11. Clara
Chapter 11
Clara
H ow the hell did I get here?
I lie in the bed of Deniz’s spare room, spinning the gorgeous gold ring around my finger, my heart thumping in my fingertips. His words from a few hours ago repeat on a loop in my mind.
Someone to go to war with. Isn’t that what I always planned for myself? It had taken a lifetime of Syndicate training to hold myself still while he slipped the ring onto my finger. Overcompensating for the urge to throw myself at him, I held myself too stiffly, and I know the photos Gwen’s photographer took are likely awful.
Still, when I looked into his eyes, I could see something returned. Maybe things have shifted between us more than I thought since the night in the valley. Maybe we can make progress toward something more than unwilling partners.
I don’t believe in fate, not in the way my brother does. Charlie thinks we are the hands of a predetermined destiny, but I believe the opposite. The Syndicate was created to enact a fortune that the universe isn't kind or moral enough to provide. We create fate, we don’t bend to it.
But looking at Deniz on one knee, I swear I could see destiny written out like a storybook. A future of mutual enemies and battles fought side by side, like he said. My imagination pushed the boundaries of probability, remembering the way he touched me, intertwining those memories with his proposal.
My skin feels too tight on my body. No matter the source, the tension between us has been undeniable over the past few weeks. With this priceless family heirloom on my hand and both of us under the same roof, I can’t fathom how I’ll resist crumbling.
I force myself to stop tracing the little rivers of diamonds, picking up my phone up off the nightstand to flip through my messages and emails. Updates from Bea on new recruits from ports in Singapore, Rotterdam, and Hamburg. Video surveillance from a few airports tracking persons of interest. A message from my father asking about wedding dates.
My stomach turns over, and I ignore the feeling until I see an email from Emily titled RE: More . It’s the thread she’s used to send any additional information she can find on Deniz. Emily may think I’m paranoid, but I know there’s a chance Deniz will flip on me, and I need an arsenal of seemingly innocuous information to keep him in line.
The attached folder has a bunch of files in it. More immigration paperwork from the late ‘90s for the ?imsek family, a news clipping from the accident Deniz’s brother died in, real estate holdings under his parents’ names. At the very end, there’s a PDF of the layout of this very apartment.
I chuckle as I open it, curious to see where I’m sleeping from a bird’s eye view. It’s not a particularly large place, especially with the balcony taking up such a large portion of the square footage. The digital layout reflects exactly what I expected—Deniz’s wing of the house to the north, with his bedroom, office, and bathroom, and the guest wing to the south, with a bed and bath. I’m about to close the app and force myself to sleep when something catches my eye.
The dimensions of the room seem…wrong. This is a large bedroom, certainly, but definitely not twenty-six feet long. I sit up, the sheets crinkling beneath my weight as I zoom in on the numbers again. Twenty-six feet by thirty-four feet for the guest bedroom, it says. I slide out of the bed and pad to the far wall, still staring at my phone. Carefully, I place one foot in front of the other, toe to heel, across the entire room. Even accounting for the fact that each of my steps isn’t a full foot long, there’s no way this room is larger than twenty feet.
I turn on my phone flashlight and scan the corners of the wall and ceiling, looking for some hidden door but finding nothing. Maybe the room was redesigned when the elevators were installed? But no, when I check the blueprints again, the elevator shaft and mechanical room are clearly listed near the entrance.
Turning off the flashlight, I step into the cold hallway. All the way across the apartment, I can barely make out Deniz’s closed bedroom door. The bathroom and hallway seem to be in the correct place, so I resume my inspection, using the moonlight to find any out-of-place creases.
When I don’t find anything, I move to the living room. I stand behind the couch and turn in a circle, trying to determine what the fuck is going on. Even if Deniz remodeled when he purchased the apartment, it wouldn’t make any sense to decrease the overall square footage. I hold the tiny floor plan close to my face and note that the living room also looks slightly smaller, like the kitchen has been pushed farther into the unit.
I feel like I’m going insane, walking around Deniz’s dining area and kitchen, searching for hidden seams and doors, but I don’t know why else the blueprints would be incorrect. I stare up at the skylight in the kitchen, running through all the options in my head. Maybe the blueprints were old, and the original owners made changes.
I squint up at the skylight. Is this in the wrong place, too? It’s situated over the sink, instead of in the center of the room. Open shelving sites behind the faucet, decorated with small knick-knacks. So the last remaining option is the pantry.
