same way at my words. Gia’s eyes narrow, like she’s organizing puzzle pieces in her mind. Alessia, always more trusting than she should be, gives me an understanding look.
My mother purses her lips, but stays silent. The Syndicate runs regular security assessments on our assets in the field—both those that we placed from within our ranks and those who we met and turned to our cause. Bea takes the burden of this work; she’s like a bloodhound with secrets, often knowing someone will turn before they’ve even made the decision themselves. But I think my mother can tell that this isn’t a random security sweep—it’s related to her attack.
Seeing her here now, it’s hard to believe she nearly died. But the fire that almost took her life has left indelible scars. Not only the twisted lines climbing up her neck and cheek, but ones in our family. The implicit trust we once had in each other is shattered, and no one knows when the remnants will be pieced back together. If they ever will.
We don’t talk about the investigation at council meetings. We haven’t told my mother about the traitor that Charlie and Gwen tortured and killed, or the information he provided to us months ago. But it’s clear to everyone in this room that no information is safe, and very few can be trusted. We all have hand-selected teams who know key details about The Syndicate and our work. Telling the group that someone with a Syndicate tattoo has been recruiting Gia’s team members to our enemies would be like setting off a smoke bomb in our living room—no one would be able to see clearly, but everyone would be ready to defend or attack.
After a few more moments of tense silence, my mother nods and turns to Gia for an update on central and eastern European operations. I try not to be obvious as I breathe a sigh of relief. Not being able to trust a significant portion of my family has been grating on my senses. I feel paranoid, despite the reality of the danger hiding in the darkness.
And when my eyes meet the envelope sitting beside me, I wonder if trust is something I’ll ever feel comfortable with again.