A/N
This is very short, but it doesn't really fit within the next chapter that will be ready soon, so - here it is, by itself. It's a little different from the normal story, but I felt like maybe there's not enough perspective showing what the time in New York was like for Lorna? Again, not much to get through, but the next chapter is pretty close to being ready!
2009
Lorna meets Vincent Armetti by accident. She is a cleaner in his crew. She tries to keep her head down, but she's too pretty and too new to ignore. A quickly escalating conversation turns into a hospitalized coworker and a corpse for the morgue. She's not used to this kind of violence necessarily, but neither were her cleaner opponents either, apparently. Plus, she's got a lot of repressed violence. In any case, she is called all the way up to the boss's headquarters and directly to his side as soon as he hears of the incident.
She enters his office in the brownstone, wondering if she'll actually need taxi fare for the ride back to her side of town, and he looks up from the newspaper on his desk.
"Harrison, correct?" He asks, and she nods once, hands clasped together in front of her. Her thumbnail is digging into the flesh of her other hand as she keeps herself under control. She has a poor history with employers, and she's heard scary things about him. He scans her once, leaning back in his chair with a creak of leather. "I'm surprised. The way Donovan described the incident, I thought you'd be... bigger. Scarier, perhaps?" He tilts his head a little, appraising her. Waiting for a response, she realizes.
She blinks at him, like he's missing something. "I'm not supposed to be scary. I'm supposed to be small, and quiet, and delicate. That's what makes them let their guard down."
Armetti's expression is difficult to read for a moment, then it smooths out into a warm, inviting smile. He leans forward in his chair, elbows resting on the table, his hands clasped together. "I've just had an idea," he says.
She's not an assassin until he suggests it, and suddenly she goes from being a grifter physically cleaning up the goons' messes to a hitman using grifter skills to get the job done. She finds that she's good at it. More than that, she finds that she really, really enjoys it. Killing is easy. It makes sense. And fuck, she's an A-Lister, in a way she's never been before.
The relationship with Vincent follows naturally. He approaches her at a party she's only recently qualified for and makes very decent small talk. She is drunk and mostly impressed that a man talking to her has anything resembling decent people skills. A grifter talking to anyone else has, internally, very little patience for fucking poor people skills. The night ends with them both passed out on the couch, and in the morning, he kisses her. She kisses him back.
She meets his sister the third month they're together. Valerie is a spirited girl, and despite the many privileges she has grown up with that Lorna has not, they get along splendidly. It's doubly surprising, since Lorna has a history of disliking children - or at the very least, awkwardly ignoring them when they bump into her leg in public. She's not sure why Valerie is different, but she doesn't look too hard, just tries to enjoy this semblance of a family life while she can.
It is six months into her relationship with Armetti that he includes her in his planning process, and she gets to see for the first time the machinations of the Family, and the families surrounding them. Vincent is young to be in charge of what he has, and the other families are resentful.
The first one to make a move is Antony Luciano. He's mostly a loner - no wife, no children - a dead sibling or two. His move is confusing: they don't understand why he's taking this risk with no support. In any case, they lose a warehouse and a couple of men to Luciano's goons. Vincent's hold on New York is fragile as it is. He must act swiftly, and decisively.
He musters the families who support him, as well as his own considerable manpower, and swiftly bans Luciano from operating in New York, in the same movement that he takes every piece of Luciano's property he can get his hands on. It's not quite an exile - Luciano is allowed to stay, like a jester in a king's court, in order to expound on the lesson Armetti is trying to teach to the rest of the families. And for a while, that's the end of that. For a while.
Vincent knows about the heroin - there is no avoiding it. She has track marks on her left arm that she carefully hides in public, but he sees everything. She sleeps in his bed, after all. He never tries to stop her. She is not sure if she is grateful for this or not.
Sometimes, he will come home late from work, and she will be blissed out on the sofa, listening to some song that makes her feel like she's floating. He gets rid of the syringe on the coffee table and sets an overly-fancy paperweight on her package of heroin so she doesn't knock it over. He kisses her on the forehead and goes to bed, and she sleeps on the sofa. She's not sure why he's so... understanding. He doesn't do any drugs himself - the only thing he indulges in is alcohol, and that's rarely to excess. Maybe he gets that she needs to numb herself to the things she won't talk about. Maybe he's just afraid of losing her to an argument he'll never win.
Lorna sits on the edge of the chair, elbows on her knees, her head in her hands, fingers bunched up in her dark hair. Her improbably high heels sit on the floor next to her bare feet, the left shoe on its side, knocked over. She stares down at her feet, listening to the party rage downstairs. Her black nail polish is chipped on her right big toe.
Next week, she will have been working for Armetti for a year. He's good to her. She likes this.
His sister, Valerie, has been missing for 12 hours.
She sweats on the balcony, the pulsing lights below casting purple and red and blue shadows around her, and knows that every hour Valerie is missing, they have less of a chance of finding her. Valerie, who she is closer to than her own flesh-and-blood brother, and they've only known each other for six months. The bass of the music coming from the speakers on the first floor reverbs through the walls and the floor and into her feet and chair with beats eerily similar to a heartbeat.
The door behind her opens, and footsteps crisply cross the threshold. She lifts her head, turns to face him. Vincent stops a few feet away, his cell phone in his hand at his side. He looks like hell - dark circles under his eyes, his typically-under-control hair falling into his eyes. Their clients think he's been on a bender - the fun kind, too. The Family, and Lorna, know differently.
"It's Luciano," he says, his voice tight. Conflict between families was never easy; throwing Luciano's business out of New York had been a carefully made decision. Their mistake had been thinking that Luciano would play by the rules in terms of striking back.
Lorna says nothing in response, just stands and bends down to pick up her heels, hooking the heel straps over her first two fingers. "He'll regret it," she says.
Getting into the party, winning the brief struggle against Luciano, disabling the security in the basement - it's all easy. What's hard is walking down those grimey cement stairs; what's hard is the stench of filth and decay and disease. What's hard is finding the children in that dark. What's hard is knowing they must have suffered. What's hard is Valerie is gone and there is nothing to do about it.
That's what Lorna thinks, anyways. Vincent has other ideas.
It is that same week that Vincent orders her to nail a message to everyone's door in the middle of the night. She doesn't like the job - she tells him as much. He insists - he tells her it is the only way to avenge Valerie. Any family who was found supporting Luciano will pay for the damage done to the Armetti family. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A child for a child. Lorna doesn't agree, but he gives her a look he rarely does, and she acquiesces, to her almost instant regret.
She never forgives him for this. It festers, lingering in the back of her mind. When she finally regains the self-confidence she'd lost to DeWitt, it is the thing she throws into his face when he demands to know why she is leaving.
She never regrets leaving.
Maybe in time
When we're both better at life
Daylight can open my eyes
And you'll still be by my side
But meanwhile
I've got my contact high
You've got your powdered lies
We've got these summertime nights
Night by night
I let you eat me alive
I want you to eat me alive
I want you to eat me alive
- Glass Animals - Your Love -