New York City
April 16
Tox waved goodbye to Steady and Chat—by flipping them the bird over his shoulder—and strode toward the massive steel garage-style door that was the entrance to his home. Sort of home. Some Manhattan neighborhoods had charming, storied names like Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and Harlem. Others had quirky names based on where they were located: Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street), SoHo (South of Houston), Nolita (North of Little Italy). And then there were the unadorned, location-based titles: the Upper East Side, Wall Street, Midtown. Tox’s neighborhood’s nickname was as bare-bones and unimaginative as the blocks themselves: Alphabet City. Located on the Lower East Side and named for the avenues A, B, C, and D that ran through it, Alphabet City was late to the Manhattan gentrification game and remained one of the last bastions of the forgotten. Once home to Norman Mailer and Alan Ginsberg, the gritty section of the Lower East Side never managed the chic allure of its Greenwich Village neighbor, and the nineteenth-century row house tenements that defined the area remained some of the highest crime areas in Manhattan. Artist’s lofts, specialty food shops, and condo developments were slowly encroaching on the squatters and pawn shops and plumbing supply stores, but Alphabet City remained a dark inclusion in Manhattan’s diamond.
Tox gave a quick wave to the “ladies” on the street corner. When he had first moved into the top floor of this building, which had once been a commercial bakery, the primary occupants were prostitutes, drag queens, junkies, and dealers. It was exactly what he had been looking for. Not because he partook of any of their wares, but because it was anonymous; a neighborhood occupied by people nobody wanted to acknowledge. Plus, there was an unexpected security benefit. Several months ago, Foxy—who was currently strutting her stuff for a man in a minivan—had taken down a guy with a knife about to jack him. Turned out Foxy was a black belt. Gotta have skills on the street, sister. Tox was a six-five, two-hundred-thirty-pound former SEAL; it took a lot to get the drop on him. Nevertheless, it was always nice to have someone watching your back. Before the Navy, it was a feeling he had never known. Tox had returned the favor. Numerous times. Life on the street was no picnic.
Inside the expansive, barely habitable loft on the fifth and top floor, Tox flopped unceremoniously onto the scarred leather couch. Not a block away, buildings like his had been snapped up and converted to multi-million-dollar condos and apartments. That was his hope when he bought it—he had an inheritance from his parents and sank his entire savings into the purchase. This building would be next. He’d already fielded calls from developers. Despite the rats and the ramshackle plumbing, the architecture was breathtaking, and the bones were solid. He could see the potential through the haze of neglect. As it was, it was a place to keep his stuff and crash between missions. It was adequate. Tox hadn’t had a real home in a long time.
Severe separation anxiety and profound abandonment issues. That was his diagnosis. Understandable considering his childhood. It had been picture-perfect for the first eight years. Tox—he was just Miller back then—had lived in an upper-middle-class suburb outside of Denver; his dad was a successful pediatric surgeon, his mom stayed at home with her twin boys, Miller and Miles. Then his mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She died in her sleep three months later. The brothers were just getting accustomed to their new normal when, a month after their mother’s funeral, their father was T-boned by a tractor-trailer driving to work. He died at the scene. And just like that, the boys were orphans. Miller and Miles were sent to live with their maternal grandmother. Two years later, she passed away, and when their father’s brother refused to take the boys, they entered the foster system. The following year, the twins were separated.
Miller didn’t talk much as a child, but the image of calling for his brother over and over as Miles was driven away with his face plastered to the rear window of the sedan was burned into Miller’s brain. The family that had fostered Miles adopted him and moved away. Then they disappeared.
Years later, Miller had learned from his best friend, Finn McIntyre, a CIA field officer, that Miles’s adoptive father had witnessed a mob execution behind his small family restaurant. The details were sketchy. He had testified, and Miles and his adoptive parents had been entered into the Federal Witness Protection Program. Six months after relocating, the family had been killed in a house fire officially caused by faulty wiring. Miller was alone. His own foster parents, a childless couple in their mid-sixties, were wonderful, but the damage had been done.
