The graceful feather, her mother’s beloved treasure, looked like a blade over Harris Fine’s shoulder. “You live here,” Alice said. I know who you are.
She knew who she was, too, what he’d made her.
“You don’t understand,” he said, reaching for her. She stepped back. Her skin crawled. She had never understood that phrase, but now—
“Yes. I live here.”
The house boxed up, her mother’s things missing. Bachelor dinners at his house with old saucepans, all to make her think nothing had changed. He was the same guy he’d always been. She gazed around in wonder. Everything new, except for her mother’s sleek flame. “How do you live here? How do you live here?”
He took a breath, seemed to consider. “I wanted to bring you here, but I couldn’t find a way.”
“I’m sure you considered kidnapping.” A joke, but then she was reaching beyond the fog of memory to the sheer terror of the stranger reaching for her. The homesickness, the fist of herself in a room she didn’t know. The baby crying and the woman looking down at her. The warm safety of her father’s arms.
The wings of the black bird beat the air.
The terror of the stranger. The safety of the father. She’d gotten everything wrong. She hadn’t been returned to loving arms. She’d been ripped from them.
“I was kidnapped.” She could barely say the words, and felt what little power she had over herself and the situation slip away. She focused on the bright circle of the elevator button across the room. “Legally, through the courts. Held hostage, for spite—”
“For control over a situation—”
“For money and control over everything you could grab—”
“For a lot of reasons you’ll never appreciate.”
“And you never minded that a few people’s lives were destroyed. How could you do it?”
He put a hand to his forehead and pulled it over his eyes like a blindfold. “It wasn’t about you. Can’t you understand? You weren’t even—you weren’t you. You were just—”
“An insurance policy. Collateral.”
“I’m sorry.” He dropped his hand, and his expression was not one of regret. It hurt to have him look at her.
“I don’t think you are,” she said.
“I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you.”
“What about what you did to my parents—”
“Don’t,” he said loudly, then recovered his calm. “Don’t call them that. Never. They were trash. They didn’t deserve you.”
She hadn’t even reached the depths of grief they deserved, and he was already digging a thumb into the wound. They hadn’t mattered. They were less than human, and if that’s what they were, what was she? He hadn’t denied his actions, only the value of those who had suffered from them. “Is that what you have to tell yourself? To sleep at night?”
“You should have seen the squalor, the disregard for your safety—”
“Oh, so it’s my safety you’re worried about. It’s a good thing I didn’t get too close to a window.”
“That wasn’t me,” he barked. “Your idiot ex was nosing around where he shouldn’t have been, watching Big sell us out, and Gus got a little carried away—”
“Gus!” But of course a kingpin would need his heavies to do his dirty work. Gus would have been the one to convince Brody he’d been home sick that day, too.
“Al, sweetheart. We—I—I took you in for the wrong reasons, but—but you’d never have had this life, raised by them. All the comforts,” he said, flinging his arms wide like wings. No irony that they were standing in the middle of opulence she had never been offered. All the comforts were his. “You’d never have become the person you are.”
“You have no idea what I might have been. Maybe I would have been—” She swallowed the thought that occurred to her.
“Don’t dare say you’d be better off. They couldn’t have loved you more than I did. Than I do.”
“Not more than you did,” Alice said.
He reared back. “She loved you, too,” he said. “And you know it.”
He reached for her again. Alice flinched away, but he kept coming. She couldn’t keep stepping out of his embrace. She didn’t want to. He put his arms around her, gentle and awkward. She let him but wouldn’t embrace him in return. She sagged into him so that her chin hooked over his shoulder. Against her cheek, a flat weight under his jacket, the leather of a holster.
Always a cop. Except when he was the criminal.
Alice disengaged herself and walked to the elevator, pushed the button. “She could barely look at me,” she said. “I disgusted her. I always thought it was because I wasn’t the right kind of daughter, didn’t look like either of you, wasn’t delicate, graceful, wasn’t . . . whatever she wanted me to be.”
The elevator appeared, and Alice leapt into it.
“Alice.” He rushed in with her. “Let’s talk about this—”
“Do you know how much I ate my heart out over it? Because I thought it was something about me that wasn’t good enough or pretty enough or smart enough or anything enough. I had plenty of time to wonder, packed away to Siberia for four years. And when I came back to care for her, she didn’t want me there. I gave up everything to be there, and she didn’t want me.”
“Well, obviously she wasn’t always—” He swallowed it.
“But it wasn’t because of me, was it? Every time she looked at me, she saw—”
“Her beloved child.”
“—death. Murder. The monster she married.”
“Stop it.”
“She knew who I was.” Alice choked on the words. “She couldn’t love me, though, because I made her realize who you were. Where is Laura’s body? Why stab Rick twelve times? Twelve. You did those things yourself, just as sure as you killed Mom—”
“Enough! And stop calling him Rick like he was your fucking buddy.”
