She shakes her head. “Tinted windows.”
“Right. Convenient.”
She gently tugs away and smooths her clothes as she turns to the crosswalk and starts toward the other side. I stay close, unwilling to be more than a couple of inches away, and even though I’m closer than I should be, I can’t help it. Anger, clear and bright anger, washes through me like cleansing fire. Those fucking bastards, they’re really coming for her.
On the other side, she pushes me away, but not urgently. “I’m fine, Rian. Just stay out here, okay? I’ll be okay at work.”
“You think that was a coincidence?” I ask, looking at her sideways. I know she’s been out of the clan for a while, but she can’t be that naive. “How many streets have you crossed without almost getting hit?”
“It happens. Mistakes happen all the time.”
“No, they don’t, not to you.”
She bristles at that. “Just stay out here.” She walks away and leaves me behind, but I can’t take my eyes off her.
“Don’t go anywhere until the end of the day,” I call after her. “That wasn’t an accident, princess.”
She disappears into her building, leaving me alone on the front steps.
Cars don’t blow through red lights like that in the middle of a busy intersection, not unless they’re trying to kill someone. They weren’t even trying to hide their intentions, and that’s what bothers me the most—it was utterly blatant, like whoever was driving didn’t think they’d get caught even if they ran a girl down in front of dozens of witnesses.
If the Turks think they have that much power, the clans are in trouble. They’re strong, no doubt about it, but the Halloran clan has more political connections, more cops in our pocket.
Unless something has changed.
I lean back against a beat-up station wagon with peeling fake wood paneling along the side and watch the professional people stream past.
Guys in decent suits. Girls in skirts and jackets. Briefcases, backpacks, purses. They’re the kind of people with their shit together. Mortgages, families, dogs and cats. Clean apartments and electric cars.
I wanted to be one of them a long time ago.
Me and Daley used to talk about it a lot. Megan, too, when she wasn’t too busy running off and getting into trouble. That’s something Daley never saw about her best friend. Megan was the life of the party, but sometimes the party didn’t want to be alive, and then Megan would have to wander around and find something to do. She was the most unsettled and dissatisfied girl I’d ever met, always sticking her nose into other people’s business, incapable of sitting still for more than a minute. Daley was too smitten with the girl to see it. To her, Megan was a saint.
But me and Daley, we were similar back then. We both wanted to get out of Delco. We both wanted to have a life beyond the tiny, insular community that’d been our entire world. I was sick of my drunk mom and tired of being poorer than dirt. She hated being the daughter of the clan chief. She couldn’t stand being treated with so much deference by everyone around her—deference and fear. But most of all, she missed her oldest brother, and she hated the violence because of him so much that it drove her crazy.
She remembers a different person, a guy that’s been gone for a while now. It was another lifetime. Like an alternative dimension, bizarro-world version of me. I hated the clans too back then and wanted to escape their magnetic pull. I wanted college and life and something approaching normalcy. I didn’t want to die young on the street covered in tattoos and high as hell and convinced that the sun shines for the benefit of Chief Halloran and the clan alone like all her cousins and brothers and hangers-on eventually would.
I wanted more.
But a lot changed over the years, and now I understand something I didn’t get back then.
Violence drives everything. Violence is what keeps this place going, this broken, fucked-up world of ours. She doesn’t see it because she ran away and got to pretend like violence doesn’t underpin everything, like all the other nice middle-class folks get to do. She got to hide away and distract herself. She went to college, met nice friends, got her fancy MBA, but the underbelly’s still there, the seediness is still a part of everything she does.
Like the SUV that nearly ran her over.
She’s not scared enough. That should’ve set her off and freaked her out, and maybe it would’ve back when she was still in the clan’s orbit. But it’s been long enough that she can pretend that it was a coincidence or an accident.
That was no fucking accident.
A black BMW rolls toward me and slows to a stop, double-parking alongside the woody wagon. I slip away from the hood and lean down into the window of the car.