Cruel Paradise

38

At the time, my father explained that it was for my own safety. Now, I think that with my mother gone, he simply didn’t know what to do with me. His only child. A pre-teen girl.

So off I went to a private school for rich kids in Vermont.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I met Fin and Max and had friends for the first time in my life.

My mother didn’t have any friends. She wasn’t allowed to have them. Originally from California, she met my father during a vacation to Manhattan. After knowing him only a week, she gave up her entire life to go live in New York with him. That’s how in love she was.

Or how lonely.

If she didn’t know what he was before she moved there, she certainly found out fast.

He was a king. Wealthy. Proud. Charismatic. Both feared and respected, and known by all for his commitment to his honor but especially for his thirst for violence.

Exactly like Liam Black.

“Killian,” I say aloud, correcting myself.

Killian. Not a nickname, not a middle name, not a name he’s called by anyone else. It makes no sense that he would demand I call him that. It irks me.

What irks me more is that I haven’t told Fin and Max about it. I’ve always been good at keeping secrets, but not from them. This name thing, though…I’m still working it out. There’s something important there. A clue. But to what, I don’t know.

The last time I spoke to my father was seven years ago. I’d been arrested for shoplifting. It was the only time I’d seen the inside of a police station, before or since. The bail was only five hundred dollars, but I had no money of my own. I didn’t have a job. My father paid for everything. It was the day after graduation, and I was scheduled to return to New York within the week.

But that phone call with my father changed everything.

In the mafia, a thief is the lowest form of garbage aside from a snitch. Made men will happily profit from the spoils of stolen goods, but they would never themselves stoop to the actual procuring of it. Their “honor” won’t allow it. They have associates who do that sort of thing instead—people not allowed in the mafia ranks. Non-Italians, those of poor reputation, etcetera. So when I had to call my father to wire bail money, and he discovered that I’d dishonored the family name by stealing, he flew into a rage. He screamed at me. He called me names.

He said I was stupid, my mother’s daughter to the core.

And something inside me snapped.

I was done. Done with all of it. Especially done with him.

I hung up the phone in the middle of his tirade.

I told the arresting officer I’d stay in jail until the arraignment. He looked at me strangely, then said he’d talk to the judge. I seemed like a nice girl, he said. And it was my first offense. He had a daughter about my age, and it didn’t make much sense to have me in jail with the s*x offenders and drug dealers for stealing a ten-dollar lipstick from a department store.

The judge decided to be lenient. I was released after twelve hours sitting alone in a cell, thinking. It was the first time I’d truly been alone in my life.

I loved it. There were bars on the door and window, but I’d never felt as free.

I knew my father would come for me, even though he was furious. I belonged to the family. I was chattel. I had value as a bride for a favored ally or payment for a debt: it was unthinkable to simply let me go.

I disappeared instead.

I moved to Boston with Fin and Max. Fin knew someone who knew someone who got me a fake ID. I got a job working in the mailroom of a local paper.

I was terrible at it, but I learned.

From the mailroom, I was quickly promoted to the advertising department, and from there to an assistant position for one of the staff writers in the features department. Hank had aspirations to grandeur: he wanted to win a Pulitzer for reporting. He was dogged in his pursuit of “real news” and taught me how to do data mining on the internet for research, how to piece together seemingly unrelated tidbits of information, and, most importantly, how to verify facts.

I became adept at all those things. In my spare time, I used those skills to find our marks.

Criminals—the “good” ones, at least—are also skilled, especially at hiding their criminal activities. When I saw the news report about Liam Black’s arrest and almost immediate release, I decided to find out more about him.

But for a man with such a huge reputation, there was curiously little to find. No verifiable address, no history of arrest before the recent one, no social media presence, no photographs. It was as if he existed by word of mouth alone. As if he were a ghost, a Bogeyman parents used to frighten their misbehaving kids.

My interest grew.

I kept digging until I found something: in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s corporate licensing database, there was a listing for Black Irish Enterprises, Inc. The name jumped out at me. The corporate headquarters address was a post office box. All the officer positions were listed under the name Mail Kcalb.

A name that made absolutely no sense, until you spelled it backward.

After more digging, I discovered that Mr. Kcalb was the owner of ninety-five other companies, most of them in foreign countries and operating under DBAs. The majority of them were shell corporations. Meaning they had no employees, no active business operations, and no significant assets.