On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 1: The Return

Boston smelled exactly the way I remembered it — brine and diesel off the harbor, old bricks baking in the late afternoon sun, that specific kind of money that soaks into the air of a city built on dead whales and colonial guilt. I pulled my sunglasses down as I stepped out of the terminal at Logan International, and for one stupid, unguarded second, my chest seized.

Home.

The word arrived unbidden, in a voice I had spent five years surgically removing from my throat. I crushed it. Swallowed it back down where it belonged, beneath the newer voice — the cooler one, the one that now answered to Aria Kenzari. The one that had earned an MBA from Wharton, negotiated two acquisitions before her twenty-fifth birthday, and carried a carry-on bag containing exactly one photograph, one journal, and a four-hundred-page dossier on the man who had killed my father.

The driver was waiting at the curb. Black Mercedes, dark-tinted windows, no placard. I'd specifically requested no placard.

"Miss Kenzari?"

"Yes."

"Welcome to Boston."

I almost laughed.

He held the door for me, and I slid into the leather seat and set my bag down with the care of a woman who had learned to carry grief like carry-on — light enough to stow, heavy enough to declare at customs. The radio was on, very low. NPR. Someone discussing the price of eggs. The driver glanced in the rearview mirror.

"The Commonwealth address," I said. "And take the long way. I want to see the harbor."

He nodded and pulled into traffic.

* * *

The drive took thirty-eight minutes. I watched the city move past the tinted glass the way you watch a parade that has been organized in your honor but without your permission. The Zakim Bridge. The gold dome of the State House. Beacon Hill, where my father had taken me to see the swan boats when I was seven, and where a different kind of man now lived in a house with mullioned windows and a safe behind the library wall.

I did not let myself linger. I catalogued. I measured angles. The city was a weapon; I was here to be held by it or to hold it, and I had not yet decided which.

Somewhere on the Mass Pike, between a billboard for a personal injury lawyer and the first sight of the river, I closed my eyes, and the memory I had not allowed myself on the plane came for me anyway.

* * *

It was September of 2020. I was twenty years old. The cemetery was in Dedham, where my mother had been buried seven years earlier, and my father had wanted to be buried next to her, which was the one piece of paperwork in our family that had been honored on time.

The funeral was small. Cross Corporation's legal team had seen to that. The papers had called it a suicide. Richard Devlin, fifty-eight, CEO of Devlin Holdings, had jumped from the fourteenth floor of his own office building on the morning his company's acquisition by a larger rival had been finalized. Despondent, the obituary said. Over the loss of his firm, the reporters said. I knew, because I had seen my father every day for the three weeks between the signing and his death, that he had not been despondent. He had been planning something. I did not know what. I had not been smart enough at twenty to ask.

At the graveside, after everyone else had gone, I knelt down in the wet grass beside my mother's headstone and put my forehead against my father's new one. The granite was still warm from the mason's work. It smelled of stone dust and the plastic wrap they had used to cover the earth.

I did not cry. I had cried for a week already. I had run out of the kind of crying that helped.

What I did, instead, was open the small notebook I had brought. I had written three lines on the first page, the night before, by the light of my dorm room lamp in Wellesley, with my roommate asleep across the room. I read them aloud to my father. There was no one to hear me except the wind.

I will build a version of myself that can destroy them the way they destroyed us — slowly, legally, and from the inside.

I will take their company. I will take their name.

And I will make sure the man who ends up sitting in the chair you used to sit in realizes he is losing everything, at the moment of its losing, and knows exactly who took it from him.

I closed the notebook.

I stood up.

I walked out of the cemetery, and I disappeared for five years.

* * *

The car came off the Pike and onto Commonwealth Avenue, and the memory closed like a file being filed. I opened my eyes.

The apartment building was exactly as advertised. Pre-war limestone, black iron doors, a doorman who had been told to expect a woman with a single carry-on and to ask no questions. I gave him my name. He gave me a key and a nod so small it functioned as a handshake. I rode the elevator to the top floor alone.

