Page 4 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
I find my voice, a thread of glass in my throat: “If you touch her?—”
He holds up a hand, wedding band dull with scratches. “No. I won’t touch my daughter. I know what she’s capable of. I know how she would retaliate.” He leans closer, his calm enormous. “But you are a different story. Your love for her is a liability. A flaw.”
I try to kick out, but a meat-paw claps my shin so hard I nearly faint. The pain brings clarity. I taste Laura’s name, but don’t say it.
Dominic sighs. “I did not come to debate you, Mr. Landon. I came to clarify. Laura belongs to this family. Her blood, her destiny, everything. You are a passing fascination — nothing more. Sicilian daughters do not take husbands from the outside. You are not in the story.”
He lets that hang. The car’s lights stab forward in brief, haunted pulses. I see my own reflection in the rear window: a man who thought he’d left this shit behind.
“She’ll come looking,” I say, hating the crack in my voice.
Dominic examines his cufflinks, little gold hammers. “She won’t. She was going to tell you tonight, actually. That’s why we did this now, before you could embarrass both of you.” He waves a hand; the gesture is kingly, cruel.
“You’re lying,” I snarl, but the certainty doesn’t hold.
Dominic’s face is patient — the mask of a surgeon setting in for a long, satisfying operation. “It doesn’t matter what you think, Pierce. You’re done. We can do this the easy way, or the tragic way.” He leans in so close I smell his breath, mint and violence. “Your brother, Adam, is being watched. Your grandparents. If you try to contact Laura again, if you try to come home, they are dead by morning. You understand this?”
Everything in me goes white-hot, then icy. I have never hated a man so purely. But my words fail me. My hands are useless.
Dominic takes my phone, wallet, keys, passes them to the silent man in front. “Tomorrow morning, you’re on a private jet to London. New identity waiting. Decent money. We’ll check from time to time to make sure you’re being obedient. If you so much as call the wrong area code, we start with Adam, then old Mr. Landon, then the wife. Is that enough warning?”
I stare at my hands. They are the hands of a boy, after all, not a killer. Not a hero.
“Why,” I say, the word a whimper, a prayer.
Dominic softens, just barely. “Because you'll never be family, Pierce. And because my daughter deserves to rule, not ruin. You would have ruined her.” He almost sounds sad. “I know love. I killed the only woman I ever loved, to keep her safe. Sometimes that’s the job.”
The car slows. The doors open.
Two men drag me into the night, across a tarmac wound with blue taxiway lights. The cold hits in a blast. The jet looms ahead, its belly open, crew waiting. No other humans in sight. They walk me up the steps. A woman in a British Airways uniform hands me a passport. "Welcome aboard, Mr. Campbell," she says, a practiced smile that means nothing.
Behind me, Dominic watches. He holds up a hand, two fingers together, and the men fall back.
“Bon voyage,” he says, and I want to scream, but I don’t.
They close the door. The lock clicks — metallic, final, absolute.
And then I’m hurtling into the black, towards nothing, towards exile, toward the end of every lie I’ve ever told myself about freedom.
Chapter 4
Laura
Four Years Later
Once, I believed the city would make me invisible, if not invincible. Now, New York in December only magnifies every raw place, a bruise pressed by cold air and the too-bright holiday lights. My feet crunch over blackened ice leaving a trail that disappears in the sunlight. With my hands stuffed in my mother’s old cashmere coat, I watch my breath rise and vanish with each exhale. Before long, I spot Frida Larson at our usual bench, posture military but gaze disguised behind cateye sunglasses, a Starbucks cup bleeding heat into her gloved hands.
She doesn’t look up, so I break the ice. “You’re early for once,” I say, and she gives a tiny, sharp-toothed grin.
“You’re late. That’s different.” She pats the bench and I sit beside her, close but not touching. I see myself reflected in her glasses — eyes large and black, hair escaping its beret in little static sparks. We look like two sisters on a day out, if you squint, which is what I want the city to believe.
The air is cottoned with distant noise: children shrieking on the playground, wheels slicing over glass-smooth ice at the Wollman Rink down the slope. The only true privacy left is in the open, where no one expects secrets.
Frida passes me the coffee, the cup scalding my palm. “Espresso with oat milk,” she says. “Because you’re a martyr.” She brushes flakes of something — snow, dandruff, who knows — from her thigh. “I assume you have a plan, Laura.”
I stare at the ice skaters twirling in loose orbits, their faces pinked with weather and glee. “No plan. Just a request.”
Frida makes a humming sound. “I’m listening.”
