4. Deniz
Chapter 4
Deniz
I ’m usually a very patient man. But over the last week, I have lost all semblance of the virtue.
I expected Clara to reach out immediately. She’s been so earnest in her search for a spouse that I couldn’t imagine she’d wait to take the bait. But when I didn’t hear from her, it concerned me. Made me reckless.
I watch from across the street as she leans back in her chair, talking into the laptop perched on her kitchen table. She scratches a few lines into the notebook to her right without looking down at the page before crossing her arms again.
I can’t see the screen, but it must be instinctual for her to position it facing away from open windows. I’ve noticed she even blocks her phone with her body when she’s waiting for a crosswalk light.
I haven’t been able to access anything on her computer remotely. Based on my early research into the Costas, they have contracted with a South Korean security company called DigiSpark, but the relationship is simply financial. They have no familial ties, blood or legal, to the organization, which isn’t how they prefer to do business.
It’ s both the key to my plan and a significant limitation. I can’t attempt to infiltrate their protected network without alerting DigiSpark, and now that Clara knows my line of work, she’ll immediately be suspicious. But it also places me as an attractive potential partner who can expand their internal resource control.
Clara closes the laptop, snapping my attention back to her. She pushes away from the table and stands, disappearing from my view. When she returns, she’s holding a small black lighter in one hand, and a soot-stained dish in the other.
In a process that’s become familiar, I watch her tear a page covered in writing from her notebook. She clicks the lighter on and stares at the paper as it burns down to her fingertips. The final corner flutters into the dish as she lets go of it, burning to ash.
If she turned her head now, she might see me. I’m leaning too far out of the shadows, and it’s too early in the day to be here. I should be at home, watching her through the camera I installed over the entryway of this convenience store. But something tells me that if I see her in person, I’ll be able to figure out why she hasn’t called.
Clara pulls a thick envelope into her lap, fiddling with the seal. She stares at it for a long while, drawing her knees to her chest so her heels rest on the edge of her seat. It surprises me how little she looks like a killer, curled up like this. When she finally unseals the package, she almost seems afraid.
She pulls a stack of pages from the envelope, scanning them one by one. Over the next twenty minutes, I feign a phone call and pretend to smoke a cigarette as I watch Clara read the paperwork before her. At one point, she opens her laptop and types in sporadic bursts, seeming to read from the screen when her fingers still.
It physically pains me not to know what she’s looking at. I’ve always been a bit of a control freak, but this goes far beyond that. My entire life’s purpose for the last year hinges on Clara letting me in. I know working alone would be foolish, and operating within The Syndicate is my best opportunity to avenge Kerem’s death.
I take a lap around the block, trying to calm my heartbeat. Regardless of what Clara decides, I will do whatever it takes to honor my brother’s memory. If she’s forgotten about me, or for whatever reason has decided against seeing me again, I will find another way to determine who sparked the flame that killed my brother, and take down The Syndicate. With my dying breath, if I must.
I’m halfway back to my apartment when my phone buzzes. I slip it from my pocket, expecting Taf or Chase. But an unsaved number I recognize flashes across my screen.
“This is Deniz,” I say, moving quickly through the people walking up and down the street until I can see her building in the distance.
“Hi, this is Clara,” she says, her voice catching. “Ah, from last week?”
Clara from last week. Clara from the last year of my life, more like it. I have to stop myself from laughing out loud.
“Clara, it’s good to hear from you,” I say, catching my breath as I finally make it back to my usual station outside the convenience store.
“Sorry I haven’t called; work’s been a little busy,” she huffs, like she’s struggling with something. I can’t see her through the front-facing windows, so she must not be in her kitchen or living room. I’ve never seen her go into the guest bedroom on the north side of the house, except to clean, so I make my way down the street to see if I can catch her through her bedroom window.
The angle isn’t the best. The buildings here are close together, and the Costa family owns the ones on either side of Clara’s apartment, renting the units at prices significantly below market rate to well-vetted and very discreet residents. I thought about trying to buy one out via a shell company, but concluded it would raise too many red flags and send The Syndicate digging into things I didn’t feel like covering up.
I can see that the light is on in both the bathroom and her bedroom. I don’t have any cameras trained this way—even for me, some things are too much of a violation of privacy. So I watch her shadow dance across the wall against the lamplight.
“I understand. You do important work,” I reply, hearing a bump and soft swear on the other side of the line. “Everything okay over there?” She huffs out a laugh.