In high school, Miller found his first girlfriend. They were deliriously happy for their entire junior year. When summer came, the girl, Jessica, lost interest. She told him she wanted to “take a break” and “see other people.” Something inside Miller broke. He followed her everywhere, consumed by what she was doing. He left notes and flowers, pleading for a reconciliation. He slept in her backyard. He waited outside her classes. Most were sympathetic to the brokenhearted teen, but when she started dating a friend of his, and he broke into her bedroom and trashed it, enough was enough. His foster parents put him into therapy, and a restraining order ensured he kept his distance from Jessica.
He went to college on a football scholarship and had a decent career as an offensive lineman at Michigan until a torn ACL sidelined him his senior year. He’d had two relationships as an undergraduate. The first ended amicably. The second was again problematic. His pre-med girlfriend, Laura, was busy with an intense course load. Miller became consumed by the idea she was leaving him. He would follow her, track her phone, insist she location-share. She put up with it for a few months, but he had started to scare her. She ended the relationship—another restraining order had been issued—and he went back into therapy to get through it.
His therapist at the time had employed a metaphor that really worked for Tox. He told Tox to look at romantic love and relationships like a football field. The two people involved didn’t have to both be on the fifty-yard line emotionally, but they did need to both be midfield. Sometimes one person could cross over to the forty-five-yard line to compensate for their partner’s temporary emotional withdrawal. Maybe the other partner would do the same at another time. Emotions were fluid, but for a relationship to be successful the emotions should be shared. They could be intense, but if a partner didn’t share that intensity, they retreated, the one left behind compelled to push forward into the emotional Redzone. Tox needed to stay out of that zone.
He had accepted the words. He vowed to get his act together, but deep down he felt differently. He didn’t need therapy. He didn’t need anger management. He didn’t need medication. He just needed someone in his life who wouldn’t fucking leave.
The Navy had provided the answer. The Navy SEALs saved his life. In BUD/s training, his swim buddy, Finn McIntyre, became his best friend. It was an unbreakable bond, one that he hadn’t known since childhood. It was effortless, automatic. A few years in, Finn had been injured on an op and captured by a small, poorly-organized group of insurgents. At full strength, Finn could have handled them all without a weapon, but in his incapacitated state, he had been overpowered. It had taken Tox seventy-two hours to find where Finn was being held, and less than eight minutes to slit the throats of the men who were torturing him.
Within his platoon of sixteen, his squad of eight was a true family. Even now in the private sector, he worked with most of them. Andrew “Chat” Dunlap, Leo “Ren” Jameson, Noah “Steady” Lockhart, and Tox all worked for Nathan “North” Bishop who had been their Naval Intelligence liaison. Tox and Nathan had formed an even deeper bond after the Navy, and when Nathan asked Tox to stand with him at his wedding, well…Tox had accepted and clapped him on the back with an insouciance that masked his utter joy. Tox was nearly drunk with happiness. These friendships, these brothers, were what Tox had been missing. Finn worked for the CIA these days but occasionally joined Bishop Security on government-sanctioned ops—or in his free time because that’s what former spec ops guys did in their free time. The remaining three of the eight-man squad were doing other things, but Tox kept in touch with all of them because that’s what real families did.
The Navy also had inadvertently provided relationship therapy of a sort. Because his deployments were classified, and he traveled more than two hundred days a year, Tox couldn’t have become romantically involved even if he had wanted to. He found it easy to limit his interactions with women to unfettered sexual encounters. He stuck to the frog hogs—Navy SEAL groupies—and women he met on leave. Sexual encounters had become just that. And nothing more. Every time Tox slipped out of a strange bed, or thanked a woman “for a fun time” or struggled to remember how a night had unfolded, he reminded himself it was better than the alternative.
He wasn’t worried about the emotional Redzone because he wasn’t even on the field. And if that submerged craving for some middle ground that hovered between one-night stands and obsession ever fought its way to the surface? Tox got drunk. It was how he got his moniker; when most guys would detox after a hard night of partying, Tox would do it all over again, “retox.” There was also another reason for the nickname. When he told his brothers, the Team guys, about his troubles with women in the past, Finn had broken the tension of his confession by playing Britney Spears’s “Toxic” on his phone. Everyone had laughed. Tox had been both grateful for the comic relief and sad that it was necessary.
