“Okay,” he said, pulling out his phone. “Is there anything else? Should we tell people who might call looking for you anything specific?”
“Just tell them to contact me if it’sthatimportant, but otherwise I’ll be back in, at most, a few hours. No one needs toworry about where I’m at, I’ll answer them when I get around to it.”
“Sure,” he said with a couple of quick nods. “I’ll pass it along to Reed. Do you need any... Oh, I guess you wouldn’t need any help getting around, huh? You’ve been here almost a month now.”
“That’s not quite enough time to acclimate. That said, you wouldn’t remember this because you were too young, but I spent a good sixteen years in this city before I moved to Portland to take on a bigger role within The Family.”
“Oh, I didn’t know this was your hometown.”
“It is,” I said, standing up and tucking the card and flash drive in my pocket. “I grew up not far from here, actually.”
“Oh. Is it a good thing or a bad thing being back?”
“Whether or not I’m happy about being here is irrelevant,” I told him with a shrug. “I’m here to do a job, and I fully intend to do it to the best of my ability. Actually, my goal is to achieve more than just simple success, aim high, that way even if you fall short, you’re still winning.”
Of course, if I did achieve more than just simple success, I would undoubtedly end up on Augustine’s list of people to do things in the future. I had clearly already been put on that list, hence why I was here in the first place. I didn’t want to stay on that list; I would prefer to go back to the quiet life I had before I was nominated to clean up other people’s messes and corral a bunch of egotistical assholes like Hugo. The problem with that was there was no going back. I might be able to go back to that role if I failed. The right kind of failure, though, the kind that didn’t make me look incompetent or dangerous to trust, just enough to be demoted.
Except, I didn’t do half-measures, and certainly not intentionally. I might want my old life returned, but that didn’t mean I was willing to sabotage what I had agreed to do, even ifthat agreement was under duress. It wasn’t about loyalty to The Family or to Augustine, but I had never believed in doing a bad job. Augustine had once said I had my mother’s work ethic, but I had inherited his perfectionism.
So no, I would not be intentionally making myself look less capable than I was, even though it might result in the return of the quiet life I had led before. It was clear Augustine knew that if I were put to a job, I would do it with every ounce of effort and knowledge I possessed. If I failed, it would be because of circumstances beyond my control. I was stuck, and I would lose either way.
“Hold down the fort for me,” I told Reed as I passed by. “I’m taking a few hours to myself, you know the drill.”
“Call you only in the event of catastrophe, significant death, or if your…if Augustine shows up,” Reed listed off, catching himself at the last second. So far, he was one of only two people who had caught on to the fact that I didn’t like Augustine being referred to as my father. Sadly, Hugo was the other one. Reed tried to refer to Augustine by name when I was within hearing, but what he called him when I wasn’t around didn’t matter.
“Good, thank you,” I said as I walked out the front door and was reminded why one of the first things I’d ordered when coming into the building had been air ducts to freshen the air. The smell of fumes, gas, and human waste had been worse in my childhood, but it was still no better. The only difference was that regulations required factories and warehouses to contain their waste so it didn’t contaminate the water or ground.
I pulled out of the parking lot, not knowing where I was going, all I knew was that I wasn’t going to return to that hotel... or anywhere near it. In fact, I had been quietly making a mental list of all the places I needed to avoid so I didn’t risk running into Dom. That meant avoiding the neighborhood I’d grown up in, the hotel, and the blocks around it. Of course, now that I knewDom was in the city, it meant anywhere was a risk, but at least I could minimize it by avoiding our old stomping grounds.
“Oh,” I sighed as I drifted through the city mindlessly, letting my body take over the driving while I drifted through my thoughts.
It wasn’t until the car stopped that I paid attention to what was going on around me. I had driven to the far western part of town, where the cliffs made up a good chunk of the area. During the summer, they were a prime spot for tourists before heading further south to the beaches.
I wasn’t surprised when I realized where I’d ended up. The cliffs had always held a fascination for me, though getting there when I was younger had been a chore. There were no buses to the farther cliffs, so I had to walk for an hour or two, depending on the weather. It was the cliffs at the very edge of Cresson Point that I had been fond of, mainly because they were less likely to have people ruining the ambiance.
