Page 62 of Forsaking All Others

I didn’t have much experience with men like that, and I found it refreshing even though Alessia thought he was an absolute idiot.

Though most of the men in attendance were—pretty and vapid and more interested in thinking with the little head in their pants than anything else.

She was right, but vapid and pretty could be useful too.

I was proof enough of that.

“Where is he?” I asked under my breath as we headed to the restroom like two ladies about to powder their noses and gossip.

“In the kitchen,” Alessia returned as she closed the door behind us. “He’s had one too many whiskeys, as requested.”

“You’re an angel,” I praised as I redid my red lipstick with a steady hand and then adjusted my breasts so they sat high and plump in the red corset I wore. “Walter should be downstairs in twenty minutes to grab it.”

Alessia stared at me in the reflection, worrying her lower lip. “Don’t you ever stress about getting caught?”

I snapped my clutch closed and turned to face my friend. “Cara, I have been doing this for two years now. I am an old hat at this game.”

“You’ve come close to serious trouble,” she rejoined, no doubt thinking of the incident in Wilmette when the state senator’s son had rebelled a little too hard by breaking into the house of his father’s best friend to steal some of his priceless belongings and gotten trapped in the garage. The friend had come home, interrupting the robbery without any notion the eighteen-year-old kid was still in the house. Getting him out had been a challenge, mostly because I had no relationship with Mr. Rittman and no reason to be at the house.

Happily, most men were helpless to resist a damsel in distress, and Mr. Rittman was only too happy to let me use his phone to call a mechanic after my car broke down outside his gated home.

Hank helped me sneak the kid out a side window while the police cataloged everything Mr. Rittman had lost in the heist.

“Only that one cop was suspicious of my timing,” I reminded her. “And it’s because she was a woman.”

Alessia snorted. “Not what I was thinking about.”

I pursed my lips, wondering if she meant the time I’d almost been arrested helping Petyr, the same boy who had once kidnapped me, out of a jam with the Mexican cartel, or that time when Katya had dated a club owner who tried to pimp her out, and I went undercover to blackmail him into getting the fuck out of her life . . .

“See, that right there!” Alessia said, snapping me out of my reverie. “You’re thinking about all the times you came close to getting caught or getting hurt. That’s one time too many.”

I waved a hand in dismissal. “I’m not alone, Less. I have you and Renata, Hank and the boys, Booker, Akira, Elijah and Finn, and so many others. Every person I help is another person insulating me from discovery. They have even more to lose than I do.”

Because I had nothing.

Not really.

A husband who could hardly stand me, a big house and a big bank account, a job that was shockingly fulfilling, and friends who had proven time and again they’d do anything to have my back.

But I didn’t have any of the things I’d dreamed of as a child, a family to call my own, a husband to love me, parents to make proud.

I didn’t even have the answers yet to how or why exactly I’d lost all of that in one fell swoop on my wedding night.

So exhilaration, flexing my mind and muscles so I felt useful and powerful in my own right for the first time in my life?

That was worth everything to me.

“If Dario ever finds out . . .” Alessia murmured, finally expressing her true concern.

She wasn’t worried about the police, no one in the Outfit ever was. We had enough money and connections that most things didn’t stick.

She wasn’t even worried about the scum of the earth I primarily worked with or against as an information dealer and fixer. The Oracle had so many fingers in so many pies, it wouldn’t do for anyone to turn against her.

She was worried because if my husband found out I was a mover and shaker under his own nose in his own town, there would be hell to pay.

A hell worse than prison, maybe even worse than death.

Because if he forced me back into a gilded cage, I knew I would wither and disappear.