Revenge18 min read
I Got too Close to the Kingpin
ButterPicks15 views
"I warned you to be careful," Quinn said over the phone, his voice low enough to be dangerous and soft enough to make me feel like a child again.
"I know," I said. "I'm at the hospital picking up my meds. I'll be home in twenty."
"Don't dawdle."
I hung up, stepped into the elevator, and the ordinary doors felt like a seam shutting behind me. "Why does it feel like someone's watching?" I told myself. I checked the mirrored walls, the row of buttons, the polite man whose eyes were stuck on his phone. Nothing.
The plan had been tight for months. Quinn had drawn the map. Kayden, Elias, Dion, Jalen, Fabian — we were a team that moved like a shadow. I had been the shadow inside Bowen Combs' house. I had been the one who smiled at the right time, touched the right shoulder, said the right name. I had been his favorite. I had been his lover.
Then the elevator chimed. The doors opened. The chill eased.
"Relax," I told myself out loud.
A hand slid across my throat.
"Don't move," a voice purred in my ear, dark and amused. "You're not going anywhere."
"Bowen?" I managed. My throat burned with sudden stupid hope. "This is—"
"This is private." He laughed. "Or used to be."
He let go long enough to study the little brown bag of pills I'd been handed at the pharmacy. "Knee meds," Bowen said. "Still hurts when it rains?"
"It will never stop hurting," I said, as if talking to a stranger. "Maybe it shouldn't."
He smiled the way predators do. "How long have you been my pet?"
"Three years." The words scraped out of me. "Three years."
"Three years," he repeated. "You fell apart for me, you dressed up for me, you cried for me. Did you ever mean any of it?"
"You're the one who sells poison," I said. "You ruin children, families. You should be put away."
He crouched to my level, laughed softly, and ran a fingertip along the scar on my knee. "Is that how you talk to me now? My little Jocelyn? Quinn's girl?"
"Don't call me that."
He flicked the cigarette from his fingers, smoke running like a thin ribbon. "Call you what? Jocelyn? Renard? Or the woman who looks like Carolina?"
"I am not Carolina Martin," I snapped.
"Carolina is gone," he said, and his face changed for one flash of a second to something like pain. "But you? You wear her like a mask."
I had been planted because I looked like her, because Quinn had fed the information that only seeing a ghost of her would loosen the throne Bowen had built. I had been sworn to hatred and to the dark work that would end his nights. Quinn had told me the truth about Carolina Martin. Quinn had given me this second name, this second life. Quinn had told me to be careful.
Bowen's fingers tightened. "You lie well," he hissed. "You play the part so well I almost believed you yourself."
"Almost?"
He laughed until his chest shook, then his knuckles came up and struck my jaw. "Do you think I don't know?" he snarled. "Do you think I didn't notice the late messages, the nights you snuck off to meet your precious team?"
"You wouldn't understand," I said, tasting blood. "You don't care about children."
He grabbed me by the hair, dragged me into the house, and into a room that wasn't his bedroom but felt like an altar. The floor had the faint smell of expensive wood and fear. He threw me onto a bed and watched me like someone watching a creature he could not tame.
"Answers," he said. "I want answers."
"You're a criminal," I told him. "You will be found."
He reached into his pocket and produced a thin photograph. It was a picture of Carolina Martin, laughing at a party years ago, hair loose, cheekbones like a cut of marble.
"She jumped," he said. "You know that."
"I know she suffered," I said. "You pushed her."
He smiled, but it was hollow. "You keep calling her name like she can save you."
"I am not her."
"You are a liar," he said. "And liars..." He leaned in. "They should not be given mercy."
I fought to breathe while the last daylight slid across the curtains. I tried to remember Quinn's face, the way he had told me to keep my heart narrow and my head sharp. I thought of Kayden's quiet hands, of Elias' laugh, of Dion's patient eyes. I thought of the night we'd first rehearsed the signal to call for extraction.
He smiled down at me and asked, "Do you think I'm blind? Do you think I don't feel the betrayal?"
"Do you feel the children? Do you feel the houses that break because of what you sell?"
"Shut up," he said, and then he struck me again.
*
I woke in a room that smelled of lemon oil and the kind of silence that had been paid for. Bowen was there, sitting on the bed. Smoke from his cigarette ghosted around his face.
"You're awake," he observed.
"Where am I?" I croaked.
"Safe," he said.
"I'd rather be in a cell than here."
"Aren't you silly." He put the cigarette out with his heel. "You have things to answer for."
"Stop calling me names." I pressed a hand to my abdomen. A cold hollow spread across me. "It hurts."
