Page 11 of The Honest Affair

Chapter Two

December 2018

Matthew

Drip. Drop.

Freezing cold raindrops smacked the collar of my trench coat and splashed my cheeks. A storm was threatening from the New Jersey side of the Hudson, darkening the skies over the Statue of Liberty. From this crumbling cement block of an abandoned Red Hook dock, I had a front row seat.

It was the first day of December, and Mother Nature was celebrating with a harsh drizzle that could easily turn into the first snow of the year. The rest of the streets in my lonely corner of Brooklyn were suspiciously empty—people had already gone to work or else had hibernated at home.

But I hadn’t moved for the last three hours, since I’d returned to my side of New York after finishing my latest shift at Envy, the Lower East Side lounge where I currently had a job as a part-time bartender.

Job. Ha. More like a joke. Once I was a Marine. An officer, even. Captain fuckin’ Zola before I became Matthew Zola, ADA. I had medals, degrees, accolades and honors. Now I was slinging drinks for Wall Street assholes and the women they wanted to fuck, night after night while I waited for the powers that be to decide if I could, in fact, still be a prosecutor in the city of New York.

And who fuckin’ knew when that might be.

With a swig from the flask of bourbon I’d been nursing since clocking out sometime past four, I stared at the front page of the Post I’d found abandoned on the subway on my way home. A few more rain drops stained the newsprint, from which shone two familiar faces caught in the bright flashes of paparazzi outside the Brooklyn courthouse where I litigated case after case for nearly eight years. Eric de Vries and Nina de Vries…Gardner.

I almost spat out my drink. Just thinking that name put a bad taste in my mouth. Instead, I took another swig and swallowed heavily, ignoring the buzzing in my head.

The de Vrieses were a good-looking family, I’d give them that. Side by side, the cousins certainly bore a clear resemblance to one another. Same long nose, same flaxen blond hair, same piercing, almost hawkish gray eyes. Despite the generations of polish, ruthlessness lurked behind the designer clothes and perfectly straight teeth. Shadows of the Viking ancestors who had conquered most of Northern Europe at one point, burning and pillaging wherever they went. People who would do anything—and I do mean anything—to protect what they believed was theirs.

Eric in particular looked like he had just seized another town. I understood why. The case against Jude Letour was a big one, and the fact that it was going to trial this quickly, just six months after the guy was arrested, was big news. Even bigger when the key witness was one of New York’s ten richest people.

But where most people with de Vries-level clout might be content to move behind the scenes, asserting their power like a puppet master, it was obvious that Eric wanted to be a part of this particular display. After all, it was personal.

Letour was the second-most-powerful man in a ring of extremely powerful men, a secret group known as the Janus society. They were stupid rich sociopaths who attended Ivy League colleges before inheriting some of the most powerful positions and wealth in the world. People who say the United States doesn’t have an aristocracy are wrong. Wealth and power are generational, and the Janus society was proof.

It also seemed they were having a bit of a civil war. The first-in-command was dead, shot last May in self-defense by Eric’s own hand. The Viking had protected his own—in this case, his wife. Letour, though, was responsible for a lot of what had happened to them. He was complicit in the near constant targeting of Eric over the past decade, through the murder of his first fiancée, the abduction of his wife, and even Eric’s own kidnapping. Mob tactics, plain and simple. You don’t just go after your target—you make them heel by attacking the ones they love.

And when Eric had gone to war with members of the Janus society, I had served as his general. Af few months ago, this had been my case. I had been working tirelessly and secretively for nearly a year to put this motherfucker away. People like Letour didn’t come down easily. The members of Janus had the feds, congress, even the president in their pockets. So I alone had filed all the papers, arranged the stings, worked lock, stock, and barrel with Derek Kingston and Clifford Snow, the single investigative unit who knew about this case. And in the last year, we had identified Jude Letour and John Carson as part of one of the largest human trafficking rings ever in the Northeast. But they were smart enough not to put their names on the thing—just use it, apparently. No, the ring itself was headed by someone outside the Janus society. A man named Calvin Gardner. Nina’s husband.

I took another heavy drink. Fuck. Breaking up the white-collar criminal ring that was the Janus society would have all but guaranteed me a promotion, probably bureau chief in another year or two. Instead I was sitting here on this crumbling dock, drinking at seven in the morning next to the river to avoid going home and facing the void my life had become. And for what?

A woman, that’s what.

I drifted my thumb over Nina’s face, tracing the stark lines of her cheeks, the graceful contour of her lips. She still looked beautiful. More beautiful than any woman I’d ever seen. But unlike Eric, she looked sad. She wasn’t wearing red anymore. She hadn’t on the night we met, but after I’d mentioned it, I’d only seen her with her lips painted crimson since. Until now.

Yes, I’d sacrificed my future, fucked up my life, for the defendant’s wife. And in doing so, I’d also convinced myself that she was just as guilty as he was…and for that, she’d never forgive me. Any wisp of a future disappeared the moment she looked at me in that interrogation room like I’d killed her puppy and kicked it into the river. After everything, I hadn’t believed her. I hadn’t trusted her the way I had come to realize she had trusted me.

Instead, I’d used her to gain as much as I could for the case against her husband, and possibly against her too.

Now, I had next to nothing.

A shitty job that barely paid my grocery bill.

A mortgage that was quickly eating up my savings.

A sister and niece who would soon be homeless if I didn’t figure something out fast.

“Zio!”

Speak of the devil.

I turned at the sound of my niece’s bubbly voice, but not before I took another glug of bourbon and tucked the flask into the breast pocket of my trench coat, then tipped the brim of my gray fedora a little farther over my brow to hide the glaze in my eyes. Drunk at seven in the morning isn’t a good look for anyone. Sofia didn’t need to see me like this.

My sister, however, wasn’t giving me a free pass.

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