Chapter 3 - The House in the Orchard
The black sedan didn't go toward the state highway. It traveled along winding, unpaved logging roads that tore through the dense pine forests of eastern New York, the branches of the birch trees slapping against the reinforced glass windows like wet hands.
Elena sat in the back seat, her knees pulled up to her chin, still wrapped in Matteo’s jacket. Matteo sat beside her, a heavy silver laptop open on his knees, his fingers moving across the keys with the silent precision of a pianist. In the front seat, two men in identical dark coats sat perfectly still, their eyes fixed on the road ahead, their shoulders so broad they blocked out the view of the dashboard.
“Where are we going?” Elena asked after forty minutes of silence. The cash envelope was still tucked into her duffel bag on the floorboard, but it felt small now—pitifully small compared to the weight of the car she was sitting in. “This isn't the road to Montreal.”
“Montreal is where your husband thinks you’re going because you bought a bus ticket from the Albany station three days ago using your cousin’s name,” Matteo said without looking up from the screen. “He’s already sent two state troopers to wait at the border crossing. They’re checking every female passenger with dark hair and a duffel bag.”
Elena’s heart gave a sickening thud against her ribs. “How do you know that?”
“Because the troopers work for a sergeant who owes my family eighty thousand dollars in gambling debt,” Matteo said simply. He closed the laptop with a soft click and turned his head to look at her. The interior lights of the sedan were off, but the green glow from the dashboard caught the sharp line of his jaw and the thin, pale scar that ran from the corner of his left eye down to his ear.
“Your husband is a small man, Elena. He uses a small badge to scare small people in a five-block radius. But when you step off that train, you enter a territory where the law is just an argument between people who own the land and people who want to buy it. You are safe here because I am the one who owns the dirt.”
The car turned through a set of high, unlit iron gates that were half-choked by wild blackberry vines. At the end of the long drive sat a house that didn't look like a mobster’s villa; it was an old, three-story Dutch colonial made of dark fieldstone, its windows long and narrow, surrounded by miles of neglected apple orchards that smelled of rotting fruit and cold rain.
May you like
One of the men in the front seat got out and opened Elena’s door, holding a large black umbrella over her head before she could even ask.
“This was my grandfather’s house,” Matteo said as he led her up the stone steps. The wood of the front door was thick, reinforced with iron straps that looked like they had been forged in the previous century. “The local police don't come here. The county sheriff doesn't come here. If your husband comes down this driveway, Elena, he will not find a wife. He will only find three hundred acres of old trees and a very deep well.”