“Yeah, I should stop trying to multitask,” she says with a sigh, and then seems to remember herself. “Anyway, I was hoping you might want to meet again. Maybe during daylight hours.”
“I’d love to,” I reply. The tension that’s been threaded through my shoulders since she left my apartment finally dissipates, and I catch a glimpse of her elbow through the window. “I can make us a reservation…”
“Actually,” she cuts me off, her voice higher-pitched than usual. “There’s this place I love in Pasadena. Do you mind if we meet there? My treat, since you were so generous last week.”
The memory of her taste hits me again. I’ve tried so fucking hard not to think about the way she came for me, the sounds she made as she ground her pretty cunt against my mouth. But I fail every night, fisting my cock to the memory of her and hating myself for it every time. I cough and adjust myself, trying to maintain the persona of a man simply lusting after a woman without a grain of animosity to be found.
“I promise, it was my pleasure,” I reply, keeping my voice low. “ But I’d be happy to experience one of your favorites. Name the time and place.”
“Does tomorrow at seven work?”
She gives me the address of the restaurant, and apologizes again for not calling sooner. Right before she hangs up, I hear the sound of metal squeaking and water running. And as I stand on the sidewalk staring up at her apartment, I watch the bathroom window fill with steam.
I arrive early at Redbud Home, an American food restaurant off Colorado Boulevard whose seating spills into the blocked-off road. Over the past twenty-four hours, I’ve dug as deeply into the restaurant as I could, wondering why Clara would want to meet here. But the owner’s finances don’t indicate any dealings with The Syndicate, and the family doesn’t hail from Italy. As far as I can tell, there are no marriages or agreements in their mutual past. The single item of note was how popular the restaurant became overnight, but that could be attributed to a few fortuitous reviews from food bloggers and influencers.
Maybe she really does like the food.
When I walk inside, Clara is already at a table in the corner. She’s got her back to the wall, facing the windows and entrance. When she sees me, she grins widely, and it feels wrong.
I may have spent a limited amount of time with her, but her affect is completely different from when we met at Skyline. Her movements are more controlled, her smile fixed. A feeling of foreboding crawls up my spine, but I can’t back down now .
When the hostess leads me to our table, I press a gentle kiss to Clara’s cheek, breathing in her soft scent of coffee, vanilla, and patchouli. Her shoulders loosen at my touch, but she still maintains the same shrewd look in her eyes.
“Thank you for meeting me all the way out on the east side,” she says, gesturing toward the restaurant. “I’m glad it’s not too busy, it’s usually pretty packed.”
Not too busy is an understatement. Apart from the hostess at the front and a waitress sitting behind the bar, the restaurant is suspiciously empty. Few witnesses , the part of my brain where self-preservation lives whispers. But I’m backed into a corner. If I manufacture a reason to leave, she’ll grow even more suspicious than she already is. And I’ll ruin my best chance at destroying her.
The waitress comes over and greets Clara by name, and they chit-chat about work and the surprising amount of rain recently as she pours us waters. Clara orders her regular
and then turns to me.
“Do you mind if I order a few things for the table? There’s so much you need to try.”
I agree, trying to connect the uncanny-valley smile and overly sweet persona of the Clara in front of me with the woman I know she is. Even if my lone encounter with her was the woman in my bed last week, this wouldn’t make any sense.
“And Alexandra, do you mind giving us a little privacy?” Clara asks sweetly, taking the menu from the waitress’s hand. Alexandra winks and smiles as she walks away. With my back to the door, I don’t see it, but the audible click of the lock turns my blood to ice.
“So, we didn’t do a ton of talking last week,” Clara says with a slight blush. “I thought maybe we could get to know each other a little better.”
There’s a sinister energy in the air, but I can’t place my finger on the source. She doesn’t strike me as the type to play with her food, and if she figured out that I’d been following her, I’d most certainly have become prey. So I pretend I’m not afraid for my life and fix her with a charming smile.
“I’m an open book. What do you want to know?”
We go back and forth, exchanging stories from our childhoods. She asks me what it was like immigrating to the U.S. as a pre-teen, and I ask if Bari is as beautiful as it looks in pictures. She doesn’t outright lie to me until I ask about her parents. She says they’re both happy and healthy, retired and traveling the world after a lifetime of non-profit work. I’ve heard this story before—it’s what the Costa cousins have been feeding colleagues and family friends since Lucia’s attack.