The apartment itself had been chosen remotely, six months in advance. Two thousand square feet. White oak floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the Charles River like a painting I had not commissioned but could not avoid. The furniture was mine — sent ahead from the storage unit in Philadelphia where I had lived under this name for the last three years. The Rothko above the fireplace was mine. Everything in the apartment was mine, and none of it knew me, and that was the point.

I set my bag on the entry table. I walked to the window. I looked at the river for exactly fifteen seconds.

Then I went to work.

* * *

The walk-in closet off the master bedroom had been modified during the renovation. Behind a panel of cedar shelving, there was a safe. It had been installed on my instructions, by a locksmith who had been paid in cash and flown to Zurich the following day. I had the only combination.

I opened it.

Three items. That was what five years had reduced me to: three items, and a list of three things to accomplish, and the patience to do them in the order I had chosen.

The first was the photograph. My father, in his office on the fourteenth floor of the Devlin Holdings building, the one he had built and the one where he had died. He was smiling in the picture — the kind of smile a man only gave when he believed the worst thing he had survived was already behind him. The photograph had been taken three months before the acquisition. I allowed myself to touch it once, with the edge of my thumb, on the corner furthest from his face.

The second was the notebook. Brown leather, softened by years of handling. Inside, on the first page, three lines of ink that had faded slightly over five years but that I had not needed to reread because they had never left me. On the last page — the one I had written on the fourteenth of June, 2020, a week before my father's final meeting with Marcus Cross — the sentence ended mid-thought. I had not finished it. I would not finish it tonight.

The third was the dossier. Four hundred pages, tabbed in five colors. Family, business, romantic history, habits, vulnerabilities. The cover bore three words, centered, in Helvetica:

CROSS, NATHANIEL A.

I did not open it. I had memorized it two years ago. I kept it the way a soldier keeps an old letter from home — not for the content, but as proof that the cause had been real.

I closed the safe. I shut the panel.

* * *

My phone rang at nine twelve. I did not need to check the screen to know who it was.

"You made it." Daniel's voice was tight, compressed — the way it always got when he was trying not to sound relieved.

"I made it."

"And the apartment?"

"Fine. Exactly as advertised."

"And you?"

I watched a gull tilt across the river, looking for scraps the tide had missed. "I'm fine, Danny."

A pause. Long enough that I heard the hum of his office in Cambridge — the old radiator he refused to replace because it had been his father's.

"Ari."

"Don't call me that on an open line."

"Then tell me you're okay."

"I'm not okay," I said. "I don't need to be okay. I need to be exactly where I am, and I am. Tomorrow, eight-thirty, the place on Brattle. Bring the last dossier."

"Ari — "

I hung up.

* * *

I stood at the window for a long time after that. The sun finished setting. The lights of the Cambridge skyline came up across the water in a ragged, patient line. Somewhere over there, Daniel was sitting in his office, probably staring also at a photograph he kept in the top drawer of his desk that I was not supposed to know he had. I had loved him in a distant, grateful way for my entire life. I had never been able to give it back in the shape he wanted. That was one more debt I was carrying into this city, and I was not going to settle it tonight.

I leaned against the balcony rail and let myself look — really look — at the city that had raised a version of me I'd had to murder to survive. Somewhere out there, past the lights of Beacon Hill and the gold dome of the State House, past the glass tower with the CROSS lettering at its crown, there was a man eating dinner. Drinking something expensive. Sleeping, maybe. Dreaming, probably not. He would not know my name yet. He would not know anyone's name yet. Not mine. Not my father's. Not the one I was coming for.

I had three things to do, and five years to do them, and the man at the top of that tower had no idea that the first of them had already begun.

I smiled. It didn't reach my eyes.

"Hello, old city," I said, very softly. "Did you miss me?"