Page 80 of A Favor Owed

“You’re from the Bronx,” she finally says.

“Yeah…” My accent is a dead giveaway to anyone from New York. I’m not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in China, though.

“You’re wearing a St. Florian medal in that picture,” she says quietly, her voice wavering slightly. “Patron saint of firefighters, right?”

“Yeah. I was a firefighter until 9/11.” I wear that medal everywhere. I have it on right now under my suit and tie. “How’d you know that?”And why do you care?

I watch as her face goes even paler and her eyes fill with tears. When she speaks, her voice is just above a whisper. “My boyfriend has the same one.”

“Your boyfriend, huh?”You gotta be kidding me.

She nods her head slowly, and the tears spill over. “A sweet, green-eyed Irish firefighter from the Bronx. Likes the Yankees.”

Oh, damn. The McDaniels kid has seriously taken one for the team.

She stands up and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.

Well, this sure changes things. I thought I was out of aces, but Ms. Pini might have just dealt me one.

I pick up my phone. I’d better do Brady a favor and let him know he’s in the doghouse.

Chapter Thirty

Angela

There are different levels of betrayal. I knew I was betraying my dad when I made a call to the FBI and tipped them off about the clubs. I also knew that it was unforgiveable. But an even worse kind of betrayal was what my father had done to those girls. I couldn’t be his daughter anymore, not once I knew what was going on.

I’m my parents’ only child, thanks to a cancer-related hysterectomy my mom had a year after my birth. My dad had a couple of kids with girlfriends before he married my mom, but only one was a boy and the mother wouldn’t let the kid anywhere near The Business. You’d have thought the absence of a son and heir would have generated some interest in me on Angelo’s part, but no. I fell off his radar the day that the ultrasound conclusively showed I wasn’t a son who would carry on his name and his business.

It wasn’t until I brought him my acceptance letter to Columbia Law School that he began to look at me differently. I watched a series of lightbulbs turn on in his head as he read the letter and looked up at me.

I have a daughter.

She just got into one of the best law schools in the country.

She needs me to pay her tuition.

I need a lawyer who I can trust almost as much as I trust myself.

Then came the smile and the hug. Suddenly I wasn’t his pampered and petted but mostly ignored daughter. I was his adult, future-attorney daughter. His flesh-and-blood, financially-beholden-to-him daughter. For the first time in my life, he poured me a glass of sambuca, tossed in three espresso beans, and sat down to talk business. Like I was his son.

That was when I learned about the trafficking business. What he told me about the strip clubs that night—that he had associates procuring “the talent” for him overseas, that they needed visas to get in the country, and that we needed to pay off law enforcement and vet the clientele to keep things running smoothly—revealed that the clubs were actually prostitution rings. As he drew me closer into his circle, little by little, I learned that the clubs were staffed by trafficked women and underage girls.

My dad wanted me to replace the lawyer who was currently handling the visas and setting up the fronts as lawful businesses. He had to pay for that guy’s loyalty and silence. I was a lot cheaper. There’s no one you trust more than blood, especially blood who owes you.

I hid my shock and horror as best I could and feigned compliance. In the few months between getting accepted to law school and graduating from college, while making my dad think I was grateful and excited to be one of the few women associates in The Business, I started to make my plans to escape. Luckily, my dad never monitored my bank account or really paid much attention at all to how I spent my time outside his presence.

My driver Paul Centanni used his connections to track down Connor Quinn, a small-time forger in the Bronx. Connor has a soft spot for undocumented immigrants, so he was all too happy to help someone tipping off the FBI about a trafficking ring. In addition to an ID with a photoshopped picture of me with silvery lavender hair and blue eyes, Connor got me a social security card and a fake court-issued name change order so that I could update my transcripts and Law School Admissions Council documents to reflect my new name.

A few weeks later, I had my documents.

The morning after my last college exam, I put in my new blue contact lenses and took an Uber to Queens, leaving my parents the infamous “I’m going on an international yoga tour” note. I got my hair dyed at a cheap salon, called the FBI, then headed to the airport and flew to California.

Snitching to the feds is the ultimate betrayal, second only to testifying in court. I knew this when I did it, but as much as I wanted to live, I couldn’t forget the luxury I’d enjoyed thanks in part to those brutalized girls. Girls my age and younger were being beaten and drugged and raped, all so I could get my nails done and shop on Fifth Avenue and get the best education money could buy. I couldn’t live with that knowledge without doing anything, even if doing something meant I might not live.

It all would have caught up to me sooner or later. With or without Brady’s help, the FBI would have tracked me down. If they hadn’t, my dad likely would have. But the knowledge that Brady had betrayed me, had sped up the inevitable while professing to love me, hit me with a level of pain that I didn’t even know my limbic system could produce.

That was his big secret. That was the dead end. I’d been so stupid, so naive and, like he said himself, so unimaginative to think that his secret couldn’t be any worse than mine. It was a thousand times worse. My secret was just about who I was and where I came from. Brady had sold me out.

---