Even the imagery of Lucia living a life of luxury and relaxation makes me livid, my peripheral vision spotting with rage. She should have died, not Kerem. Maybe whatever gods lie beyond would have been satisfied with her soul, and left my brother to recover like the Costa Matriarch does now.
I don’t lie because I don’t see the point. If everything goes according to plan, Clara will be my fiancé in a very short amount of time. There’s no reason to build a backstory of falsehoods that will have to be maintained throughout our time together. There’s no point in lying to ghosts. And if it doesn’t go to plan? Well, one of us may be dead in a matter of minutes.
Alexandra hauls out a tray laden with food, covering our table with half a dozen plates. Clara thanks her, and Alexandra and the hostess both disappear behind the kitchen door, whispering and giggling behind their hands.
“Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I prefer American food over Italian,” she whispers conspiratorially, using a massive steak knife to slice a burger down the center, setting each half on separate plates. “It’s a veggie burger, I didn’t know if you maintained halal.”
The consideration takes me by surprise, but I suppose I did speak Arabic and talk about growing up in Türkiye last week.
“No, I don’t, but thank you for checking,” I say, grabbing one of the small plates from her hands. She reaches for another dish and smiles at me.
“Well then, you’ll have to try the cheddar bacon fries.”
She hands me dish after dish, explaining why she loves each one. The balance, the sauce, the heavy-handed garlic and onion. She’s not wrong; each dish is incredible, and I tell her such.
“The food is delicious, but that’s not why I love this place,” she says, licking her spoon clean of chocolate lava cake and placing it on the plate in front of her. I can’t help but track the movement of her tongue, swiping away the lingering dessert on her lips.
“Then why do you love it?” I ask, scraping the last of my own dessert from the plate.
“The owners are old family friends.”
My breath catches in my chest, and I hesitate just for a moment as I lift my spoon to my mouth, but she sees it. I hope she assumes it was inspired by her tone, and the thinly veiled threat behind her words.
“Are they?” I ask, my voice betraying me. I should have found a way out. I’m not ready to kill her, not ready to give up all the knowledge that she has about the people who killed Kerem. I don’t know if I even can kill her. I’m not a Costa, an assassin trained since birth. But unlike her, I don’t have anything to live for, and even a second of desperation can sharpen a blade quicker than a lifetime of dedication to a mission.
“Oh yeah,” she replies with mock apathy, flicking her curls off her shoulder. “When my cousin Emily was in grad school, she went on this excursion to the Florida panhandle to collect coral snake venom. Not exactly my idea of a vacation, but to each their own.” She shrugs a shoulder, taking another bite of her dessert and savoring both the taste and whatever she’s building to. “Emily’s trained to handle snakes and collect venom, so she was confident that she wouldn’t get bit. Funny, though, how sneaky snakes can be.”
Out of her purse, Clara pulls an envelope, eerily similar to the one I saw her holding at her kitchen table. She places it in front of her, tapping her finger on the lifted seal.
“She probably would have died out there, in Florida of all places. But then this scrawny, eighteen-year-old kid covered head to toe in khaki pops up out of nowhere. And by some miracle, he’s got an injector of antivenom with Emily’s name on it.”
I watch as Clara opens the file and pulls out a much smaller stack of pages than I saw earlier. My pulse beats in my ears, and I struggle to make the motion of swallowing appear casual. What if she really did find out I’ve been stalking her? Watching her? I thought, at worst, she would reject me and I would find some other path to my vengeance. But it strikes me that she could kill me now, inside this restaurant with floor to ceiling windows and giant pot lights.
“Anyway, turns out that the son of the owner of this very restaurant was training as a wildland search and rescue EMT,” she continues, seemingly unbothered by the fact that I’ve stopped breathing. “He saved Emily’s life. And now we protect them.”
“Protect them?” I ask, because I don't know what else to say. Don’t know how to avoid this being the last few minutes of my life.
“From the darker workings of the world,” Clara says slowly, like she’s explaining something incredibly complicated. “They’re good people. The kind who teach their children to seek out someone in trouble and lend a hand. They deserved investment in their restaurant, and a booming customer base, and for their kid to get a degree and a job doing what he loves. They’re good people, and they deserve to be protected from people like us, don’t you think?”
If both her hands weren’t gently wrapped around the stack of papers in front of her, I would have sworn she cocked a gun at me under the table at those words. I force myself to breathe to the tempo of the music playing overhead.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I reply shortly, trying to find some sort of exit strategy. Or a way to kill her before she kills me. To at least take out one Costa as I die.