Those furthest from the city seemed the perfect place for tourists; they were picturesque and striking, with their towering walls of rock and hard-packed dirt, and the way the waves crashed at their base, sending sprays of saltwater flying. On sunny days, the entire base of the cliffs came alive with rainbows. The problem was that, unless it was a warm day, the cliffs were often chilly, and several signs warned of the danger, so families tended to avoid them. I imagined that they occasionally had social media influencers out here to show off the place and do something stupid for their followers, which would explain the new signs warning against climbing.
It was a cooler day, though, and the sun hadn’t peeked out much, so it was quiet, and I could only see one person on the lower cliffs. My feet, however, carried me up a steep slope to one of the tallest cliffs in the area. It had always been my favorite. There were fewer people, and I enjoyed theharsh weather whenever I needed to sit and think about my life. Considering how much my life had changed, along with the recent unwelcome addition of seeing the one person I’d tried to avoid, perhaps a little reflection was in order.
After fifteen minutes of steady climbing, I found a familiar rock and sat down with a smile. There were a lot of things about the city that had changed, but some things didn’t change. Not that someone couldn’t have come along and ruined this cliff or moved the rock, but it was nice to see no one had. The wind wasn’t cold enough to bite into my skin, but there was enough to make me draw my jacket closer.
“What am I going to do with myself?” I wondered aloud, the sound muffled by the wind.
It was a good question, and one I’d been asking myself off and on for years. I had mostly accepted that this was the life I was going to have, and my feelings were irrelevant. There were, of course, lingering regrets over my choice, but I didn’t dwell on them. If there was anything I’d learned about regret, it was a lot like shame; if you weren’t quick, it would breed out of control and start filling all the spaces until there was little room for anything else. The best thing you could do was to stomp on its head and grind it into the dirt before it could even think about breeding, then see what lessons you could pluck from the corpse.
But...regrets were inevitable, and even when you killed them before they spread, some were capable of crawling back out of the grave. My life since I had left Cresson Point had been a game of mental whack-a-mole with those resurrecting regrets. If I had known back then what I knew now, I would never have left Cresson Point, and I would have taken the window I didn’t realize at the time existed to get out of this life before I got in too deep.
Yet I hadn’t, and I was stuck with the consequences of my choices. There was no getting out; I had made as much peacewith that fact as I could. Over the years, I had occasionally indulged in the ever-dangerous ‘what if’ game when I was alone, but it had been years. Sitting around, considering what my life might have been like if I had made a different choice at seventeen was as tempting as it was damaging.
There was no going back, so giving the what-ifs too much energy was dangerous. The problem with being back in Cresson Point was that it gave more life to those what-ifs, and to the regrets that followed hot on their heels. Even being here, on this cliff, watching as seagulls rolled and tumbled through the air, was dangerous for my mental equilibrium.
It begged the question, just what had Augustine expected by sending me here? It would have been one thing if he’d given me the job and expected me to operate out of Portland. It would have been harder, but I would have been mentally stable. Being here in Cresson Point was...unsettling. It felt like trying to walk, but the room was slanted, making me think carefully about each step.
I couldn’t afford to be off balance, but how was I supposed to change that? The only way to solve the problem would be to leave Cresson Point, to leave its memories and influences behind. Perhaps I should have risked operating out of Portland instead, even if it would have made the job much harder. It was my goal to operate in Cresson Point in the short term, with the hope of shifting to Portland, so I didn’t have to stay here much longer.
That was still up in the air, and I had no idea how long ‘short term’ would be. Trying to move operations out of Cresson Point too quickly, when I was already establishing it as a new hub, came with a breathtaking amount of risk. Setting up a new base, like I already had, was difficult enough, especially with the feds crawling all over the place. To then shift it all back to Portland simply because it would make things emotionally easier, openedup the possibility of creating gaps in defenses, stretching something that was already thin into something so threadbare it was non-existent.
Typical.
