"Humor me: how in the world did you end up working as a maid at the Calore Dance Academy?"
Arrested in place at the door, I stare after Will as he crouches behind the counter and opens one of its larger cabinets. The clicking of a combination lock sounds throughout the air, and soon enough Will's tossing a manila folder onto the counter. Though he probably has dozens of cases, I can't help but remember the folder he handed Farley all those weeks ago.
Will busies himself with removing the file's papers, all blurred and black and white from the door. He glances over his shoulder towards me for a moment. "Well?" he asks. "Your parents don't seem to know that you work there at all, and the reports on that nasty fall only mention you walked in with an advertisement the day before."
I don't bother asking what reports he speaks of. "It was pure-chance," I grumble. My throat has that parched feeling, like I took a nap for three hours with my mouth wide open.
"The fall or how you got the job?"
"You were there when I ripped that ad off your storefront."
"To this day I question what idiot had the balls to vandalize my property."
I would laugh if it were just me and Will chatting it up like old pals. But I'm too focused on my words. I tell him as little as I dare to, leaving Cal's name off the table and our meeting at the GrAveyard nonexistent. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, and more importantly, what he doesn't know won't hurt me.
My stomach continues to churn, and I keep my arms firmly crossed, but I say anyway, "You knew it was an advertisement for the Manhattan Dance Academy. You're just asking to see what I'll say."
"Clever girl. Now come look." He finishes, laying out the papers in six columns and two rows.
This man . . . this man . . . he knew what I was getting myself into the moment I took that poster from his window and stormed up to my apartment. He let me run away from everything to live out this dream, kept his mouth shut when my parents undoubtedly asked after me. Even tonight, he knew full well where this conversation would go in the end, shepherding it like the trickster he is. He puts Cal's manipulation to shame.
My feet stay anchored in place, utterly petrified. I don't register the new song that comes on the radio, placid as the air around me is. Even my pounding heart goes a little numb along with the rest of my body. I only see Will's face, his sharp chin angled down at the papers, his hands braced along the counter's edges, and his eyes insisting that I don't walk out the door.
"I'm not ruining what I have there." Shaking my head slowly to make a point, I settle one of my hands on my hip, the other in a fist set against my mouth. "The law's going to get to the Street Fighters long before they get to the Calores."
"Don't be turning all cynical on me," Will scolds, shaking his head right back. "I wouldn't bother telling you any of this if I thought you could stomach working for a corrupt family. You might have a nice little salary and a pretty little loft to live in, but at the end of the day, you're not one of them—no matter how hard you try, you never will be, nor will you want to be."
My gut clenches, and air catches in my throat. I can't say he's wrong. Any building as big as the ones downtown possess some degree of corruption, have stolen something from the little man. For all my life, I've seen Midtown and Wall Street as nothing more than an outlet for pickpocketing, a haven for wealth and fortune. Those skyscrapers and billboards reminded me for the longest time of what I wasn't born into and what I wasn't lucky enough to have. I've never bought off Fifth Avenue or seen Central Park from the high rises of Billionaires' Row. The similarities I share with the other ballerinas at the Academy extend no further than our pointe shoes and leotards.
No further. I'm a girl from East Harlem who dropped out of school because she thought it wasn't worth the trouble. Every pair of jeans and shoes I own are secondhand. My family's broke because my dad can't walk anymore, courtesy of those rich kids who thought the world revolved around them. My brother and Kilorn are just another two names on a very long list of kids who've run away from home.
Will laughs, a cruel, vindictive kind of sound I've never heard out of him. "You're not going to ask what they're guilty of, are you? You'd rather not know? No one ever said oblivion wasn't sweet."
No, they didn't. And though this situation's becoming more inextricable by the minute and it might damn us both, I promised Maven. I can't live in the dark any longer.
Of their own volition, my feet guide me back to the counter. "Fraud? Money laundering? Blackmail?" I ask helplessly, rattling off the types of corruption I've heard of. But no, I'd rather not know, and I'd take one more corrupt family over whatever madness the Street Fighters have planned. Each step feels like a nightmare as I see what's written in Sharpie on that manila file: CASE 0, SSF.
"Something like that. You should realize that the Calores are very thorough when it comes to hiding their dirt, though. Two years and this is all I have." Will gestures to his papers proudly nonetheless, happy enough he reeled me in from walking out the door.
A dozen sheets of printer paper. I brush my fingers over the Calores's bank records, a few meeting transcripts, and a blurry photograph of two men in an elevator. None of it means anything to me.
"What do these prove?" I ask, biting my lip as I point toward the bank records.
Great. Now I'm showing interest.
