He was a contradiction, a bigger mess of contrarian values than anyone I’d ever known outside myself.
He was tall, dark, and sinfully handsome, a masterfully created man.
My heart raced, and the primal urge to flee spiked hot again through my veins because even though walls separated us, I knew instinctively he was not done hunting me.
And I thought, for the first time in my life, that I might have just met my match.
ELENA
My life settled into an odd kind of routine over the next week. I woke up early every morning to use Dante’s state-of-the-art gym. Sometimes, I ran on the treadmill the way I had at my own gym, reading The New York Times while I warmed up, then doing intervals for forty-five minutes. Most of the time, I worked out with Dante and some assortment of his crew.
As I said, it was odd.
They were all criminals, rough wiseguys who cursed freely, flouted everything I stood for, and made money hand over fist through ill-begotten means.
I shouldn’t have liked them.
But I found I kind of did.
They were fun and free in a way I’d never seen people act before. They joked with each other just as easily as they delivered brutal blows when they fought on the sparring mats. There wasn’t competition between them as there was between every lawyer and me at the firm, that edge of envy and wariness that curdled socialization. They were brothers in crime, bonded over battles in alleyways and on street corners, in backrooms and ballrooms. They were as capable of sophistication––I learned Chen actually had a master’s degree in mathematics and Frankie was COO of the Salvatore-owned Terra Energy Solutions, a well-known energy and gas company––as they were of ruthlessness.
They were a tangle of contrasts I found myself wanting to sit cross-legged on the ground and pull apart until I held each individual thread in my hand. I was curious by nature, a puzzle solver by trade, but there was something primal in them that called to me like the howl of a fellow wolf at night.
I felt moved by them and moved by their acceptance of me when normally, I would have judged them and found them wanting without ever giving them a chance. It shamed me to acknowledge that as much as it awed me to know they were above that.
I caught Dante watching me sometimes when I sparred with Marco, who was short enough that we were more evenly matched, or when I spoke to Chen as I stretched about the recent economic downtown. He watched me with this look in his eye I couldn’t quite figure out, but it looked something like pride. I didn’t speak to him, avoiding any alone time with him as if it was essential to my safety, and in a way, it was. But I could admit to myself that I watched him too, and what I found continued to fascinate me.
They clearly respected Dante, deferring to him in a myriad of different little ways I cataloged with more interest than I should have. They mimicked his movements sometimes, shifted their positions throughout the room in correlation to him like planets around a singular sun, and followed his orders without blinking an eye. They teased him often, fought him hard when they sparred, and seemed relaxed in his company, but an alert attentiveness in the soldiers spoke of their willingness to do more than just his bidding, an intensity that spoke of their readiness to dive in front of a bullet for him.
It was heady to observe their dynamic.
Not just observe like a witness, like the fly on the wall I’d been most of my life, but to participate in it.
They enfolded me into their morning routine like sugar into egg whites, beating us together until, at the end of eight days, I felt like a homogenous member of their five a.m. practice sessions.
From there, I did my ablutions, grabbed a banana from the bowl in the kitchen, and had Adriano take me to work, where I focused mostly on other cases while we waited to find out when the trial date would be set for Dante. Until we knew, we didn’t have access to the witness sheet, and therefore, it was difficult to know how to defend Dante against whoever they would find to replace Mason Matlock. The only evidence they seemed to have of Dante’s racketeering and illegal gambling was a low-level bookie in New Jersey who’d been arrested eight months ago and rolled over on Dante to reduce his sentencing time as well as a wiretap they’d taken of Dante speaking to a known sports gambling shylock in the Bronx about betting for the 2018 World Series years ago.
It wasn’t much, and it would be nothing if we could squash the murder charges.