The elevator doors opened to the commotion of the party. Alice stepped out, turned, and blocked him inside. His hand reached under his jacket. “Wait,” he pleaded, his eyes darting behind her, left, right. “I don’t want to—”
“Then don’t. For once, don’t do the worst thing. Do the right thing. Do the thing Harris Fine would do, the Harris Fine who was my dad. The one who says he loves me.”
She turned. JimBig King in one direction, Jimmy in a tux in the other. Nearby, a woman who looked remarkably like Juby. And—was that Merrily?
But then her dad had a grip on her arm and was leading her toward the lobby. Under his jacket, a gun. He pressed the muzzle into her ribs. “Prison for the rest of my life,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
“Aren’t you threatening to end mine?” she said. “Either you’re my dad or you’re not. How many lives have you ruined to have all this, this empire? What’s the point?”
“Walk with me,” he said.
She had no choice. He was taking care of things.
Suddenly, even with a pistol shoved into her side, Alice felt the most impossible calm. They moved through the room as if through water. A path laid out, their friends and colleagues parting.
“Where will we go?” she said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
She looked at him. “Fine.” His face creased. She hadn’t seen him cry since the funeral of—
Alice caught herself. His wife. She felt such a freedom to think of the woman that way. Beth Ann Fine, just a woman who hadn’t loved her as her own. She felt a force of feeling for the woman now, was almost sick with forgiveness. Richard and Laura, too. JimBig, whatever his crimes. She forgave them all, knowing they were nothing to her.
“My car is just out there at the curb, and the keys—”
“We can’t.” He turned them as a unit so that she could see the party was being redistributed away from the lobby. The cop who’d smashed her phone was there, trying to get Merrily to go with the crowd. Too late for a quiet exit. “I have to explain,” he said.
“You don’t have to explain.” Her curiosity, gone.
“I need you to hear it, in case—”
“Alice?” Jennifer came out from behind the counter. “There was a— Oh, Mr. Fine, I didn’t—”
“Now,” Alice said. They didn’t have a choice. “Let’s go now.”
She allowed him to lead her outside, where the night sky burned a ruined orange, too bright for stars. The valets rushed to assist.
“No,” she said. “Stay back.”
“I took you,” he said. “For petty reasons, to control him—”
“It doesn’t matter.” The car was where she’d left it, one tire on the curb, the keys still in her pocket.
“—to keep what I’d built. All that, I can’t help it. That’s what happened. That’s who I was. But then you were ours.”
Alice glanced at him. His eyes were dark, fevered. “And then it wasn’t about him anymore,” he said. “It was you.”
“Don’t blame me!”
“It was you. You were everything, and he was the only one who could take you away,” he said. He stopped, so she did, too. The street had been blocked off, squad cars parked, lights rolling. “Don’t you get it? I couldn’t stand to lose you. You were all I had.”
That was his fault, but then she had worn her life down to a sharp point, too. “And a fortress to keep me in,” she said. “Two.”
“I didn’t know I would lose you anyway,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“To someone, eventually. Matt, someone else. To another job. To some other part of the world. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that letting you go was the whole point of parenting you.”
“Put down the gun, Harris.” From behind them, JimBig stepped out of 1799, black gun in his hand. The valets scattered.
“No,” Alice cried, sagging in the knees.
Her dad pulled her up and spun them as one to face JimBig. “There’s the turncoat himself.”
Turncoat. JimBig was the one leaving the business, burning it down behind him and saving only Jimmy. She was collateral damage. Again.
“Mr. King,” someone shouted. Behind JimBig stood the cop who had smashed her phone, weapon drawn. And behind him in the frame of the lobby window, Jimmy, palms pressed to the glass, and nearby Merrily and Juby clutching one another. Juby mouthed messages to her she couldn’t understand. “King, put the gun down,” the cop yelled.
“The police seem to know your name, Big,” her dad said. “Did you get tired of being too rich? Of living too well?”
“That must be what it is. Certainly too late to grow some morality.” Face-to-face, they no longer looked so much alike. JimBig was shrunken, wrung out. Face-to-face, they were a man and his shadow.
He’s sick. Alice didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. JimBig had nothing to lose.
“Morality sounds expensive,” her dad said. “It might cost you everything you have.” He pulled Alice backward, stepping around the bumper of her car.
“Everything,” JimBig said, edging closer. He made eye contact with Alice. She shook her head at him. No. “But not everyone.”
The two great men of her life fighting it out over her head again. She existed only to clean up the wreckage. She was the wreckage.
She imagined a way for it to end. Another. None of the eventualities she could imagine were outcomes she could live with. “Dad.”
He flinched and the muzzle pressed into her dipped away.
Alice saw the way it would go. “No!” She lurched in front of him just as the air around her exploded, once, twice. Alice couldn’t feel anything but noise, tasted nothing but pain. Her dad’s hand on her upper arm jerked away, and he was flying from her. He flew.
Her feet weren’t under her. Down, down, down. She fell and kept falling.