SERAPHINA
Los Caballeros. There was no proof the secret society even existed, yet my boss had ordered that I, an assistant district attorney, head up the task force to take them down. How many people were on the task force? One. Me. It would be laughable if my job—my reputation as a prosecutor—didn’t depend on it.
So here I was, poised to go after the most powerful entities in the wine industry, starting with the Ridge family. In particular, Noah Ridge, the man I’d asked to meet me for breakfast.
The family was renowned for wine-making, both on the Central Coast of California as well as in the Napa Valley, Sonoma, and Russian River regions. While their Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay were acclaimed, their Zinfandel outsold the other two varietals at least five to one. Not the syrupy pink kind, but the rich, full-bodied red the grape made when used to its full potential.
The pink stuff was a billion-dollar accident, according to wine-industry lore. Someone at a lesser-known winery forgot about the vat of juice, so the owners decided to put it in a bottle and give it away. At the height of its popularity, the stuff the winery had named “White Zinfandel” sold twenty million cases per year.
Regardless of the money they could’ve made jumping on the White Zin bandwagon, Ridge never had.
They’d stayed their course, continuing to produce some of the best red wine in the world. By doing so, they’d won endless awards and made billions of dollars without succumbing to the hype, thus maintaining the integrity of the varietal. It was a position I envied. Maintaining integrity, that was.
When I’d interviewed for the position of assistant district attorney with San Luis Obispo County, I knew part of the reason I was invited to do so was my connection to the wine industry.
At one point in my life, I’d wanted to pursue a degree in enology—the science of wine and wine-making. From there, I had two options. Either vinification, aka making the stuff. Or viticulture, aka growing the grapes used to make the stuff.
Instead, I’d charted a different course after my father lost the winery that had been in his family for generations to none other than the Ridges.
While coincidental, it wasn’t their fault he’d lost it to them. In fact, Noah’s father, Hewitt Ridge, had been generous when he bailed mine out of bankruptcy after his experimentation into “non-traditional” varietals failed catastrophically.
Had the saga ended there, I might’ve been able to follow my dream of working in the industry myself, but in the years following his bankruptcy, my father began drinking heavily. On a fateful night when I was eighteen years old, he left a bar after being there for several hours and got behind the wheel of his car.
He’d made it within five miles of home when he veered into the opposite lane, causing a head-on collision. The family of four in the other vehicle all died on impact, according to the police report filed on the accident. My father, though, had lingered in a coma for four painfully long years before dying.
During that time, the legal fight between the deceased victims’ family and mine resulted in us losing what little we’d had left, including the home where I’d grown up.
The decision to become an attorney had been made out of necessity. Once I started, though, I knew it was what I was meant to do. I loved the law and had taken my oath to uphold it seriously.
Now, though, my boss was pressuring me to dismantle Los Caballeros as well as prosecute the man rumored to be at the secret society’s helm—Brix Avila. He knew as well as I did we didn’t have any evidence to prove they existed, let alone convict them of illegal activity.
In fact, his continued insistence that I make this task force my top priority started to feel as though I was carrying out a personal vendetta against Brix and the perhaps-mythical Los Caballeros.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, answering her call as I left the house.
“Hi, baby. By any chance, have you talked to your sister lately?”
“Not since last week. Why?”
“She, um, hasn’t come home.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been a few days.”
My baby sister had been missing for a few days, and I hadn’t heard about it until now?
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked, trying not to let on that I was about to jump straight into panic mode.
“Two days ago.”
I sat down, put my head in my hand, and breathed a sigh of relief. Two wasn’t a few. In fact, depending on what time she’d last seen her, it might not be the forty-eight hours required to report someone missing.
Not to mention, at twenty-three, my sister, who was six years younger than me, was an adult. Perhaps it would’ve been nice of her to inform our mother of her whereabouts. However, that wasn’t the relationship the two had.
“What happened, Mom?”
“Nothing.”