Page 79 of Crowned in Sin
"They're supposed to like me. I pay them."
"That's not it and you know it." She bumps her shoulder into my arm as we walk. "You're different in here. Looser."
"I'm always this charming,piccola. You've just been distracted by my other jobs."
"Uh huh." She doesn't buy it, but she lets me have it. Something about that, her letting me get away with the deflection instead of pushing, settles low and warm in my stomach anyway.
We get to the office and she's already pulling a folder out of her bag before I've got the door shut behind us.
"Okay," she says, dropping into the chair across from my desk like she owns it. "I've been going through everything again. Frank's precinct roster, complaint records, the guys who show up at Bianca's hospital more than they should."
I sit on the edge of the desk instead of behind it. "Show me."
She spreads three pages out, corners overlapping, and starts walking her finger down names. "These four rotate through OCCB with Frank, same unit going back nine years. This one," she taps a name circled twice, "signed off on two of Bianca's old incident reports and buried both of them same week. I think he's one of the ones Frank's been renting her out to. This one's newer, transferred in eighteen months ago, and he's the one who visits her floor the most."
"You're sure."
"I cross-referenced visitor logs with duty rosters. He's supposed to be on shift three of those visits." She looks up at me. "I'm sure."
"And this one." I tap a name near the bottom, one I already recognize from Frank's own precinct roster. "He's the one thatmatters most. He's Frank's oldest friend on the force. If anyone's covering for him at the top, it's him."
"I thought that too." She pulls another sheet from underneath, a second list, smaller. "So I split them. Ones we can hit clean, no blowback on Bianca's case file, and ones where if we move too early, it tips Frank we're already inside his circle."
I look at her a long moment, the careful order of it, the restraint in it. "You thought about protecting the case before you thought about revenge."
"Somebody has to." She says it plain, no drama in it, and I'd say the exact same thing myself if I still trusted myself to think that clearly about her.
I look at the names. Some of them I already know. Some of them are already handled, quietly, before Frank even knows it's happening.
"This is good work," I tell her, and I mean it plainly, no charm in it. "Better than what my own guys pulled."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm impressed. Different thing."
She flushes a little at that, pleased despite herself, and folds the pages back together like she's protecting something valuable.
We work another hour, cross-checking, narrowing the list down to the names that matter most, the ones closest to Frank's protection and closest to what he did to Bianca. By the time we're done the list is short and ugly and exactly what I needed.
"Come on," I say, standing, offering her a hand up. "Let me show you the rest of the place properly."
I take her through the back, past the kitchen, up to the mezzanine that overlooks the whole floor, glass and steel and low gold light, my name nowhere on any of it and somehow still entirely mine.
"I always wanted something like this," I tell her, leaning on the rail beside her. "A club. Something that was just... mine. Not Family business, not something my father built and let me run. Mine."
"So you built it."
"Vinny got it started," I say. "Incorporated it, put the paperwork together behind Father's back, before I even knew it existed." Saying his name still catches somewhere in my throat, and I let it catch. "The night my initiation was done, he handed me the deed like it was nothing. Like it wasn't the biggest thing anyone had ever done for me. Everything it actually is now, though, the floor, the staff, six years of keeping it clean, that part's mine. I built that up myself, after."
Lydia's quiet, watching me.
"I guess it was Vinny's way of telling me I could still have something Father couldn't take away," I say.
She reaches over and puts her hand over mine on the rail, and neither of us says anything for a second.
"Did your father ever give you anything like that?" I ask her. "Something just yours?"
Something shifts in her face, something older than pain.
