Bound To The Devil's Empire

Chapter 2: Two Jobs and a Dream

Aria didn't sleep.

She lay on her narrow bed and stared at the water stain on her ceiling — the one shaped vaguely like the state of Florida — and listened to the city outside her window doing what the city always did. Sirens in the distance. A couple arguing two floors up. The groan and hiss of a bus pulling away from the stop on the corner.

Normal sounds. Ordinary sounds.

She focused on them and tried not to see a man folding to the floor of a warehouse.

Tried not to see dark eyes finding hers through a gap in the metal.

At four-thirty she gave up, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat in the dark with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. The studio apartment held its breath around her. Twelve feet by fourteen feet of everything she owned — the law books stacked in towers along one wall, the single-burner hot plate, the folding table that served as both desk and dining room, the secondhand lamp with the slightly crooked shade that she'd carried six blocks from a stoop sale last spring.

This was her life. This small, purposeful, carefully constructed life.

She had built it out of nothing. Out of a childhood spent watching her mother stretch twenty dollars across five days, out of a father who had believed in her so completely it sometimes felt like a weight she carried rather than a gift. Out of the specific and burning conviction that the law meant something — that it was the difference between a world with order and a world without it.

She had never once questioned that conviction.

Until last night, when she'd stood on a wet sidewalk with her thumb over the call button and made the choice not to press it.

You're going to call today, she told herself. You're going to walk into the precinct on your way to class and you're going to tell them what you saw. That's what you do. That's who you are.

She believed it.

She almost believed it.

The morning arrived grey and indifferent, the sky the color of old dishwater, the air carrying the particular bite of a New York autumn that had fully committed to making everyone miserable. Aria showered in the bathroom she shared with the unit next door — an arrangement that had seemed temporary eighteen months ago and had calcified into permanence — and stood in front of her small mirror in her towel, looking at her own face.

She looked tired. She always looked tired.

Dark circles beneath dark eyes. A jaw set with the specific tension of someone who was accustomed to holding things together through sheer stubbornness. Her hair was still damp and already curling in the way it did when humidity was involved, which in New York was always.

Twenty-four years old. Law student. Waitress. Night-shift bookkeeper for a dry cleaning business three blocks from campus.

Daughter of a dead man and a mother who had moved back to her sister's place in Queens after the money ran out. Sister to Sofia, who was beautiful and ambitious and had never quite understood why Aria kept choosing the hard way when easier options existed.

This was Aria Bennett. In full.

She dressed in her work uniform — black trousers, white button-down, the non-slip shoes that had seen better years — pulled her hair back, grabbed her backpack, and opened the door to her apartment.

She stopped.

The hallway was empty. Of course it was empty. It was six-fifteen in the morning and her neighbors were sensible people who slept like normal human beings.

She exhaled.

Took the stairs down to the street.

And stepped outside into the grey morning and immediately saw the black car.

It was parked across the street, engine off, no visible plates. Dark tinted windows that told her absolutely nothing about the interior. It was the kind of car that existed in a register she didn't belong to — not a town car, not a standard SUV, but something in between that spoke of money so comfortable it didn't need to announce itself.

She stood on her stoop and looked at it for three full seconds.

Then she walked in the opposite direction and told herself she was being paranoid.

She was a twenty-four-year-old law student who waited tables and balanced dry cleaning accounts. Nobody sent black cars for people like her.

The car did not follow her.

She told herself this meant something.

The Morning Shift at Rosie's Diner ran from six forty-five to noon and was managed by a woman named Connie who had the energy of someone running on pure spite and espresso and who had hired Aria three years ago because, as she'd said, you look like you actually need this job, not like you're doing it for character. Connie was not a warm woman. She was, however, a fair one, and in Aria's experience fairness was rarer and more useful than warmth.

The breakfast rush was relentless. Aria moved through it on autopilot — plates, orders, coffee refills, the specific smile that was professional without being performative. Table four wanted their eggs over easy but received them scrambled and took eight minutes to decide whether to send them back. Table seven had a toddler who redistributed an entire bowl of oatmeal across a six-foot radius. Table twelve was a man in an expensive suit who ordered black coffee and spent forty minutes on his phone without looking up once and tipped twenty percent to the dollar, which Aria respected even if she found him vaguely unsettling.

It was during the brief lull between nine and ten, when she was refilling the sugar dispensers at the counter and letting her mind drift, that she saw the news.

The television above the counter — Connie kept it on the local news channel, volume low, captions running — was showing a reporter standing outside a building Aria recognized. She knew that building. She walked past it twice a week.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: STATE SENATOR RICHARD CAVALLO FOUND DEAD. APPARENT HOMICIDE. INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY.

The sugar dispenser slipped from her hand and hit the counter with a crack that made the two remaining customers look up.

"Sorry," she said automatically.

Her eyes stayed on the screen.

The reporter was saying something about a warehouse in lower Manhattan. About an anonymous tip that had led police to the scene in the early hours. About Senator Cavallo's long career and his family and the investigation that was already underway.