I slide the door open and step into the little room. It’s not exactly a walk-in, more like a small coat closet, but I can barely fit inside. I’m still too nervous to turn on any lights, so I close the door behind me and shine my flashlight again. All three walls are stacked with shelves holding dry and canned goods, onions and garlic and other groceries. I scan the wall again, finally finding what I was searching for.
There’s a vertical line running from ceiling to floor, barely noticeable. There’s no obvious place for a door handle, so I flatten my hand against the wall and push. There’s a tiny amount of give, but not enough, so I drop my phone into my sweatpants pocket and put my full weight behind the shove. There’s more movement to my left, so I shift my weight that way, and the wall finally swings inward on silent hinges.
It’s pitch dark, the skylight in the kitchen providing very little assistance. Even my phone seems to glow weaker in this hallway, illuminating a few inches in front of me, the darkness swallowing up all the light. My right hand twitches toward the small of my back, but of fucking course I didn’t bring a weapon here. Why would I?
I reach my hand out, steadying my breath as much as I can. There isn’t anything in this apartment more dangerous than I am. Few things in this entire city are. I’ve killed armed men with my bare hands, and there won’t be a more significant threat in this…well…this hallway.
My fingertips meet cool metal, and I follow the path away from the kitchen, my bare footsteps silent against the concrete floor. I hold my breath, listening for any sound, but all I can hear is an air vent above my head.
I move slowly, one hand on the wall and one holding my single source of light. It takes a few minutes, but soon enough I stumble upon another door.
It’s simple, with no adornment and a handle without a lock. I consider turning back and waiting until Deniz is out of the house, but I’m in too deep now. I turn the handle of the door, grunting under its surprising weight as I push it.
Soundproofing. That’s what’s making this door heavy. I could recognize it by touch, but I don’t need to, because a motion-activated overhead light flickers on as soon as I step inside. The room isn’t large, but every inch of it is covered in screens. A long, narrow desk with multiple keyboards sits along the back wall, below dozens of black monitors. File cabinets line both sides of the room, and another door. When I look at the blueprints again, I can see that it likely leads to Deniz’s bedroom.
It’s like a technological bunker. Normal—if brilliant and cunning—Deniz has a bunker. It could be for work, but then why would he leave his everyday laptop so easily accessible to me? The behavior doesn’t line up.
I pull on a few of the file cabinets, finding them predictably locked, before sitting at the oversized chair in the middle of the desks. I don’t expect anything to happen when I shake the mouse in front of me, but half the screens light up. There’s no password lock, but maybe that seemed like overkill after the secret pantry entrance in his private residence?
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something critical as I watch the screens in front of me. A few of them make sense—video footage from the front lobby of his building and inside his private elevator. There’s one that looks like it’s coming from inside Dullas airport. A few from areas around Los Angeles that seem vaguely familiar.
Chasing the foreboding feeling building in my stomach, I click around until I find saved files instead of live feeds. For the most part, they look work-related. They’re organized by client, with nested files by dates and locations that contain contracts, recordings, work orders, almost everything you could think of related to his line of work.
The sensation in my gut doesn’t dissipate though, so I keep hunting. Why would he have this hideaway for his normal work operations? He has a secure setup at his office downtown, and normal encryption would keep anyone who stumbled across his personal office from…
A bead of sweat gathers at the nape of my neck as I open a random folder. In it are hundreds, if not thousands, of mp4 files. My instincts tell me to turn around, to run, but I can’t look away. I open the first video, and it displays on all the screens at once.
The angle is high, facing the storefront of a grocery store. No, not a grocery store. My grocery store. I see the image of myself and Lee, walking side by side up through the sliding doors. The image flickers and changes, now inside the store, following us as we walk up and down the aisles.
I remember this day. I don’t grocery shop often—I’m rarely home long enough to use produce—but Lee’s partner was coming into town and I was teaching them how to make orecchiette from scratch. This was almost eight months ago.
I swallow the bile stinging the back of my throat as I open another video. I immediately recognize the area surrounding Aeroporto di Bari. For a few seconds, a black town car passes through the screen, and then the video starts over.
Is that my car? Is that me, visiting my family in Bari? There’s no date or time stamp on these files, their names a random assortment of characters. My hand slips against the mouse as I continue opening files, one after another.