“Oh, I think you do,” she says, almost sweetly, thumbing through the stack of pages. “Deniz ?imsek, born in izmir, Türkiye to Asya and Mirac on August 26th—a Virgo,” she whispers with a wink, and against all sense of self preservation, I find her entrancing. She’s so far into her element, her confidence is intoxicating. Despite my lingering fear that I’m about to die, I can’t stop myself from watching her lips as she smiles at me.
?????. Qar?nah. She’s a siren, a succubus, a demon come to damn me.
“You didn’t spend too much time in izmir, though. First to Istanbul, then to New York, and finally here. You’ve stayed in Los Angeles since you moved here, except for a short stint at Khalifa University for your bachelors. Then to the California Institute of Technology for a master’s in computer science, very impressive.” Something in my brain must have short-circuited, because I nearly take the words as an actual compliment. “But this is where young Deniz’s life takes a turn, doesn’t it? Because ?imsek Security Services was born, and you learned the power of knowing everyone’s secrets.”
That shakes me out of whatever trance she’s put me in. She slides the top page across the table to me; a news article about security breaches at domestic and international airports. Public criticism of the companies they were using, despite being top names in the field. Opinion articles in Forbes about the downfall of “old school” enterprises who weren’t adapting quickly enough to the new age of digital threats. My eyes flicker up to meet hers, somehow both cold and warm, calculating and impressed.
“Most people would see a young, upstart company seizing an opportunity when presented. But I know better, Deniz. Because you don’t seize opportunities, you create them.”
She lays out more and more examples. Not anything definitive, but certainly circumstantial. Banks, government agencies, communications platforms, universities, retail conglomerates, manufacturers, shipping companies, hospitals, realtor groups. Time after time, a small flaw in their firewall would be exploited by a nameless perpetrator. Nothing stolen, nothing compromised. Enough of a close call to shake up their shareholders and executives. For them to demand an upgrade to their systems that their current contractor can’t provide.
“You’re smart about it, I’ll give you that,” she says when I remain silent, counting how many cases she’s gathered. Despite the fact that she’s uncovered what no one else has been able to see, I’m relieved. Because she doesn’t know about Kerem, or Istanbul, or the last year of me standing across from her front door. “Sometimes, you don’t bid for the client after you’ve exploited the weakness. You let a competitor take them, to keep anyone from getting too suspicious, maybe.”
“This is ridiculous,” I scoff, letting the way she’s rattled me show through. I’ve had investigators, both international and domestic, at my doorstep more times than I can count. It comes with the territory of my line of work, where most government agencies suspect you know more than you should. But no one has ever noticed this pattern. Not until Clara. “Even if it were true, what does it matter to you? Are you some kind of private investigator?”
Clara laughs, hearty and loud with her whole chest.
“Come on now, Deniz, let’s not play dumb. We both know you’re too smart to come here without at least asking around about my family.” She almost pouts, slumping back in her chair. “Did you think the rumors were exaggerated?” I lift my eyebrows at her, but she stares back at me, waiting for me to participate in the conversation.
“I know the Costa family is involved in more than assisting victims of human trafficking,” I acquiesce, trying to find the line between truth and lie I want to walk. “I assumed that your business, like mine, requires engagement with the darker parts of humanity every once in a while. I also assumed, given time and trust, you and I could be more honest with each other.”
There’s a little twitch below her left eye, the only evidence that my words make any impact. I still don’t know why she’s collected all of this evidence against me. It’s not like she can go to the police, or has any motivation to.
“Unfortunately for both of us, time is not a luxury I have right now,” she sighs, rolling her shoulders back and relaxing her smile. “I’ve got this deadline I have to meet, and you’re going to help me meet it. Unless, of course, you’d prefer I tip off Interpol’s cyber crimes unit.”
Oh. Blackmail. I should have figured this out much quicker. My gaze lands on the stack of papers. Technically, she doesn’t have anything substantial. Even if she gave what she has to some investigative body, there’s no evidence of what she’s proposing, even though she’s got it mostly correct. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that there isn’t some government analyst out there who could find evidence, regardless of how well I’ve covered my tracks, but it would be unlikely. And besides, now I have a head start to track down any loose threads.
But I’m too curious to simply shrug off her threat. And this is still my best opportunity to infiltrate The Syndicate. So I make a show out of considering, glancing at the papers and my hands. When I finally meet her gaze, she has victory in her eyes.
“What exactly do you want my help with?” I ask, and I can hear her clench her jaw as she grins back at me.
“I need a husband.”