Novel Upper Westside Novels & Stories

POV: Lena Moretti The new location was a brownstone in a quiet neighborhood on the east side. Not The Obsidian with its glass walls and surveillance cameras and the ghost of who I'd been when I lived there. This was neutral territory. Three floors. Furnished but impersonal. Naomi had secured it through a chain of corporate entities that would take Julian's investigators weeks to unravel. By then, it wouldn't matter.

Clean, dark, and damn him, perfectly suited to his face. “You’re going to make my life difficult.” I blinked once, then forced the corner of my mouth up. “Thank God. For a second there, I was worried my dress wasn’t contributing enough.” :::: Nicholas’s business associate’s house stood on the Upper East Side with the kind of silence only old, rich buildings possess. Golden lights glowed warmly behind the tall windows. A row of black cars lined the curb. From the outside alone, the place already looked like the kind of setting where people made million-dollar decisions while holding champagne and smiling like their sins were tax-deductible.

Adeline's POV --- I'm surely going to get arrested for this. I mutter it under my breath as I approach a Mercedes G-Class, phone raised. October sunlight hits the glossy black paint, the car glowing against the gray Manhattan sidewalk, screaming money I'll never have. Just another Friday on the Upper East Side. The street runs with its usual chaos. Businessmen rushing with heavy briefcases, a delivery cyclist almost committing vehicular manslaughter against a tourist squinting at G****e Maps.

After speaking with Joanna extensively over the last few weeks, I’d finally gotten a better understanding of how things were going to be now. The first thing we’d done was manage to get an apartment in the Upper East Side. It was a quaint two-bedroom which was about ten minutes away from my new office. Rachel and I had chosen it together, and we’d gotten an old friend of hers to handle everything over here before we came back. We would need to get some furniture over the next few days, and I was looking forward to doing that.

"Mark's not stable right now. I'm not taking chances with your safety. As his plans come undone he could come after you to get at me." She couldn't argue with that. Didn't want to argue with that. "Where are we going? Your new place?" she asked. "Yes, the brownstone. I moved in three weeks ago. You'll be the first person besides me and the movers to see it." "Really?" "Really." He smiled slightly. "It's not fully unpacked yet. But it's home." The car wound through the city, eventually stopping in front of a beautiful brownstone on the Upper West Side. Four stories, pristine facade, the kind of place that cost more money than Willow wanted to think about spending on a place.

Jasmine's POV Where I chose wasn't hip. It wasn't some fashionable diner we had to fuss and primp over, waiters in black shirts and spouting to us condescendingly about what wine to drink and farm-to-table flavour. It wasn't a fifth-story club that he could reserve based on his black card, with champagne and a city view more money than most pay for an apartment rent. No. It was tiny, discreet on the Upper West Side, the sort of establishment you might drive by a hundred times and have no idea that you had done it unless you were actively searching for whatever it was that it did.

Merciless. And famously, dangerously sexual. The stories about his appetite for women were legendary among New York's underground circles. There was the socialite from the Upper East Side who'd tried to seduce information from him about a rival family's operations. She'd emerged from his penthouse three days later with cigarette burns on her thighs and rope marks around her wrists, her spirit so thoroughly broken that she'd checked herself into a psychiatric facility and never spoken of what happened.

Six AM arrives without sleep. I'm sitting in my car outside Greg's building. Upper West Side. Pre-war. A place people with old money choose because they don't need to prove anything. The coffee from the bodega across the street has gone cold in my hand. I drink it anyway. Marcus's words keep looping: You're supposed to fight your own battles. Fine. I'm fighting. Greg's building doesn't have a doorman. Just a security system. I wait near the entrance until someone leaves for their morning run. Hold the door. Smile like I belong.

And the fifth. I kept scrolling. Studio in East New York: twenty-two hundred a month, "cozy" (read: claustrophobic), recent bedbug treatment. Room in a shared house in Far Rockaway: nine hundred a month, but the commute would take two and a half hours each way. I closed my eyes. This was fine. This was manageable. I'd survived worse. My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number. Luxury 1BR apartment available for immediate move-in. Upper West Side, 15 min walk to Central Park. Fully furnished, utilities included. $1800/month. Serious inquiries only. Text for details and viewing.

I wheel it out of the parking garage of my building and the second I start to pick up speed all my worries melt away. I shrug off my angst as I maneuver between cars and shoot down the busy streets of New York with chilly air whipping through my hair. I go and go and go and 20 minutes after I leave home I realize I’m in the Upper West Side. I head to my favorite pick up joint in the area, aptly namedThe Meat Market.