"Considering Calore Industries is a banking corporation, digging up fraudulent records on their money is rather difficult," Wil mumbles, and he puts an elbow to the counter and cups his chin in hand. "But . . ." he continues, tapping the transcripts, "I hacked into their Wall Street building's cameras two months ago and managed to transcribe a few meetings before their security threw me out a week later.
"Tiberias Calore partook in on all of them. A man named Volo Samos—you've met his daughter—was in on the first, the two discussing future banks they might try to absorb. Not especially illegal, no, but still something to keep an eye out for. The second, interestingly enough, was with Orrec Cygnet—perhaps you recall his company was attacked in July—though the conversation was strictly professional. And the last . . . the last was with the New York Police Department Commissioner, Dane Davidson."
The pixelated image to the left of the transcripts is now clearly a photograph of a business-ready Tiberias shaking hands with a man wearing a police dress uniform, badges and cap and all. They're in some sort of meeting room. I lean closer into the counter to make out the finer details of the Commissioner, which include closely-shaven hair and a height to rival Mister Calore's. Otherwise, he's a perfectly ordinary man, hardly threatening or special in the first place.
I don't have to ask Will what that conversation entailed or read the transcript to find out. He's a corrupt cop, and the big dog of the NYPD to boot. Tiberias Calore probably bribed or blackmailed that man, along with the rest of the police, to stand back while he carried out whatever nefarious business needed carrying out.
No wonder Cal got his motorcycle returned to him so quickly.
"So the cops . . . what? Ignore the Calores should they do illegal things?"
"Precisely. From what I understand, their arrangement is years-old." Will gathers the transcripts and the photograph, shuffles them into an orderly stack, and deposits them into the folder. "When your bank account is worth billions, nobody notices when a few million are missing." He taps at the bank records before returning them to the folder as well.
I match Will pace for pace as he wanders to the other end of the papers, where five remain. "And you have no idea what sort of illegal things they're doing, besides for buying out public officials?"
"Nope. I've never hacked something so big, and trust me, I'm ashamed of my progress. Their security is air-tight. If it was anything less, Tiberias Calore wouldn't be having such discussions in rooms with security cameras; even so, he probably likes to have that kind of footage on hand. Davidson's locked in for life, now."
What the hell do the Calores even do? Investments and finance my ass, they own a banking corporation, and I'm disappointed in myself for not looking into it sooner. My money is in that bank. Though they flaunt the beauty of the Manhattan Dance Academy, they downplay their wealth. The Calores more than likely pay off the media to abstain from gossiping about them, given how Mister Calore kept my story from the paper. Then there's Maven, who didn't mention how garishly rich his family is until today, and Cal's made light of it from the start.
I come to five driver's licenses printed onto the remaining papers, four of which the faces I know all-too-well. Mister Calore, born in the mid-seventies, is smiling broadly, while to his side, Elara Merandus, born around the same time, wears a neutral expression in her photograph. It might be a black and white copy, but her eyes still freeze my skin over. Both papers have a Wikipedia-style biography beneath the license that I skip over entirely.
Cal's picture comes next, right below his father's, and it somehow ended up decent. His classic, enchanting grin shines through the colorless paper; his hair's tousled; and a strong jawline suits him well. The card describes his eyes as hazel, though I don't agree. His birthday's in less than two months. Thankfully, Cal's too young for Will's time to be worth stalking him, and the paper contains no biography for me to read.
"Are you friends with the older one?" Will asks, noting my eyes while they linger on Cal's ID.
If he could stop the commentary for one minute. "Not really," I say. I rarely talk to Cal these days, though he'll still forget his keys in Julian's studio once in a while, and we'll end up chatting for a few minutes on those mornings.
"Hm. From what I hear, he's the most eligible bachelor in New York. The Academy girls must be all over him, poor guy."
I take a steadying breath. "You're unbelievable, Will."
"It's all part of the job."
Maven's paper doesn't include a biography either. He wasn't so lucky when it came to his license picture, and his face is contorted into a half-cringe and his hair looks as though he ran a hand through it ten too many times. "I know the younger one much better," I tell Will. "You must have found out we're partners."
"Yes," Will says and shuffles those four papers away, "A nice boy, yes?"
I nod, pulling the last paper towards me, one last driver's license.
Coriane Jacos . . . as in Julian Jacos? She's no older than twenty-five, and though her eyes have a dullness to them and her hair's limp, she's a beautiful woman in a demure, withdrawn sort of way. Funny, for all the talk there is of Julian, I've never heard about a daughter. Maybe she wanted to get out of the city after she graduated, having found it too loud and pretentious. Yes, she looks like that sort of—
DOB 5/1/1977.
