Chapter 103

Ethan

I, once again, found myself at the precinct long after the rest of my desk-mates and cohorts had vacated for the night. I mean, the police precinct was never truly empty—it was New York City, so the place was always hopping—but the difference between day shift and night shift was, well. Night and day.

And this was night.

Which meant my side of the building was dark, quiet. A voice echoed from somewhere far down the hall, followed by the light echo of footsteps on tile. The ventilation system hummed in the walls. A clock I hadn’t even known existed ticked from the other side of the wall, driving me halfway to insanity.

I should have just gone home.

But I was so caught up in, well … Everything. The Rossetti vigilante case, if that’s what it was. The evidence he’d planted at each scene that led right back to Aldo Marcello—and whether I could possibly do anything with it, when it was so closely tied to Layla.

I ran a hand through my hair. Trying to focus on the files in front of me, more pieces of the Rossetti case. In the very least, maybe I could catch this guy, stop this trail of violence.

Worry about Aldo Marcello afterwards.

Maybe.

But my thoughts kept drifting back to Layla.

The way she’d looked at me, that night in the garden. The way she hadn’t hesitated when she’d told me she wouldn’t leave, couldn’t, that her place was at Aldo’s side.

She hadn’t wavered for an instant. She’d made her choice, and for all the doubt I knew she faced, her loyalty was unbreakable.

She saw something in him, in this world, that made it all worth it. And as much as I wanted to see that world in black and white, good and bad, cop and killer, I couldn’t help but wonder if it really was like that.

Layla, who I’d always seen as a good person, didn’t see the world in such plain stripes. Was that enough to make me question my own principles?

And Vanessa …

Those green eyes swum before my vision. Sparkling. Mischief written in the lines around them, but something else, too.

Something I couldn’t look away from.

Couldn’t stop thinking about.

She’d lived a dark life, darker even than Layla’s. And yet … she stood steadfastly at Layla’s side, despite the fact that she must know what Aldo Marcello was—that he wasn’t a good man.

More shades of grey begging me to look between the lines of my striped world.

I tilted my forehead down against the mussed piles of paperwork. How the hell was I supposed to focus on solving a case when all I could think about was … women?

Maybe I needed to take a break. Focus on something else for a little bit. Maybe if I cleared up a smaller mystery, I could go back to my bigger one. Solve a few little riddles, uncover a few answers, feel like maybe I wasn’t a totally crap cop.

Vanessa was definitely one such mystery.

She fascinated me. And not just because of her quiet strength and the way she carried her head high and proud. Not just for how she’d refused to let the world break her. Not just for how much she reminded me of Layla.

It was that cop-gut thing again, telling me there was … something. Something hidden, something I wasn’t seeing, something that meant something.

But using my badge to dig into someone like Aldo versus someone like Vanessa … Was it overstepping?

I wasn’t technically dating her after one date, right? Sure, I’d enjoyed myself. Might have asked her out again … except for that niggle. And maybe if this all proved moot, I could ask her on a second date.

But first, I had to be sure there wasn’t something I was missing.

I’d been a cop long enough to know when someone was holding back a secret. And sure, Vanessa was right in that we all had pieces of ourselves we deemed too personal to share. But her secret wasn’t something silly and safe.

Hers was a high-caliber secret, that much I was sure of. I just wasn’t sure if it was one that mattered—to Layla or to myself.

I leaned back in my chair, stared at the computer screen for a few moments. Still considering. Balanced on that precipice of right and wrong …

I set my fingers on the keyboard. Typed her name into the system: Vanessa Redding.

Hesitated again.

Then, I hit Enter.

Unsurprisingly, the results were spartan. She hadn’t rented an apartment or applied for a job or bought a car, but I’d expected that kind of lapse in information.

I was almost surprised to find that she did, in fact, exist. In some capacity, anyway; a sole driver’s license record existed in the New York City DMV database. No birth certificate. No social security number.

Just a driver’s license.

Which, honestly, was more suspicious than if she hadn’t existed at all—if she’d simply given Layla a false name. No, having a driver’s license but no birth certificate …

It meant Vanessa Redding wasn’t her real name.

My heart beat a little too quickly, accelerating my pulse so I felt it in my throat. All right, that didn’t prove anything. She’d had a troubled family; she’d run away. Changed her name.

But.

Using a fake name was one thing. But changing it in such a way that her false name showed up in the Department of Motor Vehicles database?

That took a level of trickery and finesse most laypeople didn’t possess. It indicated connections.

And most women on the run, lying low, flying under the radar didn’t have those kinds of connections.

My fingers drummed the desktop. Pondering. Connections like that usually weren’t a sign of anything good. No, more often than not, they meant one thing: organized crime.

My head spun.

Could it be …

In my line of work, coincidences were so rarely that. Nothing was simple—and yet, most things were far simpler than they seemed.

It couldn’t hurt to try, in any case. I had nothing to lose.

I set my fingers atop the keys once more. Typed.

Hit enter.

This time, there were more results. A lot more. Not just a birth certificate, but family names. Addresses. Photos.

A brother. A brother with a sealed juvenile record, a history of gang activity … and a death certificate over ten years old. A presumed casualty of gang violence, but no body had ever been found. The details were murky, inconsistent. Witnesses had recanted, evidence had gone missing.

My cop-gut did that thing where it told me there was more to this story.

So I did what any good cop—and friend—would do.

I dug deeper.

I leaned forward over my computer and started scrolling. I pawned through every record, every detail, every piece of evidence out there. Slowly putting the pieces together, little by little building my case.

I hadn’t expected these kinds of answers, but goddamn. They just might be here, buried beneath years of forgotten paperwork and dead-end investigations.

My jaw tightened. Was Vanessa hiding her past, or was she hiding something far worse?