"You used to carry things for me," he said. "Now you're empty."
I remembered the heat in my belly. A memory of hope and the small sick thrill of thinking I had a life inside me. Bowen's hands had been rough when we had been together; once, in a rare fit of tender attention, he'd kissed the curve of my shoulder and hummed like he was soothing an animal.
"Don't lie to me," I whispered.
He reached toward me, his touch sudden and controlling. "We can try again," he said. "We'll have another."
I pulled away. "Don't. Do not speak to me like that."
He bent over me and spoke softly, almost coaxing. "The man who bought you when you were a child... remember him? Gilbert?"
My whole body collapsed. "What about him?"
"He was the sort to collect broken things," Bowen said. "I found him down below." He smiled with something like triumph. "I killed him for you."
My mouth filled with a hot taste. "You killed him?"
"I killed the man who hurt you," he repeated. "You should be grateful."
"Grateful?" I laughed, thin and disbelieving. "He's dead because of you."
"He's dead because I wanted to make you safe." He leaned back and exhaled. "See? You're still mine."
"You don't get to play savior."
He shrugged. "I brought you to my table, cared for your knee, listened to you whine. You belonged to me. That didn't make you mine? It made you mine."
"What did you do to me?" I asked, voice lower than a sob. "How did you make me into this woman? How did you make me accept you?"
"'Made' is such a violent word." He smiled. "You knew what you had to do. You were good at it. You were careful."
I tasted the memory: the plum candy she used to hand me in the first weeks—sweet, sticky, cloying. Bianca's smile as she fed me the candy. Bianca telling me that some things stay with people forever.
"Plum candy," I said. "Bianca. She gave me plums to gag me into being perfect."
Bianca — Bianca Craft — had been Bowen's second in command when it came to women. She was gentle in a way that was cold and precise. She had been the one to teach me how to laugh the right laugh, to stand in the right doorway at the right minute.
Bianca walked in then, as if on cue, hands folded. "You woke," she said sweetly. "How are you feeling, Jocelyn?"
"Don't call me that," I said.
She poured water and held the cup out. "Drink. You'll be better."
"I don't trust you."
She smiled, unimpressed. "You should."
"Why did you give me candy that made me unable to have children?"
Her face went blank then smoothed. "What are you on about?"
"You told me once that plums were Carolina's favorite. You made me eat plums for months."
"You should be grateful," she said, almost bored. "You were perfect at playing her."
"Perfect?" I spat. "You took my future."
She sat on the edge of the bed, feet swinging. "We all have roles. You were a role."
"You've ruined me," I said. "You broke me."
She tilted her head. "You dramatize too much. Besides, you still have Bowen. You can still be loved."
"I don't want your love." I used the only defiant portion left to me. "I want out."
"Out?" Bianca laughed softly. "You know how dangerous that is."
"Then arrest me," I challenged. "Let the police do it."
"You are the police," she said. "You work for the same people who gave you your badge."
Quinn's voice flashed in my memory: "Trust us. If you get pinned, call. We'll pull you out."
"Call Quinn," Bowen said, amused. "Or do you think Quinn will storm my doors for you?"
"You underestimate him," I said. "You underestimate all of us."
Bianca stood, walked to the cupboard, and took out a small tin. "You remember this?" she asked. "You liked how tiny it felt in your palm."
"That's the plum tin," I said. "You switched the sugar with something else."
She shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not."
"You're a liar," I said.
"I help Bowen manage his life," she said. "If that means making sacrifices, good. He's made me safe."
"What about the children?" I asked. "What about the ones who came to the clinics you closed, the ones who came from broken homes?"
She looked at me and the softness she had once worn like armor collapsed for a breath. "We did what we had to do to get here," she murmured. "You don't have the broad view."
"I do," I said. "I have a badge."
"Your badge is thin, Jocelyn," Bowen said. "You don't know how to use it without Quinn holding your hand."
"I can use my own hands," I said. "I will use them."
*
I slept and dreamed of the orphanage's fluorescent light, of the two men in black who'd met me in the director's office when I was eighteen. "We can give you a new identity," one of them said quietly. "We can give you a purpose."
"You want to be a cop?" the other asked.
"I want to stop what took me," I told them.
"Then stand there," they said. "Be the mirror."
Quinn had given me a name, had taught me to love a calculated loneliness. He had given me a room where I practiced smiles until they cut and bled. He had told me to keep my heart like a locked drawer. He had told me how to be Carolina's ghost.
I woke to Bowen's hands on me again. "You will tell me everything," he hissed. "Who is sending you messages? Who is your friend in the city?"