No suspects mentioned. No witnesses.

Of course no witnesses. Because the only witness had stood on a wet sidewalk and not pressed the call button.

Aria picked up the sugar dispenser. Set it down carefully. Walked to the back and stood in the narrow corridor between the kitchen and the storage room and pressed her back against the wall and breathed.

You have to go to the police.

The thought was simple and clear and correct.

You saw his face.

And there it was. The thing she'd been circling all night, the thing that lived at the center of everything.

She had seen his face.

She knew, in the way that people who paid attention knew things, that she could identify him. Not just as a silhouette. Not just as a shape in the dark. She had looked at him through that gap in the warehouse wall and she had seen the particular arrangement of features that made him him — the jaw, the eyes, the stillness — with the involuntary completeness of a mind that remembered things it would rather forget.

She could walk into a precinct and describe him in enough detail to make an artist's rendering that would be recognizable.

She knew this.

The question — the one she hadn't let herself finish asking last night — was whether the man she could describe was the kind of man that walking into a precinct would protect her from, or the kind that it would make no difference against at all.

Connie appeared in the corridor. Looked at her. Said nothing for a moment.

"You look like you're about to make a bad decision," Connie said finally.

Aria looked at her. "What?"

"I've seen that face before. Usually on people standing on ledges." Connie handed her a cup of coffee — proper coffee, from the good machine, not the diner pot. "Drink this. Table three needs their check."

Aria took the coffee. Drank it. Went back to work.

She did not go to the police.

The university library closed at ten, which meant Aria had four hours between the end of her diner shift and the start of her bookkeeping work to sit at her usual table in the corner of the third floor — the one beside the window that looked out over the courtyard — and try to read the same page of Constitutional Law: Principles and Practice forty-seven times.

She kept losing the thread.

Her eyes moved over the words and her mind went back to the warehouse. To the gap in the wall. To the flat dense sound and the way a man had simply stopped being upright.

And to the face.

She had done what any responsible person did when something unsettling lodged itself in their mind — she'd gone looking for information. Which in her case meant sitting in the library with her laptop open and three different browser tabs running.

The name came to her faster than she'd expected.

Luca Moretti.

She found him first in the business section. Moretti Capital. Moretti Holdings. A real estate portfolio worth — she checked twice — somewhere in the range of four billion dollars. Hotels. Commercial properties. A development firm that had reshaped two entire blocks of Manhattan's financial district in the last five years. Forbes had profiled him eighteen months ago. The photograph accompanying the article showed a man in a charcoal suit standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with his hands in his pockets, looking at the camera with the expression of someone who found the entire enterprise mildly tedious.

Her stomach dropped.

She knew that suit. She knew that face.

Luca Moretti, 33. CEO of Moretti Capital. Named to Forbes' list of New York's most influential figures for the third consecutive year.

She clicked through four more pages. Business reports. A charity gala photograph — him in black tie, a beautiful woman on his arm whose name the caption didn't bother to include. A brief mention in a city council report about the Fulton Street development project.

Nothing criminal. Nothing that would explain a warehouse and a senator on his knees and a gun drawn with the ease of a man for whom this was simply another task to complete.

But Aria was a law student, and law students knew how to read what wasn't there as much as what was.

She opened a new tab.

Typed: Moretti organized crime New York.

The results were thinner. More careful. The kind of thin and careful that suggested someone had worked very hard to make them that way. There were references — oblique ones, buried in longer articles about New York's criminal landscape — to a family by that name. To influence that extended beyond legitimate business. To a name spoken in certain circles.

The Devil of Manhattan.

She sat back in her library chair and looked at those four words on her screen.

The library was quiet around her. Late afternoon light fell through the courtyard window and lay in long rectangles across the carpet. A student two tables over had fallen asleep over their textbook. Everything was soft and ordinary and completely at odds with the cold thing settling in her chest.

She thought about the black car outside her building.

She thought about Luca Moretti looking at her through a gap in the wall with those dark, completely calm eyes.

She thought about the four seconds they had existed in each other's awareness — her terrified, him utterly still — and the fact that she was sitting here breathing meant that he had made a choice in those four seconds.

She just didn't know what choice. Or why.

Or whether it was permanent.

Her phone buzzed on the table. She startled hard enough that the student across the room shifted in their sleep.

Unknown number.

She stared at it.

It buzzed again.

She let it go to voicemail. Sat perfectly still for thirty seconds. Then picked up her phone and listened.

Silence on the recording. Eleven seconds of it. Then a click.

Nothing.

Aria sat in the library with her phone in her hand and the Devil of Manhattan on her laptop screen and the cold knowledge that the window for pretending last night hadn't happened had probably already closed.

She just didn't know what came next.

She found out four hours later, when she walked out of the dry cleaning office into the dark street and a black car pulled smoothly to the curb in front of her, and the door opened, and a man who was not Luca Moretti — but who had the careful blank face of someone who had been shaped for violence — looked at her and said, quietly and without any particular emotion:

"Mr. Moretti would like a word."

She ran.

She made it exactly half a block.