Me, entering my boxing gym, and leaving an hour later covered in sweat and bruises. Emily and I, eating lunch at a cafe in Santa Monica. My scarf-covered head rushing through the train station in Prague. In D.C., as I watch Charlie and Gwen walk into a charity gala arm in arm.
The front of my apartment.
My hand freezes when I see myself through my own window, in gym shorts and a sports bra, leaned over my notebook. I watch myself rip out three pages and light them on fire, one by one. This was a few months ago.
There are dozens upon dozens like this, of me going through my daily life. I watch Lee drive me to the underground parking lot on a loop. Watch them shut their own blinds before dark, which is apparently something I should have been doing.
There are none aimed at my bedroom or bathroom window, but I have no idea if that’s moral or logistical. Very few have sound, most placed too far away to catch anything I was saying anyway.
This is nearly a year of my life, on tape. Nearly every minute I was in public, there’s traffic or ATM camera footage of me passing by. It would take months to go through all of these recordings.
“Damn, you caught me.”
I swing around in the chair and reach for my gun, remembering too late that the small of my back is empty. I must have been so engrossed, so fucking disturbed, by the screens in front of me that I didn’t hear Deniz enter through the other door. I don’t move a muscle, watching him as he leans casually against the doorframe, still open to his bedroom.
“What the fuck is this?” I ask, tilting my head behind me. A six second image of me crossing Wilshire at Beverly repeats over and over. Deniz raises his eyebrows at me.
“I think you know exactly what that is,” he says slowly, like talking to a small child. I swallow down the rage begging me to bite back.
“I know what it is. I don’t know what it means .” The words are calm and cutting, thanks to three decades of Costa training. My mother’s voice lives in the back of my mind, repeating, your emotions are your worst enemy and your closest confidant; you must control them or they will control you.
“Research,” he replies simply, crossing his arms over his bare chest. I breathe through my nose, refusing to break eye contact with him.
“On me,” I say, causing him to roll his eyes and scoff.
“I had to know who I was marrying, didn’t I?” he asks flippantly, moving farther into the room. My muscles tense like a scorpion coiling to strike, but I don’t react outwardly, tracking him with my eyes.
“This has been going on long before we met,” I accuse, shifting my arm to rest on the desk so I can easily push myself out of his reach if necessary. He notes the motion and rolls his eyes again.
“Not exactly. This has, however, been going on long before you met me .”
The words chill the blood in my veins, as does the casual way he says them. He doesn’t seem one bit bothered that I’ve seen these recordings. In fact, he almost looks bored, like this was some sort of inevitability.
“You seem very calm for a man who is about to die,” I threaten, watching as he slides his hands into the pockets of his joggers.
“You’re not going to kill me, Clara,” he chuckles, and his apathy almost sends me over the edge. But I breathe and tilt my head, assessing his lazy smile and relaxed posture.
“I think you overestimate my mercy.”
“I think you overestimate your options,” he retorts, a gleam in his eye that I’ve never seen before. Of course, I haven’t fucking seen it before. I don’t know him.
I don’t know anything about him.
“Do you really think The Syndicate will overlook you killing your fiancé? And even if they would, do you think they’d trust you again?” He clicks his tongue, and I fight the urge to swallow hard against the lump in my throat. “You got approval from the council. You vouched for me. You agreed to bring me on as the co-leader of your purported mission, and you missed all of this ?” He waves his arms around the room, a cruel laugh on his tongue. “How could they ever trust you to lead them, to arbitrate fate itself when you don’t know what’s happening in your own bed?” His tone drips with condescension as he moves toward me again, still out of arm’s reach. “Plus, you still need a husband.”
His words cut me to the bone, every miniscule speck of self consciousness and doubt magnified a thousand times over. I could blame this on Emily, but it’s not her fault. It’s mine. I was the one who tried to build my own fate, who forced Deniz into my life. I was so distracted by my need to clamber onto my throne that I ignored what I was dragging to the helm with me.
“I can replace you. I’ll dig my claws beneath your skin until you beg for mercy and tell me why you did this,” I threaten. But Deniz still looks unfazed, leaning to whisper into my ear.
“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
I reach out and strike him below the ribs like lightning. He grunts, and I twist my other arm around him to shove him into the desk behind me, keyboards and monitors rattling as I use the momentum to shove the chair out from under me and wrap my hand around his neck.
