Jordan studied the pile of opened files on her cluttered desk in her office. She had spent all morning knocking back jugs of Perks coffee and trying to organize them into separate piles.
One she stuck a post-it on and called it her pile of progress. Meaning cases that she or her detectives had solved through hours and days, often weeks of hard work, a lot of sweat chased down by Perks coffee.
The only game in town.
She sighed gazing at that pile. Small, about as tall as well, a tall serving of Perks. The pile of shame, though she could never say those words out loud. She never said it in front of Chase or Valerie or any of the other employees. Nor did she ever admit even to herself that most of those cases involved serial parking violators and bottom feeding misdemeanors.
Only a few years ago she had ridden into town on undercover assignment for the DEA. Sent to infiltrate a sophisticated multi-block narcotics operation run by an unknown kingpin who was believed to be hiding in the shadows pulling all kinds of strings.
In reality, he had been hiding in plain sight behind a familiar face. One that had once held the highest echelon of political power in the burgeoning city a hop skip and a jump away from Niagara Falls.
She sipped from her freshest jug and pushed that pile aside, suddenly revulsed all over again by its presence. A testament to how far she had sunk in such a short period of time. Once a rising star in the DEA, now a lowly commissioner serving in a musty storage closet in the basement of the crime-fighting hierarchy.
It wasn't as if she hadn't been warned.
The other pile stood in front of her and mocked her. It would take three grande Perks just to begin to rise up to an equal level of that stack. Those were the other solved cases. The ones that had been solved by the secret task force set up of the town's mob squad as it was called.
It closed 100% of its cases within days or weeks of crimes. All of which were major felonies. Mostly murders but there was some drug trafficking and several blackmail schemes.
Then there had been the explosion. The one that had rocked the building and sent several of her family photos nestled in glass frames to the floor where they shattered.
Surely that hadn't been a sign?
"Madame Commissioner?"
Jordan looked up and saw Finn standing there looking like he had misplaced his daughter. The precious little Violent had been sent off to a new boarding school that opened up just outside of Port Charles for young girls. Girls who would be part of the new Order. The role she would, grow into with maturity and years of rigorous training would be far better than for most women of her stature. Being born outside of wedlock. Her mother was nowhere to be found and believed to be part of the Daughters of Lilith.
She sighed thinking her day was just about to get even worse.
"You may come in…"
Carly ironed her new dress. Her new uniform really, a key component of her new identity as she prepared to start her new position. She had wrinkled her nose when she first saw it.
The Commander's Wife. That would be her new title though tragically it came too late after she had been reluctantly invited into the Fellowship of Widowhood. She squeezed back a stubborn tear and sniffed the morning sugar from her Perks coffee further up her nose. Ah, now that felt better. She could continue on with her day and perhaps make it through the dedications and into the first chapter of her new manual. She gazed around at her living quarters which though her home for years looked like brand new after Lucy and her staff of Marthas had spent a couple hours bringing it back to life.
Only among the throng of tired women their hairs tied up to the point where the lines etched their worn faces and all dressed in navy green attire fitting their station in life. Carly looked down at her own frock and decided she had been assigned into the better camp. Her role as always had been to rule others she considered socially beneath her as the wife five times over of the town's kingpin.
Sadly though it looked like the sixth time would indeed be the charm though at the moment she didn't feel appropriately blessed.
Her eyes narrowed as she inspected her new Martha believing she might have seen her somewhere before…
"Is that...you...Felicia?"
The blonde haired woman with a hint of grey in more than just her hair nodded.
"Yes...Car...I mean Ma'am," she said with a slight bow of her head. The former Aztec Princess had found her new station in life that was far less regal than even a barmaid for Mac who had disappeared one night.
Carly waved her taloned finger.
"Go whip me up some breakfast. I have to meet with the Five Fingers...I mean the Four Fingers tonight."
Felicia nodded, her head bowed muttering a few words before she left the room. Carly beamed. This new world order deal suited her fine.
In a matter of weeks she would receive the glorious news that she was indeed with child conceived on the embers of her lost love, bolstered by the passion of her new life and all the promise it brought.
Blessed be the fruit, she whispered underneath her breath, Jason's child, at last.
Willow, tall and slender like the tree sashayed into the room, a trail of God's critters behind her. Her cheeks flushed pink as she walked up to her full length mirror in her bedroom. She picked up her jewel encrusted brush and ran its bristles through her long, brown hair.
The face that stared back was ripe with youth, her eyes glittered with the promises that being on the cusp of embracing her new life would deliver. She had spent one of the most passionate nights of her life with the dark prince who was heir apparent to one of the wealthiest dynasties in all of upstate New York.
Nikolas Cassadine, the lord and master of the huge palace nestled on a fog shrouded island in the middle of a lake, accessible only by a ferry. He had left her chamber even before the first rays of sunlight shone through her window. She could still sense his larger than life presence through a hint of the tobacco from his cigar intermixed with the animalism of his life energy along with the cologne that he favored.
He had left behind another treasure on her pillow, a pearl necklace that accentuated her creamy skin with a diamond from the treasure troves of a far distant place nestled in between her breasts. Right now as she stood in front of her reflection, her brow arched as she searched for any flaws she might have that would mar her vision in the eyes of her ardent suitor. Her elegant baked fingers stroked the diamond and she could feel its power. There was supposed to be a curse attached to it but the veracity of that was shrouded along with its history. But it had been a gift from his grandmother, Helena. She idly thought of her day ahead, the plans she had made until something caught her eye, a movement in the reflection in front of her.
She thought she was dreaming, bringing her hands to her face and looked harder at her own self reflected in reverse. Her mirror twin.
The one with the same figure, the same brown hair and cherubic cheeks. The one with the same hazel eyes.
Only in the mirror one of those eyes had winked at its twin.
The woman opened up the motel room, and felt like she was stepping back in time to several decades before. Then remembered there were hotel rooms that rented by the day and those that did by the hour and she was clearly in the latter. Still, it was just a place to crash for the night, a reprieve from her road trip to put as many miles as he could between herself and her torched house. As for the trail of bodies in her wake, no comment.
She thought about the man she'd left behind in the bar. A blast from her past who had this pattern of reappearing in her life every decade or so, give or take a few years. Though he was charming, sly and with wit that rivaled her favorite martini. The sex had always been incredible, definitely in the top two...or three. At least among those she remembered.
But she was all about breaking patterns, shattering them like glass into as many pieces as the barware one of her mistakes threw on a regular basis. Jerry Jacks was something and someone she definitely didn't need in her life.
She thought enough of him not to add to her list or if he'd been there, to scratch his name off of it without stopping him from leaving the bar.
Jerry Jacks would be allowed to live.
She wasn't sure why or when she'd made that decision but she thought he might be useful to her at some point. Supremely confident that their paths would again cross.
For now there was sleep, on a bed that looked inviting only to the supremely drunk or the supremely exhausted, of which she was both.
But first she needed to shower, to wash off her transgressions for the day, so after a night of sleep hopefully without dreams she could wake up to start anew.
She had whispered to herself the lines of an old rhyme from some poem she had learned as a child at the knee of her long deceased mother or maybe as happened on rare occasions it had been her distant father. But then Robert Frost had been a defacto poet laureate for a Cassadine or two for sure.
"The woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep...and miles to go before I sleep…"