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Ivory soap and the musk of masculine sweat and a big hand enfolding hers and fevered breath fogging the windows of Logan’s old Impala and Logan’s body moving over hers back before she knew it took more than love to make the world go round.
She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. Repeated until she felt more calm.
She’d needed to make the call from the office, which was swept regularly for listening devices, had needed to make it away from Emilio, where his cherub’s face would undo her if she thought too hard about the danger she might have put him in through her job.
But she’d expected to leave a voice mail, had thought she would have more time to gather her thoughts. She wasn’t the only one from the old neighborhood who’d made good. While she’d been building her prosecutorial career, Hawk and Logan had built Imperium. According to the celebrity gossip rags and the business magazines that regularly profiled Hawk she’d assumed he would be too busy to answer his phone on the first try.
Now he knew everything, and it was only a matter of time before he told Logan.
She didn’t know why she cared, except that it felt like a failure. She’d left L.A. — left Logan — and never looked back. Other than one ill-fated dinner with Logan six years earlier just before she got married, she hadn’t been in touch with him at all.
Now she was asking for help. She’d made the call to Hawk, but she wouldn’t lie to herself. She was asking both of them for help.
She took another deep breath and stood, smoothing her gray pencil skirt and adjusting the collar on her emerald green blouse.
She didn’t have a choice. It was the devil she knew versus the one she didn’t, the one threatening her and her son.
It was just that simple.
She opened the door in the stairwell and stepped into the hall. It was late evening, but the office was still buzzing with activity. Between the never-ending stream of cases that flowed through the Illinois judicial system and the competitive nature of their profession, most of them were lucky to get home before nine.
“Perez.” Gabriella turned toward her boss’s voice. Nathan Fitzgerald stood in the door of his office. He’d discarded his navy suit jacket, but his red tie was still intact, his graying hair neat as a pin despite the long day.
“Yep,” she said.
“Come in.” Nathan stepped back from the door and she followed him into his office. It was four times the size of hers, befitting his role as District Attorney for the State of Illinois in Cook county.
She stepped into the wood-paneled room and shut the door behind her, then followed him to the large desk in front of the window that overlooked downtown Chicago.
She waited for him to take a seat behind the desk and lowered herself into one of the chairs on the other side.
Nathan studied her with piercing blue eyes that had once stared back from the cover of Chicago magazine along with the headlineChicago’s Most Eligible Prosecutor. “Tell me I shouldn’t be worried, Gabriella.”
She sighed and took off her shoes. “Would it matter if I did?”
He scowled as she put her feet on his desk. “It might.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What would make me feel better is pulling you off this case,” he said. “Sending you and Leo away until it’s over.”
She stared him down. “You do that and I’ll file a complaint and give a hundred interviews about how sexism is alive and well when my ex-husband can have me pulled from a case because he’s worried about me.”
“Dammit, Gabriella.” Nathan got to his feet and paced to the window. “It’s not just you I’m thinking about here. What about Leo?”
“I don’t need a lecture on keeping my son safe,” she snapped.
“Our son,” he corrected.
She exhaled, cueing up her courtroom voice, the one she used to soothe and manipulate. “Our son. Listen, I know you’re worried, and I get it, but everything is fine.”
“The lead witness in the city’s biggest organized crime case in fifty years is under 24-hour guard and probably won’t make it to trial alive, and dead animals are being left on your doorstep. Everything is not fine,” he said.
“It was one animal.” The words came out softly. The bird that had been left on her doorstep was small and innocent. It had hurt her to see it, to know it had died to send her a message she wouldn’t heed.
She couldn’t. Not when Yakov Vitsin, a brigadier — or avtoritet, as they were called in the bratva — of one of Chicago’s oldest Russian mafia families was so close to being sent to prison.
And this time, it wouldn’t be for tax evasion like Capone.