“I don’t care what the consequences are. When my family sees all of this, they’ll understand my decision.” I say it with confidence, but there is a seed of doubt buried in my mind. I will have to tell the council the truth about the circumstances of our engagement—about my lies and deceit.
“And the birthright will be passed to your younger brother,” Deniz replies, echoing the thoughts rattling around my mind. “Clara Costa, the only firstborn in the history of The Syndicate of Fate to involuntarily lose her promised position. What legends will be passed down about you now? The woman so filled with pride she could not see her own hand in front of her face.”
I press down harder on Deniz’s neck, stopping his monologue. I’m stronger than I look, but I know he isn’t fighting my grip on his throat or my elbow in his sternum. In fact, buried beneath the rage and hatred I see in his eyes, there’s another flame burning.
My stomach clenches, and I push the knowledge away, unable to think about anything but the consequences of killing him now. I can’t see any other options. I’ve laid my own trap, organized my own downfall.
“Tell me why you did this,” I demand, letting up on my grip. He coughs and grins up at me, completely unbothered that his life hangs in the balance.
“I need you,” he says, and the words carry too many currents to untangle. “I have a personal mission, you might call it, that requires the resources of The Syndicate to achieve. I think you can understand not leaving something like that up to chance. I needed to guarantee your attention.”
My mind races to the night we met—well, the night I met him. To Delilah, disappearing mid-date. Deniz’s grin grows as he watches the cogs in my mind start to move in alignment.
“What did you do? Threaten them?” I ask, knowing he’s two steps ahead of my thought process and hating it.
“Not all of them,” he scoffs, throwing me an incredulous look. “Some of them I paid, a few I had to be more convincing with.”
These videos go back almost a year, which means every failed date, every unreturned call, has all been because of Deniz. There’s a tiny kernel of relief, knowing it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t so fundamentally broken that no one could stand a second date with me. But the anger is overwhelming, drowning out all other feelings until I’m choking on it.
“You’ve left me no other option,” I say, and press my palm fully down on his trachea.
But almost immediately, his hand comes up to circle my wrist. He doesn’t pull, just gently strokes his thumb along the inside of my arm. The motion is so filled with compassion that it startles me, and I pull back enough to let him breathe.
This time, he coughs more forcefully, breathing in deeply against my hand, until his lungs are steady again.
“You do have another option. You could go along as planned.” I open my mouth to argue, but he cuts me off with another graze of his thumb up my forearm. “You need me, and I need you. We may hate one another for the rest of our lives, but we can achieve our goals, our purpose, with each other’s help.”
My mind races, thinking of the way my family would react if I tried to replace Deniz as my partner. There would be investigations—thorough ones. And even if I could kill him, erase any public connection to us, lead the eventual investigators astray, and find a new spouse, all in a timely manner, I still couldn’t ask Emily to lie to the council on my behalf. That is one step too far, even for the future matriarch.
There’ s no way out of this, at least not right now. And as far as I can tell, Deniz needs me alive, so there’s little concern for my life. Temporarily, that is. Better to bide my time and come up with a more thorough plan than act hastily now and ruin any chance I have to fulfill my legacy.
I pull my elbow from his sternum and see his eyes light up as he realizes he’s won. I look back up at the screens, and I feel like throwing up. How could I have missed this? How did I not feel his eyes on me all the time? I know we live in a world of surveillance, and we are all constantly watched, but I hoped I would be able to feel when the same set of eyes were on me more than once.
I felt them at the bar. But then again, he wanted me to feel them.
“I’ll never trust you with another drop of Syndicate knowledge,” I say, backing toward the door that leads to the pantry. He shrugs, readjusting to lean his hip against the desk.
“Who's underestimating who now?” he replies, running a hand through his hair with a wink.
I feel for the doorknob, making sure I have an exit path. It’s a straight shot, so I shouldn’t have to turn my back to him as I leave.
“You know, I could kill you as soon as we’re married,” I say, unable to match his level of casual hostility no matter how much I try. “Widows and widowers have ruled The Syndicate for generations.”
“We’ll see about that too,” he replies, but I can hear the unsaid words. The dormant threat that maybe, just maybe, he doesn't need me alive much longer than that either. “You were right about one thing though, Clara. The world does need protection from people like us.”