The deck had been scrubbed, but you can always tell when something’s been cleaned too well. It glistens wrong, and smells of bleach and cover up. The sun was melting into the sea like a guilty conscience. The table was set for two. White linen. Two plates. Red roses in a silver flute vase. He sat across from me like a man who hadn’t executed three people with the same nonchalance most men reserve for peeling an orange.“Sea bass,” he said, cutting into it with the precision of a surgeon. “Caught this morning. Or at least that’s what the cook tells me. Who knows? Loyalty’s a slippery fish.”He looked up, smiling like sin on vacation. “Did you ever think about that, rabbit? How nobody’s really loyal? Just different flavors of afraid.”I sipped my wine. Red, dry, expensive enough to feel like a bottled bribe. “I think some people don’t need loyalty. They just need everyone else to feel too scared to lie.”He raised his glass. “To fear, then.”I raised my glass.He laughed. That soft,
The fixer just stood there, mouth moving, but the words were marshmallows soaked in gin. He kept saying, “I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t—” like repetition could buy him time.Elky Jennings tilted his head like he was listening to opera. Then he stood up. Walked over. And without a word, shot the man once in the gut. Put the gun down. Waited. Watched.Then put the second bullet in his mouth like a period at the end of a short sentence.The table still had unfinished bottles of wine, and olives, and a small plate of caprese, which I would never eat again in my life.Elky sat down, taking chair just across from me. Wiped his fingers on a white napkin with J monogram in the corner. Took a sip of wine like he’d just finished a round of golf.I wanted to say something, to object, to save lives. But all my words had packed up and left the country.Big Elky looked at me, calm as the sea that had just swallowed three souls.“You’re wondering why you’re here, huh?” he asked.I nodded. Or maybe my n
I wondered whether Freya waited for me that evening. If she did, her waiting was in vain. I spent the sleepless night hanging from the rail, being sick on Elky’s boat. The storm passed around 5 am. The sea has become too calm for comfort. It lay outside my round window like a silk sheet—smooth, quiet, hiding things that mattered. It was the kind of morning that made you suspicious of too good weather and men in well-pressed chinos.I walked into Elky’s office without knocking. I never knocked anymore. Not after I saw what he did to the guy who always waited for permission.He didn’t look up. Just closed a leather-covered notebook with the kind of care you reserve for love letters and legal threats. His fingers lingered on the cover an extra second, like the book might whisper back if he pressed hard enough.There was a sheet of A4 paper on his desk—cream, textured, fine, the kind that flakes dignity when you fold it. There were names written in black ink. Some underlined. Some circled
The familiar turtleneck worn under navy blazer with gold buttons peeked up from beneath the grand staircase. I smiled. The guy went to the wrong floor. Now he lost me and got stuck in Beauty department. He held a phone in his hand, so the message was his idea of bullying. I fought an urge to beautify his face by adding a few nice looking bruisers to his smug face but I was running late.“Come, come, you bastard,”I muttered. “I’ve practiced knife throwing not for nothing.”But the brute was too hopeless. He had no way of figuring out where I was heading.I found the knife, tucked it closer against my ribs, and texted the driver to wait five blocks away from Laduree.And by the way, I wasn’t walking into any perfumed traps.I was setting one up.I took an elevator and walked into Ellie Saab boutique in Harrods. The kind of place where girl’s guilt came gift-wrapped, and you could drop three grand without breaking a nail. On any other day I would enjoy hanging around, browsing. But that
The rain had stopped pretending to be polite. It smeared down the window like it was in on something I wouldn’t approve. I sat in the back seat of Elky’s new Bentley, leather soft as a lie, elbows on my knees, a note folded twice in my lap like a secret trying not to shake. It was my second official outing from the house, not entirely unsupervised, naturally. Elky had loaned me the car with a smile that looked too generous and a driver that knew better than to ask idle questions.“Do you have to go shopping?” Elky’d said.I nodded and showed him a list I’ve scribbled down the last minute. It looked genuine enough. I was running out of moisturizer and my favorite pink pearl shade of lipstick, but I usually topped them up online. It took me some time to convince Elky why online didn’t work that well for the evening gowns and the seasonal camouflage a wife of respectable mafia boss has to wear in public every new season. It was a few month ago, just before the tragic dinner were some lun
It took Marta three full minutes to hand over the key. Not because she didn’t know where it was—she reached for it with the certainty of someone who’d memorized its shape by heart—but because she knew exactly what I was about to find.“It hasn’t been opened for a long time,” she said, eyes on the rusted little thing lying on the wine table between us. “If he left anything, it’s been there waiting for you,” she said.The old greenhouse stood like abandoned heaven, beautiful once, rotting now. Its windows were filmed with mildew, its doors locked tight with the kind of padlock that suggested someone thought glass alone wasn’t enough to keep the dirty past from leaking.I shoved the key inside a rusty piece of metal that ceased to look like a lock. It hesitated, resisted for a bit, then turned with a promising click.Inside, it was humid, warm and stale. The scent of decay, mold, and damp, unwanted paperwork. The vines had long since claimed the corners of the metal frame, curling over