Lucky Draw
A Call Part I
“We can’t just leave!” Thisbe protested.
Gulliver wanted to strangle his sister because she wasn’t listening or even trying to hear his words. “We need to regroup. I do not want to see my men shot by some townies who think they’re heroes and I don’t want to end up killing all of the people who protected my wife over the last eight years. It would only make her hate me more if I came in with an army and took them all out, Thisbe. We need to sit down, formulate a plan and come at it from a different angle. We were all taken by surprise today. The last fucking thing I was expecting was for her to be your jewelry designer.”
“Do you think she knew? I mean, I’ve never interacted with her at all, and her manager Lottie is the only person I’ve ever emailed or talked to. Do you think though that she knew I was buying up her jewelry for resale?”
“She seemed stunned to see you, Thisbe. I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.” he rubbed the crease between his eyebrows and took a steadying breath. All these years apart and she loathed him because she’d heard him and 1/6,
Thisbe the morning they’d had their fight. He was a
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A Call Part I
Lucky Draw
fucking idiot. He should have just married her and kept it on the downlow from his family while he sorted out the shit with the Ziogas family. Instead, he thought he was protecting her by pretending she was nothing but a lover he would one day tire of. Only his brother, sister and Ford had known the truth that he’d loved her desperately and of those three people, only one of them knew why he played the game he’d played.
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For the last eight years she knew he was not her legal husband. His heart splintered with the notion. It didn’t make sense how quickly they were able to move though. He’d gone to her parents‘ house personally that afternoon looking for her and they were all gone. The house was completely packed up and a sold sticker on a for sale sign he’d never seen before mocked him.
“Where did she go?”
The question fell from his lips and he turned to look at Thisbe. “She went somewhere, either on or off campus in the middle of a class. You and I had our argument roughly ninety minutes after the guard lost track of her. So, she skipped class and did what for ninety minutes before coming home?”
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“Maybe she was sick?” Thisbe questioned. “If she’d been feeling unwell and went to the bathroom or something and then came home because she was sick and heard our argument. She went straight back to her parents‘ house and then vanished?”
“But they checked the bathrooms. Every single one of them on campus looking for her. We lived fifteen minutes from campus. We picked the location before I even met her because we were in New York for your education. Where did she go?”
“We checked the cameras at the school and there was no trace of her.”
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He grimaced, “those fuckers in the FBI must have tampered with it too to hide her fucking tracks. Jesus Christ!” he punched the seat furiously. “Who the fuck does she know in the FBI? It had to be them hiding her.” Things were rolling in his head, words from their conversation in the boutique, “her uncle worked for the organized crime unit at NYPD, so he probably had connections with the feds. Obviously her father must have maintained connections with a friend or a colleague who got them out. Motherfucker.” He grabbed his phone preparing to make a call to the IT guy who’d noted him?
A Call Part I
Lucky Draw
on Monday they’d spotted her. He shot Thisbe a look, “what’s the name of the shop?”
“Sterling Heart.”
“The name she designs under?”
“Sterling Javier.”
“Javier?” He made a face in disbelief. “Javier. Janvier. French for January. She had a French grandmother.” He couldn’t believe she’d been under his nose this whole time. He dialed out the call.
“Hey boss.”
“Get me everything on Sterling Javier. It’s a pseudonym for my wife. Since she was leaning in her mother’s heritage direction, see if you can find anything on January Fulton. I’m betting my entire fucking empire that the feds got them new identities using her mother’s name. If it’s not Fulton, try her grandmother’s maiden name. If my memory serves me right, when I first saw her and we did a pull on the family, it was Lacoste. It’s one or the other.”
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“On it.”
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He ended the call and looked back at his sister. “I can’t
believe she relocated to Vermont and started a studio
here. She’s hiding here,” he waved at the town sign they passed on their way out, “in the middle of nowhere as if she were terrified I was going to murder her.”
“I mean, if the feds are feeding her lines about how dangerous you are.”
“I am dangerous, but not to her. Never to her. She was my entire world, and she needed to know that. God. She was the only person I ever felt truly myself with. I didn’t need to be CEO in training or vovoi in training. I was always only her Gulliver, and she was my January and now she looks at me like I skinned her dog alive and ate it in front
of her.”
“The fact you came up with that analogy scares me a bit, Gully.” Thisbe shot him a look.
“I’d never eat a dog.” He shot her a sideways grin which made her shiver.
/want to know who told her you had a kid.”
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“It was definitely a weird comment for sure. She was convinced I was married and had a kid.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Even if she googled you, she’d know you hadn’t married anyone and certainly haven’t procreated.”
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A Call Part II
“I’ve stayed true to my vows. I’d never cheat on her.