That would put Coriane Jacos at forty-two years old. More like a sister to Julian.
"Why is this so outdated?" I ask.
"Because she drowned herself in a bathtub almost twenty years ago."
I look up at Will, who's eyes have changed yet again to become uncharacteristically somber. "Who was she?"
"Tiberias Calore's first wife of seven years. The older one's mother."
And then I look away toward the stained tile floor. He shouldn't be telling me this. Cal's mom . . . no wonder I've never heard about her. I would've assumed it was a divorce in which some socialite got off with some of Tiberias Calore's money, a woman who Cal goes to visit on weekends when he's not living it up in the Hamptons. For the first time all night, bile threatens to spill into my throat. He would've been an infant when she passed, with no memory of his mother now.
"When it first happened, there was speculation on whether she had killed herself or not. But the scene was clean, no evidence of foul play. Mister Calore had the investigations stop, and in time, the media laid off. Since then, I think they try to keep out of the news as much as possible."
The more I look at her, the more she looks sick. As if she—or somebody else—had been killing her slowly, long before the bathtub. "What does it mean to the Scarlet Street Fighters?"
"Well, if she was murdered . . . who was it by? What was the motive? It doesn't hurt to look into."
I run a hand over my face. This is ridiculous. "You made it sound as though you've hit the grand jackpot of corrupt families. All I'm seeing is what-ifs and wild guesswork." Coriane's death was twenty years ago, and Will's just digging up old pain and scandals."So you're certain they're corrupt, but you don't know more."
Will smiles sweetly at me. "I'm not Farley's only middleman, Mare. The Calores are bad news, and my cut of illegally-stolen information is one small part of an entire operation. The Scarlet Street Fighters wouldn't be after that family if there was a shadow of a doubt there."
Well, doesn't he have an answer for everything? Beyond frustrated with Will's mixed-messages and the time I've wasted on him, I slap my palms on the counter and shake my head one last time. "Not worth it."
"Dance blinds you, Little Barrow."
I cringe at that stupid nickname he gave me ten years ago as I walk to the door again.
"If nothing else, mark my words tonight as a warning: the Scarlet Street Fighters were created for the Calores. You're on a diamond-encrusted liner bound for the bottom of the ocean. It would be a tragedy for you to sink with it."
I stand at the landing to the subway station, staring towards the lights of Midtown. The wind's picked up, and it whips my hair in every direction, seeps under the cuffs of my jacket, and urges me down the steps.
By the time I got out of Will's store, I had wasted too much time. The kitchen light of my family's apartment was out along with Gee's, meaning Will's bullshitting took longer than even I thought possible. I didn't want to wake them, and they probably wouldn't have answered the door anyway.
But it was more than that. Having shut Will's door behind me, I felt incapable of walking up the stairs to the apartment if it meant I'd have to paste a smile on for my parents when everything's about to go to hell. Explaining what I've done at the Academy, what I've earned . . . it wouldn't feel right. All the hugs and apologies I'd have to give would feel like a hazed-over dream. Seeing them would feel trivial, even though they're my family.
On that five-block walk, my annoyance turned to fear, and my fear turned to hatred. In spite of the fact that he knows so little, Will's tone by the end of our conversation told me enough: bribing cops is only the start of something unimaginably corrupt. I was halfway out the door when Will uttered his final words, spitting the were created for part. They aren't just another case, and the Calores did something to someone if the Street Fighters were created for them.
They got me a job, a better life. But whose life did they destroy in that process? The rich take and take and take, scam and cheat their way to fortune. Farley's monologue suggested that much. The Manhattan Dance Academy, their skyscrapers, and their Hamptons home suggest that much.
How much of this city do they own? And at what cost?
Shade thought it was worth it. Shade was never selfish: he left everything for the Scarlet Street Fighters' cause, but he never would've left if not for great reason. I was so blind, so ignorant to assume that he had abandoned us for something as stupid as a gang.
And here I am, spending my days dancing with the rich.
Before I can make a better decision, I'm running down the block, the wind doing battle against me. Fewer lights sparkle this time around, but that fear turned to anger and the drunken shrieks of laughter and car engines don't scare me. It's all secondary, all . . . trivial.
I don't feel much of anything as I sprint, hard as the night air attempts to sting the pores of my face. The pounding of cracked asphalt against my feet and shins is nothing. And the ragged breaths out of my chest don't feel like breaths at all.
Will's Deli and Grocery beckons in the darkness. Will's frail outline waits in the window, a shadow counting far more money than his little store actually makes.
In another moment, I'm pushing through the door, striding to the counter.
Will looks up, cash in hand. He cocks his head.
"I want in," I say, my voice torn-up from the running. "I want in."