Chapter 4 - The Sound of Brass
The private suite on the thirty-eighth floor smelled of spilled champagne, crushed gardenias, and thirty thousand dollars of ruined French cosmetics.
Victoria Lane sat on the edge of an emerald velvet chaise lounge, her feet bare, her royal-blue faille gown bunched around her knees like a pile of discarded industrial tarp. Her mascara had run down her cheeks in two dark, greasy tracks, and her hands were shaking so violently that the ice cubes in her crystal tumbler of scotch clattered against the cut glass like dice in a leather cup.
Standing before the double doors were two men in dark gray suits, their arms crossed over their chests, their expressions completely immobile.
"I want her name!" Victoria shrieked, slamming the glass down onto an antique walnut console table, sending a spray of amber liquor across a leather-bound guest directory. "I want her social security number! I want her mother’s address! Do you have any idea who my father is?! My father has the Police Commissioner on speed dial! I will have that bitch deported back to whatever tropical ditch she crawled out of by breakfast!"
The heavy brass latch on the double doors clicked open.
Victoria jumped to her feet, her hands instantly smoothing the front of her ruined dress, her expression shifting in a fraction of a second from feral rage to an exquisite, trembling pout of victimhood.
"Alexander!" she sobbed, taking two staggering steps across the silk rug, her arms outstretched. "Thank God! Those two animals wouldn't let me leave the room! They took my phone, Alexander! They told me it was for 'security protocols'—"
She stopped dead.
The words died in her throat, choking her like dry sand.
Alexander Ashford walked into the suite.
He was not alone.
Walking beside him, her stride balanced, her spine straight as an iron plumb line, was me.
I was no longer wearing the black poplin uniform or the white service apron.
Alexander had taken me into his private dressing suite on the forty-second floor, called his personal tailor on an encrypted line, and within twenty minutes, an assistant had arrived with a high-necked, long-sleeved sheath dress of charcoal-gray matte silk that brushed the tops of my flat leather riding boots. My dark hair, previously pinned into an untidy bun beneath a white service cap, had been washed, brushed, and fell across my shoulders in thick, heavy waves.
Around my neck, resting against the dark silk at the hollow of my throat, hung an antique pendant of unpolished Philippine gold—a two-inch stylized wave curling around an iron pin—that Alexander had retrieved from the safe behind his grandfather’s portrait.
My father’s personal talisman.
The one he had carried through three wars, four shipyards, and forty years of exile, which had vanished from his effects in the morgue at Elmhurst Hospital six years ago.
Victoria’s gaze dropped to the gold wave.
Her pupils contracted to the size of pinheads. Her lower lip began to quiver, not with the theatrical distress she had performed in the ballroom, but with the sudden, cold, visceral terror of a woman who has looked through the peephole of her penthouse and seen a ghost standing on the mat.
"You..." Victoria whispered, her voice dropping into a register that was barely human. "Where... where did you get that?"
"It belonged to Miguel Reyes, Victoria," Alexander said.
His voice was terrifyingly calm. He walked to the center of the suite, pulled out an armchair of hand-carved mahogany, and gestured toward it with a single, unhurried sweep of his hand.
"Sit," he commanded.
Victoria didn't sit. She took two steps backward until her spine hit the heavy oak frame of the French doors leading to the balcony.
"Alexander, this is insane," she babbled, her hands flying to her diamond necklace, her fingers twisting the platinum links until her skin went red. "She’s a servant. She’s an undocumented girl from the kitchen staff who assaulted me in front of three hundred donors! My father is already on his way from Greenwich! He has two state senators in his car!"
"Your father isn't coming from Greenwich, Victoria," Alexander said, reaching into his interior coat pocket and pulling out a slim, satellite-linked cellular terminal.
He pressed a button. He laid the terminal flat on the walnut console table.
A man’s voice, distorted by the static of a high-speed vehicle hands-free system and shaking with a frantic, ragged panic, filled the high-ceilinged room:
"...I don't care what the warrant says, Henry! Call Judge Miller in White Plains! Tell him to stay the execution order! The marshals have four cruisers across the driveway at the estate... they’re seizing the servers... they’re taking the hard drives from the basement vault..."
A second voice, cool, bureaucratic, and entirely devoid of emotion, cut through the line:
"Richard Lane. Step out of the vehicle with your hands visible above your head. This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have an unsealed indictment from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for murder, interstate racketeering, and procurement fraud. Turn off the ignition."
A sound of scuffling. A muffled curse.
The sharp, concussive click of stainless-steel handcuffs ratcheting shut over a microphone.
Then, silence.
The line disconnected with a low, flat digital tone: beep... beep... beep.
Victoria sank onto the velvet chaise lounge, her knees folding beneath her as if her bones had turned to wet paper. The glass in her hand tipped over, the remaining two fingers of scotch soaking into the green cushions, but she didn't look down at the stain.
She looked at me.
She looked at my hands—the hands that had scrubbed the floorboards of her suite on Tuesday morning, the hands that had folded her linen towels, the hands that had caught her steel heel two inches from my shin without shifting an inch.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
I walked across the Persian rug until I stood three feet from her bare feet.
I looked down at her. I didn't feel hatred. I didn't feel the burning, hysterical need for vengeance that had kept me awake through four hundred nights in our tenement in Queens while my mother coughed in the dark.
I felt only the cold, infinite weight of the current.
"My name is Sophia Reyes," I said. "My father was the man who built the bridges your family stole. And my grandfather was the man who taught your grandfather how to hold a knife on the beaches of Leyte before your family learned how to buy politicians."
The door behind us clicked open.
Two uniformed federal marshals, accompanied by an agent in a dark blue windbreaker bearing the yellow letters FBI - PUBLIC CORRUPTION, stepped into the suite.
The lead agent looked at Alexander Ashford, then down at the shivering woman on the green velvet.
"Victoria Lane?" the agent asked, pulling a folded legal document from his breast pocket. "You are being taken into custody as a material witness in an ongoing federal investigation into the death of Miguel Reyes, and under a secondary state warrant for felony assault and witness intimidation. Stand up, please."
Victoria didn't look at the marshals. She looked at Alexander, her eyes wild, her hands reaching out in a final, pathetic plea toward the midnight-blue wool of his coat.
"Alexander! You promised my father! You signed the preliminary intent agreement!"
Alexander didn't move. He stood with his hands behind his back, his scarred jaw held high, his hazel eyes completely empty.
"I signed an intent to discover who murdered the man who saved my life, Victoria," Alexander said softly. "The contract has been fulfilled."
As the marshals hauled her to her feet, her bare heels dragging across the ruined silk of her dress, her screams echoing down the marble corridor of the thirty-eighth floor, Alexander turned to me.
"Your brother," he said, his voice dropping into that gentle, unhurried cadence that belonged only to the room we were in. "Where is he?"
"At home," I said, my voice finally cracking on the syllable. "On 48th Avenue. In the back room."
May you like
Alexander reached out, his hand closing over mine, his fingers warm, solid, and immovable.
"Marco," he commanded into the empty air of the room. "Bring the medical transport van around to the front. We’re going to Queens."