With the help of his friends and his career, Tox had successfully bested the desperation that overcame him as a young man. What he thought was a need, over time became a want, and most days now, it was a “take it or leave it.” He was in a good place in his life. The past was the past. He could only try to be better moving forward. The infamous SEAL motto resonated: the only easy day was yesterday. Hooyah.
His thoughts drifted to Calliope, to her mercury eyes and endless ebony hair, a sensation of dread passing over him. He had felt this initial jolt before, but it had never been so intense and immediate. To be fair, he hadn’t experienced this sort of attraction in his adult life, ever. Looking back on his high school and college relationships, he realized it wasn’t losing Jessica or Laura specifically that had triggered him; it was more the idea of losing the relationship itself. Truth be told he barely spared either woman a moment of thought. He had been immature and hormonal. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that an unhealthy possessiveness lurked within him.
Enter Calliope Garland.
One look. One. That’s all it had taken. He had felt a bolt of lust the moment he looked into her ice-blue eyes on the street that summer. A lust that, moments later, had morphed into something else, a resurgence of something he couldn’t name, when she adopted the dog he was fostering. Right then and there, she had simply taken the leash and walked off with the dog like it was the easiest thing in the world. Halfway down the block, she had looked back over her shoulder with a look of such joy, Tox wondered if he had ever felt so much delight…and from something so simple. Tox had taken a minute to compose himself—he imagined his tongue was unfurling like a cartoon wolf—and as nonchalantly as possible said to their friend, Emily, “So, what’s her deal?”
Then, three months later, she had twirled into his arms at Nathan’s wedding. Twice in his life, Tox had manufactured this feeling of completion, twice with disastrous consequences for everyone involved. But this…this was something else, something organic, a melding. It scared him to his marrow. So he had done the only thing the elite-trained, special forces, look-fear-in-the-eye-and-fight, charge-into-danger operative he was, could do; with a cocky wink and a forced swagger, he ran away.
Tox fingered the plastic cylinder Calliope had given him. He looked over at the slow but steady drip coming from the joint of an exposed PVC pipe in the ceiling, the water dripping into a saucepan that finally served a purpose. The tube might just do the trick, a temporary fix.
He would need to monitor his behavior very carefully if he wanted to pursue Calliope Garland. And he definitely wanted to pursue her. With that thought in mind, he took the plastic tube into his bare-bones kitchen and set it on-end under the sink. Movement in the corner of the open room caught his eye as a mangy gray cat dropped from a high shelf into a crouch on the floor with a hiss, Tox’s movement in the kitchen alerting the creature to the possibility of food.
“Hey, Loco.”
Tox had first come across the cat when the building’s handyman, Hector, had taken him on a walk-through. Hector had opened a storage closet and the animal had swiped at his face and taken off like a shot. With a shake of his head, the handyman had scooped up the dead rat in the corner and tossed it in the trash.
“Ese gato está loco pero atrapa las ratas.” That cat is crazy but he catches the rats.
The cat had paced in a corner, irked at being robbed of its kill.
“Loco,” Hector repeated. “Ese gato está loco.”
So Tox had taken to calling the cat Loco. The animal came and went and rarely walked within a foot of Tox. Once, Tox had fallen asleep on the couch and woke to Loco walking under his dangling hand in a sort of self-propelled scratch. The moment Tox became aware of the cat’s wiry fur under his fingers, the animal had darted off.
That was the day Tox had bought the first bag of cat food.
He scooped some kibble into a cereal bowl; Loco would wait until he cleared out to gobble it up. As he set the dish on the floor, his eyes drifted over to the plastic tube now parked under his sink. Suddenly, a thought tickled the back of his brain: if that worthless tube was all Calliope had taken from Gentrify Capital Partners tonight, why had she fled the building in such a panic?