"You can't stop us all," I said.
"Watch me," he whispered. "Watch me break you."
*
The extraction happened because Quinn finally bit down on his command. Kayden, Elias, Dion, Jalen, Fabian — they were all in place. Quinn had told them to wait for the signal. The signal I was taught to give was simple: a cough three times at the table. I hadn't coughed once that night.
"I didn't expect the elevator," I told Quinn later. "I didn't expect him to be the one there."
"Fault lines appear in plans," Quinn said, lighting a cigarette. "We work around them."
"You told me to be careful."
"I told you to be alive," he said. "Sometimes the choice to pull you out is mine."
I smiled, cruel and small. "You risked me."
"Yes," he said. "And I will risk again if I have to."
I thought about the basement. Gilbert Vogt. The pig-like man Bowen had found and killed. I thought about how Bowen framed himself as avenger while being the source of brutality.
"Did you tell them Gilbert was found and…" I couldn't finish.
"I didn't tell him to find Gilbert," Quinn said. "I didn't tell him to kill anyone."
"Then why did he do it?"
"Because he wanted you helpless," Quinn said. "Because he likes to own a debt."
We planned our move. It would be public. It would be in a place Bowen felt safe. It would be when there were witnesses. Quinn insisted on the witnesses.
The night came two weeks later. Bowen held a charity gala in a ballroom he thought would clean his face. He wanted to stand under crystal chandeliers and be sanctified. He invited politicians, socialites, and journalists. He made a show of generosity.
"He loves the stage," Bianca said. "He loves applause."
"I want him to hate the stage by the end," I replied.
"You'll stand on it?" she asked.
"Yes." I had the badge tucked into my dress like a hot coal.
Bowen took the podium and smiled. "Tonight," he said into the microphones, "we celebrate life. We support orphanages. We stand together against the darkness."
I waited in the wings while Quinn and Kayden sat in the crowd with a laptop and a hardened face. Elias and Fabian were watching the back doors. Dion and Jalen had the press pool in their pockets.
"You're sure?" Quinn asked, checking his watch.
"I'm sure," I said. "This ends tonight."
When Bowen brought up the photo of Carolina to a hush of admiration and mawkish sympathy, I went out into the light.
"You're a thief," I said into the crowd's microphones, voice thin but precise. "You're a liar. You're a murderer."
A gasp rippled. People turned. The band faltered. Bowen's smile froze.
"What is she saying?" a reporter hissed.
"Call security," Bowen barked. "Someone get her out."
"Please," I said, moving closer to the podium. "Look at the people around him. Check the records."
"Security!" Bowen shouted. "Get her—"
"Stop," Quinn said, stepping from the crowd into the bright space between the guests and me. "She is allowed to speak."
"Quinn Becker?" Bowen barked. "You are the last person with any right to speak."
Quinn's voice was steady. "We have evidence," he said. "We have files. We have proof that Bowen Combs and his network have been trafficking and poisoning children for profit. We have messages, bank transfers, medical reports."
"You're lying," Bowen spat.
"On the screen, please," Quinn said.
The large screens flanking the stage flickered, then filled with documents, photos, and the plum tin I'd kept as evidence. "This small tin was given to the woman on stage," Quinn said. "Tests showed traces of a compound used to cause reproductive damage."
"Stop that!" Bowen cried. "Stop this smear!"
"So many people cry about Carolina," I said, holding onto the microphone. "But have you ever asked why she jumped? Have you asked what she tasted before she fell?"
The crowd shifted, leaning like a tide.
"She was broken by the men he trusted," I said. "She fell because she could not bear the shame Bowen sold to her."
"You are lying," Bowen screamed.
"Then explain this," Quinn said. The screens showed a video of Bianca slipping something into a tin, smiling while saying, "She must be perfect."
Bianca froze in the frame. A woman in the audience whispered, "Is that Bianca?"
"It is," a man near her said. "That's her perfume."
"You can't—" Bowen stammered.
"Watch," Quinn said. "Watch them sign checks. Watch the transfer orders. Watch them call the clinics and shut the doors."
Voices rose like smoke. Phones came out. Cameras started to roll.
"This is slander," Bowen shouted, moving toward the microphone like a man trying to reclaim his throne.
"All of you on stage," Quinn said, signaling to the police liaison we had turned months earlier. "We have warrants. We have probable cause. We are making the arrest."
Bowen's face went a color I had rarely seen — not the confident flush of a man used to buying the room, but raw, true shock. "You can't do this," he said.
"We already did," Quinn replied.
