Chapter 6 #2
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame Chicago in pale morning light.
The polished mahogany table stretches the length of the room, six heavy-bottomed glasses arranged around a crystal decanter of amber liquor that nobody has touched yet.
I pull the wish box from its locked cabinet where our executive assistant left it for us and carry it to the head of the table.
The box is heavier than it looks. Every wish inside represents a life in crisis, a woman in danger, a situation that the legitimate world has failed to resolve.
I've opened this box hundreds of times over fifteen years.
Read thousands of wishes. Sorted them into categories of viable, impractical, dangerous, and occasionally heartbreaking.
I open the lid. Seventeen red envelopes. I pull them out one at a time and arrange them across the mahogany surface, my fingers moving through the familiar ritual with a methodical efficiency that requires no conscious thought.
The brothers arrive in ones and twos over the next twenty minutes. Rafael first, silver threading his temples, his tailored suit crisp, his dark eyes carrying a quiet authority.
Drake fills a chair with his massive frame, Charlotte's pacifier poking from his suit pocket. I can’t help but smile at the thought of our burly enforcer who kills with one hand and wipes spit-up with the other.
Luca drops into his seat, loose-limbed and buzzing with energy.
Kon settles at the far end of the table, coiled and still. He could clear the room in under three seconds if he needed to. He’s already scanning the envelopes.
Rowan is late. Rowan is always late. He slides in five minutes after everyone else with a look that dares anyone to comment, and nobody does.
"We have seventeen this round." I begin sorting.
The first fourteen are standard. Protection requests, custody disputes, financial emergencies, one woman asking for help escaping a stalker, another asking for legal documentation to leave the country with her children.
I assign each one to the appropriate brother, making notes in the margins, my pen moving fast across the page.
Envelope fifteen stops me.
A dark watermark stains the corner of the envelope, slightly warped from moisture hitting paper. Tears. Someone was crying when they sealed this.
Damn. Tears kill me. I set the others aside and hold the last envelope between my fingers. I tap the edge of it on a finger and that’s when it hits me.
A scent.
Warm vanilla hits first, but under that is a faint but unmistakable floral scent I spent hours memorizing last night.
My hands go still over the envelope. Every muscle in my body locks. Heat rushes up my neck and floods my face, a slow burn that starts at my collar and climbs to my hairline.
I can feel my pulse pounding in my temples, behind my eyes, thick and heavy, and I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth to keep my expression from betraying what is happening inside my chest.
I know this perfume. I buried my face in it. I breathed it off her neck while I was inside her. I smelled it on my pillow when I woke up alone.
I open the envelope. The paper inside is tear-stained, the ink blurred at the edges where moisture warped the words, and the handwriting slants hard to the right, fast, desperate, written before she lost her nerve.
I wish the man who touched me tonight could be mine. He made me feel like I was more than a last name, more than my father's plans, more than invisible. I know I can't keep him. But I wish I could. I just needed someone to know this. -SW
This is her.
I keep myself still but my brain is fast tracking all the details.
The brothers are talking, sorting, debating assignments around me, and I tune them out. My eyes are locked on two letters at the bottom of the page, written in ink that bled a dark circle where the pen pressed too long against the paper.
SW.
My brain cycles through names. SW. The Wicker Park address pushes forward again, the same connection that nagged at me at four in the morning and wouldn't stick. Harrison's daughter lives in Wicker Park. Harrison's daughter whose first name is Sloane.
Sloane Whitmore. SW.
No.
I’m wrong.
Fuck that.
My stomach drops through the floor. I wait for the thought to fade the way it did when the taxi address first flagged it. It doesn't fade. It locks in and every detail I already have falls into line behind it.
Sloane wears Chanel. I've smelled it at Harrison's dinner table for a decade without thinking twice.
Sloane wears red vintage heels. Cherry red.
Every time. The shoe on my desk is her shoe.
The taxi dropped my mystery woman in front of Sloane's apartment.
And the face in the dome light, the jaw, the profile that nagged at me through two hours of security footage, I've been looking at that face across her father's table since she was a teenager and I never once paid attention.
Harrison's daughter was in my bed last night.
I fucked my best friend’s daughter.
The recognition builds one detail at a time, each one locking into the next, stretching all the way back to the text message on my phone last night.
The wrong number. The birthday wish. The woman who showed up at my door stripped every recognizable detail away except the scent I should have placed the second she walked in.
She knew what she was doing.
I don’t know if I am impressed or pissed.
And then the older memory hits.
Not from last night but eleven years ago.
His fifteen-year-old daughter was being attacked.
I tore the man off her so hard I heard something in his shoulder pop.
I broke his face against the wall and then the other guards took him away.
Once I made sure Sloane was okay, I made sure the guard never thought about harming women and young girls again.
I remember the terror in her baby blue eyes. I should have remembered them last night. I was so wrapped up in my own lust all I saw was a beautiful woman there to take my loneliness away.
I turn back to the wish.
More than a last name, more than my father's plans, more than invisible.
Harrison. My best friend of twenty years.