I don’t know where she got the idea I’d made a child with someone else. I wanted so much for her to bear my babies.” A hint of a smile pulled his lips. “I had to beg her to let me try because she wanted to finish school first. She was a couple classes short of her degree when she left.”
The further away from the town lines they drove, the more upset Thisbe was getting. She kept looking over her shoulder out the back window of the car.
“I know you love her Gully, but I do too. She was the sister I never had. She was the one person in the world who didn’t judge me because of my money, my name, my family. She loved me for me and she saw me, my creativity and she made me dream. She forced me out of my shell and made me think outside the box of what the world wanted for me and to go after what I wanted. Knowing she hates me for my role in all this is killing me inside. I hate leaving with her thinking I betrayed her.”
“You did betray her.”
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She shot him an angry look. “I didn’t want to.”
A Call Part II
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“Yet you did. Her anger is justified. We need to work with it and around it. We’ll find a way.” He saw her rubbing her nose. “Now what?”
“You still stink. Confined in this car with you it’s amplified.”
“I bathed frequently.”
“It’s in your pores. Five days later and you reek of it.”
He shrugged, “the little thing needed help holding on its oxygen mask, but it was scared. It sprayed. He had these little beady eyes and a little heart shaped nose. He was so thin you could see his ribs. He settled down on my chest when I was holding him with his oxygen and then eventually I got to give him some cereal from a syringe. Cute as a fuck.”
“Only you would hold a skunk and call it cute.”
“Ford was telling us how sometimes people keep them as pets.”
“They’d ruin your house!”
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“No, apparently you can remove the scent glands and treat them like cats. You can even litter train them.”
“Why would you keep them?” she made a horrified face.
“If they can’t be returned to the wild, and are still healthy enough not to be euthanized, they are often used as education animals or as pets.”
“You really paid attention at Ford’s workplace.” She laughed at him.
“It was a nice distraction from Grandfather moping all over my goddamned office. Told me to make it up to me he would find me a virgin from his birth village.”
“He’s so weird.”
“Apparently when he was a very young man, such a thing was an honor. I took great pleasure in telling him my wife was innocent the first time I had her. I was her one and only. It only made him sadder.”
“He does feel bad.”
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“He should. He put so much fucking pressure on me to
merge
the two families that he threatened to take my seat from me and give it to Glenn. Glenn was freaking out because he sure as fuck doesn’t want to be in my shoes. I was raised for it. He was raised to be my right hand but there are days he would rather be a rock star.”
“He’s a damn good musician.”
“He sure is.” Gulliver frowned and looked at his phone. “I swear his ears are ringing.” He answered the buzzing, “Glenn, what’s going on?”
“Well, I’m having lunch with Ford and Mitsos. Ford was telling me how the kid who brought the skunk to the wildlife center was a doppelganger for Mitsos. He said it was eerie. He asked the mom if she was related to the Raptis family and she denied it. He said she was edgy and cranky, not friendly at all and so he chalked it up to the fact she’d been driving for hours in a car with a dying baby skunk and they both stunk to the high heavens. I laughed but he keeps staring at Mitsos and saying the kid was his twin. He asked me if it was possible Mitsos was a twin and that his mother kept one. I said hell no, but he asked me to see a picture of his mother. I was getting my phone out to show him. The chat from you and his 12:40
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morning was open with the photo you sent me the driver took at the gas station. He got excited and said, yeah, that’s her.”
Gulliver frowned, “what do you mean?”
“I mean, Ford is sitting in front of me telling me that January and her kid Kaylee were the ones who brought the baby skunk into the rehab center. How the fuck you two didn’t run into each other there is a god damned mystery, Gulliver but, he’s insisting the woman on my phone, from our chat log, is the one who he talked to at the center.”
“She was there?”
“Yes.”
“With a child?” he didn’t try to hide the tremor in his
voice.
“Her child. One that could be Mitsos‘ double. The Raptis genes are strong Gulliver. What if the reason she was home that morning was because she was going to tell you she was pregnant and she walked in to find out that she
as your side piece?”
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“She was never my fucking side piece!” he yelled furiously.
Lucky Draw
“She thought she was,” Glenn yelled back. “Our plan was flawed and faulty.”
“Well, this is just great.”
“What?” Something in his tone made Glenn pause.
“Because we found her. We walked into her god damned boutique. She’s the jewelry designer Thisbe’s been buying from. She looked me right in the face, told me she hates. me and to get the fuck out. She had an old man with a god damned shot gun pointed at me to run me out of town. Now, I’m an hour away from her and I don’t have her fucking home address, and she has my kid and a head start? She’s going to fucking run with my daughter?” He gripped his chest and gasped for breath, tears welling up in his eyes and looked to Thisbe, whose own eyes were wet. “I have a daughter?”
Thisbe spoke quietly, “Grandfather is going to implode.”
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