“Can You Come Get Me?” Beaten at the Subway, She Dialed Her Secret — The Mafia Boss Arrived at 2 A.M

She’s fleeing her own sister’s wedding, barefoot, her lips bleeding, wearing a tattered silver bridesmaid dress, while her pursuers are the children of senators, the children of men the city bows to. And in the most desperate moment of her life, she looks down at her cracked phone screen at the name she swore she’d never call again.

Lucy Unveil, the most dangerous man in New York, the man she’s tried to forget for three years. Like and comment the city you’re viewing from so I know how far my story has come. And stay because this is just the beginning. The rain came down like it had a grudge. Not the soft kind. Not the romantic kind that makes Manhattan look like a movie.

The kind that finds every crack in the pavement and turns it into a river. The kind that soaks through a silver bridesmaid dress in 30 seconds flat and makes the fabric cling to your skin like something shameful. Ava Moretti pressed herself against the cold concrete wall behind a flickering maintenance gate at the bottom of the 14th Street subway stairs and tried to remember how to breathe.

Her feet were bare. She’d lost the heels somewhere on the stairs. One when the first man grabbed her arm, the other when she’d hit the railing going down. She didn’t remember the impact exactly, just the noise, the crack of something that might have been the railing and might have been her. the burn spreading across her left side where the steel had caught her ribs, the hot copper taste flooding her mouth when her face caught the edge of the last step.

She touched her lip with two fingers, pulled them back, and looked at them in the thin orange glow of an emergency light. Red. Not a lot, but enough. Above her on the platform, she could hear them. Three of them, maybe four. She’d lost count in the chaos outside the hotel. Sons of political men, drunk in the way that only people who’d never faced consequences were drunk.

Loud, entitled, absolutely certain the world would absorb whatever they chose to do to it. She’d heard the name Crestfield before she ran. Senator Crestfield’s kid, the youngest one, who’d been photographed at Charity Galas since he was 12 and had learned somewhere along the way that photographs and character were entirely different things. She went down here.

His voice echoed off the tile. Flat. Annoyed. The way you’d be annoyed if a cab drove away before you could get in. Come on. Ava pulled her knees to her chest and made herself as small as she’d been trained to be. She was good at small. 27 years of practice. She’d been small at the dinner table when her mother pointed out the way her arms looked in sleeveless dresses.

small at family functions when her father introduced Seline first, second, and then seemed to forget there was a second daughter at all. Small in every room she’d ever shared with the Morettes, folding herself into corners, making her laugh quieter, her needs smaller, her existence as close to invisible as a living person could manage.

The difference between then and now was that smallness used to feel like protection. Right now, it felt like a trap. She looked down at her phone. The screen had a fracture running corner to corner from when she’d hit the ground. She could still see it, just barely. She had 4% battery and one bar of signal this deep in the station and approximately 90 seconds before the men on the platform found the stairs.

She scrolled through her contacts. Her sister’s name was at the top because C came before everything else. Selene Moretti Ashworth as of 6 hours ago. Now that the ceremony was done and the name change was official, Ava stared at it for a moment. In the photos from the reception she’d seen on other people’s phones, Selene had looked luminous.

White dress, pearled buttons, hair pinned up by a stylist who’d charged more than Ava’s monthly rent. Standing next to their father, who was beaming, who had his arm around Selen’s waist and looked at her with the particular warmth he’d been saving his entire life for a child who had earned it. Ava had made the cake 10 ft. 342 individual sugar flowers, each one hand pressed because Selene had seen a photo in a magazine and said she wanted that.

2 weeks of 16-our days, Ava’s hands were still calloused from the molds. She’d used $1,400 of her own money on imported Belgian chocolate and Madagascar vanilla and edible gold leaf because the family had said they’d handle the budget and then quietly hadn’t. and she hadn’t pushed back because pushing back with the Morettes was a different kind of pain than the one she was currently in.

The cake had been the most beautiful thing she’d ever made. Her mother had looked at it for perhaps 4 seconds before moving on to discuss the floral arrangements. She kept scrolling. There was no one to call. That wasn’t self-pity. It was geography. Her two closest friends, Mara and Dex, both of whom worked with her at Nocturn, were currently at a catering event in Jersey City and had their phones on silent.

Her neighbor, an elderly woman named Pearl, who sometimes brought her soup, went to bed at 9:00. She had a cousin in Connecticut, but they hadn’t spoken in 2 years after a Thanksgiving incident that still hurt to think about. And then she reached the name. She didn’t know why it was still in her phone.

She’d thought about deleting it a hundred times. Told herself she would put it off the way you put off throwing out something that still carries some residue of a person. A smell, a memory, an argument about whether the thing was worth keeping. Lucien Val. No photo. She deleted the photo, but she remembered it anyway.

Him in a gray coat outside a restaurant in the rain, not unlike this rain 3 years ago. looking at her with that particular expression he had that she’d never fully decoded. The one that looked like anger but wasn’t. That looked like warning, but also wasn’t quite that. the last thing he’d ever said to her. Standing in the parking lot of her old apartment building after she’d told him she couldn’t do whatever it was they were doing anymore, that she needed to stop before she couldn’t, that his world and her world were built on different

foundations, and she didn’t trust what would happen if she stayed close enough to feel the difference. He’d been quiet for a long time, long enough that she’d started to think he was going to simply walk away without a word, which would have been devastating. and also completely within his range of behavior.

Then he’d said low enough that she’d almost missed it over the sound of traffic. If you ever need me, call once. I’ll come. She’d said something stupid like, “You don’t have to do that.” He’d looked at her with those dark eyes that didn’t give anything away and said, “I know I don’t.

” And then he’d gotten in his car and driven away. And that was the last time she’d seen Lucian Veil in person. 3 years ago. She pressed the green button. It rang once, picked up silence. Not dead silence. She could hear road noise, could hear the specific quality of air inside a moving vehicle. Could hear someone him breathing.

“It’s Ava,” she said, which was stupid because of course he knew. He would have seen the name, but her brain wasn’t operating at full capacity right now. “I know.” His voice had the same register she remembered, low and even and unhurried. who hurt you? She hadn’t said anything about being hurt. The observation knocked something loose in her chest.

That he could hear it in two words that her voice carried what she was trying to hold back. And suddenly, she was crying in a way she hadn’t let herself cry yet. Ugly crying, the kind without dignity, her ribs screaming every time she inhaled. There were men outside the hotel, she said. I got I fell.

I’m in the 14th Street station by the maintenance gate on the south end. My phone is about to die and I can hear them looking for me and I don’t She stopped. Made herself stop. I didn’t know who else to call. A pause then. Don’t move. Lucienne, don’t move. The line went dead. Ava stared at her phone. 1% battery.

She lowered it and pressed her back against the concrete and listened to the sound of drunk men getting closer and tried to calculate how long it took to drive from wherever Lucian Veil was to wherever she was. Too long, probably. She heard footsteps on the stairs. Then the emergency lights went out entirely. Not a flicker, not a malfunction.

They simply stopped. The platform above her went dark. And then the maintenance corridor went dark. And then the only light was the faint orange glow of the train indicator board at the far end of the platform 60 ft away displaying numbers that didn’t mean anything to her right now. Hey. One of the men from above annoyed uncertain now.

The hell? It’s just the lights. The lights don’t just go out in subway stations, Marcus. Well, apparently they do. She heard footsteps come down the last set of stairs. Slow. someone who’d had too much scotch navigating unfamiliar terrain in the dark. She pressed herself harder into the concrete and held her breath and felt her ribs light up with a specific detailed pain that she decided to process later.

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