Chapter 11 - The Scent of Old Blood
Vincent did not crumple the vellum. He folded it with terrifying precision along its original creases, his knuckles pale against the dark paper, before sliding it into the breast pocket of his wool coat.
"Who is Victoria Vance?" I asked, my voice steady despite the rapid pounding against my ribs. "Derek Lawson’s attorneys claimed his family had liquidated all their Manhattan partnerships. Is she tied to him?"
"Lawson was an insect," Vincent said, his voice dropping an octave into a register I had never heard before—flat, deadly, stripped of warmth. "A spoiled parasite with an expensive pedigree and a father who bought him out of rape charges until his luck ran out. Victoria Vance is something entirely different."
He walked toward the loading dock doors, staring out into the grey drizzle beginning to mist over the Bronx street. I followed him, refusing to stay in the dark.
"Vincent. Talk to me. We have sixty-two women expecting orientation here in three weeks. We spent four hundred thousand dollars of the restitution fund on kitchen fixtures and down payments. If this lease is contested—"
"The lease is legal," Vincent interrupted, turning to face me. "My attorneys spent three weeks vetting the title. But Victoria Vance doesn't care about legality. She cares about leverage."
He leaned his back against the brick jamb, looking down at his scarred palms. "Thirty years ago, before my father was shot behind the counter of the diner, the Vance family owned half the riverfront piers from Greenpoint down to the Navy Yard. They ran the private shipping lines, the municipal warehouse bonds, the union kickbacks. My father refused to let them use the diner’s basement as a dead-drop for smuggled cargo manifests. Two weeks after he turned Victoria’s father away, three masked men walked in at closing time."
The air caught in my throat. The checkered floor. The brass bell over the door. The twenty-six years Vincent had spent standing guard over that mahogany counter, a living memorial to a murder that the city had officially labeled an 'unsolved robbery.'
"It was the Vances?" I whispered.
"Old Jonathan Vance pulled the strings," Vincent replied, his jaw set like granite. "His daughter, Victoria, was barely twenty-one then, but she had ice water in her veins. When the old man died in federal custody fifteen years later, Victoria took over the family assets. She sanitized the money. Moved it into high-end real estate, private equity, charity boards. She sits on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Center Society. But beneath the French couture and the diamond chokers, she’s a butcher’s daughter who never forgot a slight."
"Then why target me?" I asked, frowning. "Why target this building?"
"Because this building sat in a municipal land bank for forty years," Vincent said, stepping closer to me, his gaze fierce. "Victoria bought the debt bonds on it through a dummy corporation three months ago. She didn't care about the lot until she saw my name behind the corporate guarantor on your foundation’s lease. And she knows who you are, Amelia. She watched the news when Derek Lawson went down. She knows you're the one who pulled down one of her inner circle’s favorite pet monsters."
I looked out into the rain-slicked alleyway. An unmarked black Mercedes sedan was parked fifty yards down the block, its engine idling, thin trails of exhaust rising into the cold air. The windows were tinted jet black, reflecting nothing but the grey sky.
"They're watching the entrance," I said quietly, pointing with my chin.
"They've been there since two o'clock," Vincent said without looking. "They want us to know they’re here. Victoria doesn't strike in the dark like Lawson. She prefers to watch her prey exhaust themselves trying to build something beautiful before she crushes it under the heel of an Italian leather boot."
"Then she doesn't know who she's dealing with," I said, cold fury rising inside me, pushing past the instinctive fear that had governed so much of my early twenties. I stepped right up to Vincent, looking directly into his stormy eyes. "I spent four years running from angry men with heavy hands and expensive lawyers. I survived Derek Lawson breaking my jaw and trying to bury me under a team of fixers. I am not letting some uptown socialite evict sixty-two battered women because her dead father held a grudge against your diner."
For the first time since the courier arrived, the icy tension in Vincent’s mouth softened into a faint, dangerous smile. It was the look of a wolf that had just found another wolf running beside him.
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"So what do you want to do, Amelia?" he asked softly.
"I want to meet her," I said. "Tonight."
