Chapter 4 - The Sublease on 4th Street
By 4:00 a.m., the snow had turned to sleet, lashing against the windows of a third-floor walkup apartment on East 4th Street in the East Village.
The radiator clanked violently, sending a plume of rusty steam into the air. The smell of old plaster and lemon-scented floor wax hung heavy in the small, single-room studio.
Nora sat at a wobbly wooden kitchen table under the harsh glare of a single overhead bulb. Her face was pale, the bruise on her cheek now turning a deep, bruised indigo against her skin.
She wasn't crying.
She had spent the hours between midnight and dawn emptying her personal bank account—not the joint account tied to Dominic’s corporate holdings, but the small freelance reserve she had maintained for six years by doing anonymous textile illustrations for European boutiques under a pen name.
Eleven thousand four hundred dollars.
It wasn't enough to buy a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. It wasn't enough to fight the Caruso legal team in a protracted custody battle for Eli without a fight that would bleed her dry.
But it was enough to rent this room for a year, buy a new MacBook, and restart the registration for Atelier Nora, her independent design house that had been legally dissolved the month Dominic proposed.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
Missed Call: Dominic Caruso (14) New Message: "Nora, come home. Let's talk about this like adults. Vanessa was a mistake. The dress was a coincidence. Just come home."
Nora picked up the phone. She didn't read the rest of the message. She tapped the screen twice, opened her settings, and blocked his number. Then she removed the SIM card, dropped it into a glass of water on the counter, and watched the tiny gold chip sink to the bottom.
There was a soft knock at the door.
Nora froze, her hand hovering over her sketchpad. The door to this building required a key fob she had paid the super an extra hundred dollars in cash to issue without asking questions.
“Nora?”
It wasn't Dominic's voice. It was deeper, raspy, carrying the distinct cadence of someone who had spent thirty years working the loading docks of Red Hook.
She walked slowly to the door, peering through the warped fish-eye peephole.
Standing in the dimly lit, linoleum-lined hallway was Marco Vitali. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket; he wore a heavy canvas work coat, his hands buried deep in his pockets, looking entirely out of place among the mailboxes overflowing with junk mail.
Nora unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open three inches, keeping the chain latch fastened.
“If Dominic sent you—”
“Dominic doesn't know where I am,” Marco interrupted, his gravelly voice dropping to a low rumble. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a standard brown manila envelope, sliding it through the narrow gap in the door. It landed with a soft thud on the linoleum floor.
“What is this?” Nora asked, her fingers tightening on the edge of the door.
“That’s the original production log from Caruso Design, Room 402,” Marco said, staring straight at her through the crack. “The digital timestamps show when Julian Vance accessed the server files to copy your sketches. It also includes the wire transfer receipts showing where Vance sold your pattern to Moretti Group for forty grand.”
Nora stared down at the envelope. “Why are you giving me this, Marco? You’re his head of security. If Dominic finds out you took this from his office—”
“I’ve been working for the Caruso family since Dominic’s father was running numbers out of a butcher shop in South Boston,” Marco said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He didn't smile; his face looked like it had been carved out of granite by someone who had lost all their humor in 1994. “Bosses come and go, Mrs. Caruso. Men who think they can buy a family like they buy shipping containers—they always fall the same way. They forget that the people building the foundation are the ones holding the blueprints.”
Nora looked back up at him. “He hit me, Marco.”
May you like
“I know,” Marco said quietly. “And that’s why he’s already lost.”
He turned around and walked down the dimly lit hallway, his heavy boots fading away until there was only the sound of the radiator clanking against the wall and the distant wail of an ambulance out on Avenue A.
