Page 102 of One Last Shot

What?“Will do. Now, about Tony?”

She clears her throat. “He’s into some bad shit, Sasha. I have literally felt sick for the last twelve hours since I found out.”

I look at her expectantly. “Are you going to tell me?”

Petra looks like she might throw up, and the way she swallows makes me think she might actually be choking back bile. She hands me her phone and says, “Start reading from the top.”

The name at the top of the text message is Alicia. No last name.

Alicia:Holy shit. I hope you’re sitting down, cupcake. Because this is not what I expected to find when you asked me to look into TG. I should have known a rich shit like him would have skeletons in his closet.

Petra:The rich ones always do.

Alicia:Truth! Unfortunately his skeletons are of the underage variety.

Petra:???

Alicia:It seems he’s really into sleeping with underage women. Particularly coked-up underage sex workers.

Petra:No. Full stop, no!

Alicia:There’s a woman in the East Village who runs a sex trafficking ring. He has regular payments that get sent to her every month from an offshore account.

Petra:That’s sickening. How do you know about payments from an offshore account? And that those payments are for underage girls, not women?

Alicia:You don’t want to know the answer to either of those questions. The thing that matters is that I have evidence, and I need to know what you want me to do with it.

Petra:Give me a day to figure that out.

I lift my eyes from the screen and look at Petra. “What the hell is she talking about?”

“Which part do you need me to explain?” Petra asks flippantly. “The part where Stella’s uncle is a pedophile or the part where he’s regularly cheating on his wife with underage sex workers?”

“When they were here for dinner that night, you knew, didn’t you?” I ask her. I knew Tony was making Stella uncomfortable, but my brain didn’t jump to something like this, whereas hers clearly did.

“I knew something was off,” she says as she tucks a dark curl behind her ear and looks up at me with those big, beautiful eyes. “It felt like he was conditioning Stella to accept unwanted sexual attention, which is a big trigger for me.”

“Why?” I try to phrase the question as gently as I can. What has happened to her in the past that makes her able to recognize this behavior?

She takes a deep breath through her nose and raises her chin. Her lips are pressed together tightly. “Tony reminds me of a lot of my dad’s friends back in Austria, the creepy ones who always liked to refer to themselves asDyadya So-and-so.They weren’t my uncles, they weren’t related to me. But they used their friendship with my dad as an excuse to touch me, to tickle me, to give me attention I didn’t want. It started happening when I was a little older than Stella, maybe around nine or so. And my parents would always be like ‘Oh, just give your uncle a kiss,’ and I felt so helpless, like I didn’t have control over my own body.”

“Shit, Petra, I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know that was happening, but I feel like I should have been there to protect her. Or Victor, or her dad, or her mom should have stood up for her. It eats at me that she felt so alone even before her mom and Victor died.

“There was this one friend of my dad’s,” she continues, “who always had his hands on me. He’d come up behind me and rub my back or give my shoulders a massage. I was thirteen when we passed through a doorway in my house going opposite directions and he openly groped me. He slid his palm right across my nipple, then squeezed my breast, leaning down to whisper some creepy term of endearment into my ear. My mom had died a few months earlier, and while she was alive, no one had tried anything that blatantly inappropriate. I remember thinking ‘I’m the only one who can save me now.’ So I put syrup of ipecac in his drink that night. He started vomiting, and when he rushed to our front door to leave, I handed him his coat and said, ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’ I used that strategy more than once, and pretty soon my dad’s friends stopped spending time at our house.”

I gaze at her across the couch, noting how her face is triumphant, as it should be, but her eyes are sad. “I’m really sorry that you had to go through that alone. I wish you’d told me back then.”

“So what? You could come over every time my father had friends over and be my bodyguard?” Her laugh carries the notes of bitterness.

“If that’s what it took. I would have done anything to protect you,” I tell her. She shakes her head slightly and her lips curve into a frown. “What is that look?”

“Nothing.”

“Petra, I said I’d have done anything to protect you, and you shook your head and frowned. What. Was. That. Look?” I ask, drawing each word out.

She raises her eyebrows and smiles brightly. “Honestly, it was nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She’s blatantly lying to me, and an uneasy feeling is wrapping itself around my intestines, snaking its way up to my stomach, clawing at my esophagus. “Petra,” I draw out her name slowly, a low warning. “Don’t lie to me.”

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