Page 3 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
He sips espresso like a cardinal, biding his time. I can feel the blood draining from my knuckles as I grip the chair arms.
“I want out,” I say, before he can try and charm me with small talk.
Father sets down his demitasse with surgical precision. “Good morning to you, too.”
“I’m not here for chit-chat.” My voice is a wire on the verge of snapping. “I’m here to tell you I’m done. No more collections, no more dead drops, no more cleaning up after him.” I won’t say Pierce’s name. That would be a declaration of war.
He leans forward, elbows on the desk. “It’s not as simple as you pretend, Laura. The world doesn’t snap its fingers and let you go. You know that.”
I look him in the eye. “I’m not asking permission. But I am asking you to make it easier.” My lower lip trembles, and I let it. Maybe he’ll mistake the fear for daughterly affection.
He smiles then, soft and understanding, the way he used to when I was six and convinced there were monsters under my bed. “Let me tell you something about monsters, cara mia,” he says. “They’re never content with just the closet.”
“I know.”
He stands, walks around the desk, and touches my cheek. For a second, I think he might strike me, but his fingers are gentle. “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“Then let me go.” I lean into his hand, desperate and small. “Please, Papa.”
He sighs, long and theatrical. “You deserve a real life. If this boy makes you happy, what father could say no?” There is love in his voice. I want to believe it. I do. He kisses my forehead and sends me home with a promise. “Don’t worry, Laura. I’ll take care of everything. Go start your tomorrow.”
I collapse into the cab and sob until we cross the river. Grief, relief, hope—they all taste the same on the way up. In the apartment, I clean feverishly. I throw out the bourbon, scrub the kitchen, and hang cheap garlands from the window. I buygroceries, the good pasta, his favorite cheese, and a two-pound steak. Candles, too. I arrange them along the mantle and light them all, just to make the dingy place look less like a crime scene and more like a home.
Pierce is supposed to be home by seven. I change into red silk and dab perfume on my wrists. I count the seconds until I hear his tread on the stairs. Six forty comes, then seven. I check my phone. No missed call, no text. I pour wine and wait. The candles burn down. The food congeals on the stove.
By nine, the apartment is so quiet I can hear the snow falling outside. I walk to the window, press my forehead to the cold glass, and say his name out loud, just to feel the syllable break in my throat. The city is a veil of white static, swallowing everything.
At ten, I blow out the last candle and let the dark come for me. I crawl into bed, still in my red dress, still hopeful, if only because I am too exhausted to mourn. Pinky leaps up beside me, purring like something is right with the world. In my last waking moment, I imagine the future as a sheet of black ice, and myself stepping into its center, unafraid, waiting for Pierce to follow.
Chapter 3
Pierce
On the courthouse steps, the wind gnaws the last warmth from my face, just as the city’s gray light sinks behind the granite towers. The world is sutured together by the squawk of police radios and a bus hiss, all outrage and exhaustion. I’ve won today. I’ve survived another hearing, another judge’s migraine, another client whose face will haunt me in the cold hours before dawn. But today — tonight — the only verdict I care for is waiting uptown, curled into sheets of borrowed linen and laughter. Laura: still mine, for now.
I replay her voice as a refuge from the hours of testimony. How she’d whispered to me this morning, half-mocking, “Don’t let them eat you alive.” And then the thumbprint of her mouth on my collarbone, a promise in red. My body aches for her, blood a current dragging me north through traffic and crowds, past the lies that paved our old world. Nothing else matters. Not the past, not what’s coming. Just her. The wolf-girl, grown colder and more beautiful by the year, but with that animal softness she reserved for me alone.
So I move fast, shouldering through the crowd, already hearing my own keys in Laura’s lock, already tasting the cheap Chianti she would have waiting, already undressing her in theruined parlor of my imagination. That’s why I miss the first shadow tailing me — a flick of darkness, too deliberate, in the avenue’s glass. My phone buzzes: three missed calls from a Midtown number I don’t recognize. I thumb it silent, teeth clenched.
My path takes me down fifty-second, where the lights are more strangers than friends, and the city’s arteries run slick with the day’s failures. My gait is longer now, my heartbeat a metronome. I cross at the light and that’s when the world capsizes.
A hand, gloved, slides around my throat, pinning the words in my mouth. A second hand jerks my left arm, wrenching my shoulder so hard I see nothing but static. Three men in black, faces a negative exposure: all absence, no identity. Their hands are trained, not just strong but confident, the choreography of men who have taken other men before me. I try to shout but my jaw is pushed sideways, cheek mashed against the icy hood of a waiting car.
They open the back door and fold me inside, every movement practiced, every pain point mapped and charted. I taste bile, hot metal. The world blurs.
Then, in the dim wash of the dome light, I see the impossible: Dominic Stasio.
He sits driver-side rear, so close I could reach out and claw his face bloody, but I know better than to try. Dominic is older now, jowls slackening, hair like river ice, but his eyes are still the color of premeditated murder. He watches me the way some men watch fights — hoping for a kill.
“Hello, Mr. Landon,” he croons, voice dipped in something smooth and ancient. “You look well. Law is treating you kindly?”
Beside him, the men in black do not move, do not breathe. Dominic’s cologne is all over the car, a smell I want to scrub from history, but can’t; it triggers something sick and childlike in mybackbone. The engine hums, interior lights off now, city rolling by outside in moiré strips of yellow and gray. The windows are blacked out. We are somewhere between Hell’s Kitchen and oblivion.
“I assume you know why I’m here,” Dominic says.
“I assume you’re going to tell me anyway.”
He clucks his tongue. “Laura was always right. You’re stubborn.” A thin smile. “That’s why I liked you. At first.”
