Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
ADDIE
Ilost the detail in ten minutes flat.
The two men Vidar had assigned were competent.
They just weren't expecting a woman in a city she'd lived in for half a decade to know exactly which block had a delivery entrance that opened onto a completely different street.
I walked four blocks east, took the subway two stops, and came up blinking into the grey afternoon air of the East side feeling like myself for the first time in a week.
The park was a private square; the kind that exists in certain Manhattan neighborhoods as a reward for paying a particular level of rent. Locked iron gate, keypad entry, a key code Elias had texted to the server in a code only he and I understood.
Inside the park were bare trees, empty benches, the hush of a space that was technically outdoors but felt sealed off from the city's noise. At this hour on a weekday morning, it was empty.
I pushed through the gate.
Nell saw me first. She was in a camel coat; her locs pinned up and curling around her long neck. She looked at me the way she always looked at me when she was trying to assess damage — thoroughly and without softening it.
Elias stood up beside her. He looked thinner than the last time I'd seen him in person. There was a yellowing bruise along his jaw that he hadn't mentioned on the phone. Fucking Gunnar. I'd knee him in the balls the next time I saw him.
I crossed the path and pulled my brother into a hug before he could say anything.
Elias hugged me back hard. He smelled like the Blackwood estate — cedar, wood smoke, the floral laundry detergent I'd smelled on my sheets that first night there.
He smelled like he'd been living there long enough for it to get into his clothes.
I turned to Nell. She opened her arms, and I stepped into them. When her strong arms encircled me, the iron park fence and the bare trees and the whole complicated weight of the last week compressed into the familiar scent of her perfume and the firm, no-nonsense quality of her embrace.
Her eyes dropped to my throat. The mark was covered. I'd worn a silk scarf, high and deliberately knotted, but it was still visible. That was the point of its placement.
"What the fuck, Addie?"
"It's not what you think."
"Says every abused woman on the planet."
"Sit down," I said. "We need to talk fast."
"We can talk after we get you out of here."
"I'm not leaving him," I said.
Nell looked at me. "Addie."
"I didn't know about Alaska. I'm angry about it. I'm not defending it."
"You can be angry and leave still, Addie. They're not mutually exclusive."
"I don't want to leave."
Elias looked down at his hands. His shoulders sagged as if he was facing our father to tell him he'd lost something, or broken something, or had simply breathed wrong.
"I have watched you for three years," Nell said.
"I have watched you navigate some of the most aggressive, manipulative men in corporate New York without losing an inch of yourself.
And right now you are sitting here telling me you don't want to leave a man who took your freedom and your career and is currently trying to take me away.
And you're touching your bruised throat while you say it. "
"The mark is something I chose."
Nell sat back. The professional mask stayed on, but something shifted behind her eyes — a recalibration. "We'll deal with your Stockholm syndrome later. The Blackwoods are into things that will bring federal heat."
"Which is why I'm not planning to blow things up," I said. "I'm planning to use what you found. Bring the list to Vidar. Let him fix it before it becomes a problem. In exchange—"
"In exchange for what?" Elias asked. "You wanted out of this life, Addie. This is your chance. For good. I'm the heir. There is no out for me. But I can go forward on my terms."
"Or we take this to the police," Nell interjected. "I don't know what kind of crazy families you two came from, but I, for one, am not cool with having my agency taken away. Your husband has been having me followed, and the hell am I going to put up with that."
"What?" I asked.
"Since the Sterling transition started, there's been a man outside my building.
He follows me from the office, waits outside the lobby, picks up again in the morning.
" Nell's voice was even, but her jaw was tight.
"I've seen him four times. Same face, same coat.
He's not subtle about it, which makes me think it's a warning.
Vidar wants me to know I'm being watched. "
The fury that moved through me was clean and immediate.
I had been willing to negotiate. I had been building the architecture of a compromise in my head all morning: the partner list as a gift, Nell as indispensable, the whole careful structure of a woman trying to keep everything she loved in the same room.
And my husband had been having my best friend followed.
"Describe him," Elias said.
Nell described the man. Medium height, wide through the shoulders, a scar that bisected his left eyebrow, a habit of standing with his weight on his right foot.
Elias and I looked at each other at the same time. We both knew that scar. I had watched it get made when I was eleven years old, in the back corridor of the Vanguard, when my father's enforcer took a broken bottle to the face during a dispute.
"That's Boyle. He's been with my father's pack since before we were born."
"Pack? What are you two in a motorcycle gang or something? Why would your father be following me?"
I smelled it then. Movement outside the iron fence. More than one person, moving with the unhurried confidence of people who had already decided the outcome of the next few minutes. The gate mechanism disengaged with a click that sounded nothing like the hesitant beep of a keypad entry.
It opened like someone had a key.
I was on my feet. Elias was beside me. Between us, Nell rose slowly, her eyes tracking the gate.
Four men came through first. I knew the way they moved; the weight-forward economy of Vane enforcers, men who had spent years doing my father's work in the dark corners of upstate New York. Behind them, taking his time, hands in the pockets of a coat that had seen better decades, was Adolphus Vane.
The amber of his eyes had gone more yellow with age. He moved with a slight forward lean that hadn't been there ten years ago. But the authority was intact; the absolute, bone-deep certainty of a man who had never once believed a locked gate applied to him.
He looked at Elias first. His gaze moved over me and landed on his heir in the way it always had — cataloguing, assessing, running a calculation to see if the boy measured up.
Then he smiled without looking at me.
"Adolpha," he said. "You look like marriage is agreeing with you."
I didn't answer. I was acutely, viscerally aware of three things simultaneously: the mark under the silk scarf at my throat, Nell standing one step behind my left shoulder with no idea what she was looking at, and Elias to my right, breathing in a slow and deliberate rhythm that told me he was holding something back by force of will.
"Son," he said.
"Don't," Elias said.
Adolphus looked between us. Then, with the unhurried ease of a man who believed he had already won, he turned his gaze to Nell.
"Thank you for bringing them out of the house. I've been trying to arrange a family reunion for weeks. My daughter refused the suitor I provided for her. Yet she's always had a fondness for humans."
"Humans?" Nell breathed. "Addie, what the hell is going on?"