Around us, whispers hardened into calls. "Arrest them." "Shut them down." "They killed Carolina."
"You're going to pay," Bowen said, and his voice cracked. "You and your friends are going to—"
"Bowen Combs, you are under arrest for trafficking, bribery, and multiple counts of assault and manslaughter," a detective said into the microphone, his tone matching Quinn's calm. "Put your hands where we can see them."
Bowen's knuckles whitened on the podium. For a heartbeat, he held the crowd with him — the crowd that had once adored him. Then cameras swarmed. Men in suits closed in. Bowen fought, squirmed, and then his frame bowed under the weight of ledgers and exposure.
"You're lying!" he cried, voice descending into barking hysteria. "You set me up! You broke me!"
"Tell us about Gilbert," I said, and the word landed like a strike.
The cameras loved him breaking.
"That man deserved it," Bowen said. "He hurt you. I killed him to make you safe."
"You killed a man because he hurt me," I said. "You are a murderer."
"I am an avenger," he insisted.
"An avenger who sells poison to children," Quinn shouted. "An avenger who takes lives to 'protect' his image."
People around us started to shout. One woman began to cry and point. "How could we not have known?" she said.
"Look at his hands," a man murmured. "He plays saint with blood under his nails."
Bowen's façade cracked. He turned to the cameras and started to plead. "You don't understand," he begged. "You don't know him. You don't know how much—"
"How convenient," I said. "How convenient that you could buy the headlines, the judges, the charity dinners."
"You're a liar," he shrieked. "You set this up."
"Look at her knee," Quinn said to the audience. "She was injured under his people. He let it go, then bought specialists to make a show of caring."
Faces turned to see me, the apparently broken woman who had been his jewel. I stood straighter than I've stood in three years.
"You fed me plums in a tin to make me taste perfect," I said to Bianca. "You made sure my womb was closed. You kept me from being a mother."
Bianca's mask fell. "That's not true," she whispered.
"It is," Quinn said. "We have the lab results. We have the tin. We have the notes."
A ripple of disgust moved through the crowd. Phones were raised. "She's lying," Bowen said, but fewer people believed him.
"Everyone who knew of the scheme," Quinn said, voice steady as a metronome, "step forward."
Businessmen who had once smiled with Bowen's entourage looked suddenly hollow. A politician paled. Someone near the edge of the room put down champagne and walked out of the doors in horror.
"You're finished," I told Bowen. "All the people you bought, all the smallness you used to hide, it ends."
"Confess!" he begged, suddenly back to a child. "Confess I'm innocent!"
"You will see it on record," Quinn said. "You can confess to whatever you like now, on camera."
His face changed from color to stone. He kept shouting, kept denying, kept begging for the room to believe him, and the room slowly turned away to follow Quinn's proofs.
When the handcuffs closed and cameras clicked, Bowen's transformation was complete. He had been a king. He was now a spectacle with hair askew and eyes shocked beyond comprehension.
Bianca tried to flee toward the side doors, but people in the crowd saw the video and blocked her path. Someone pulled her hair. Someone shouted, "You poisoned her!" More hands reached. Her perfume, once aromatic, now smelled like guilt.
"Don't touch her!" a woman screamed, and the halt came.
"You were complicit!" I yelled. "Tell them why you did it!"
Bianca collapsed into a seat as police restrained her. "I was protecting him," she sobbed. "I couldn't let his empire fall."
"You hurt children," I said. "You took the future of mothers."
"Please," she cried. "I didn't think—"
"Save your pleas," Quinn snapped. "This is the moment your deeds become things you cannot buy your way out of."
Phones streamed the scene live. Journalists shouted questions. "Why the charity gala?" "Were donors paid?" "Where were the inspectors?" Senators who had posed with Bowen turned pale.
The press conference that followed was not the controlled press Bowen was used to. It was raw. It was public. It was unedited. Video clips of the tin, the bank transfers, the recorded messages of staff bribed into silence filled the air until the applause for Bowen that had rung earlier sounded oddly hollow.
Bowen's face went through the stages: fury, disbelief, denial, then crumbled humiliation. He shouted, "You can't do this! I have friends!" and then, in the thickening stillness, "No."
"No" had become a small word on a big night.
The crowd reaction was a physical thing. People stood, some in shocked silence, others shouting, others recording it all. There were shouts of "shame," and "arrest them," and "how could you?" Some people wept openly, old faces of patron patrons slack with betrayal. A man in the back clapped slowly, a sardonic drum beat.
Bowen's men were rounded up too; a few tried to muscle through but others abandoned them. The same people who had once polished their pockets for the king now clambered to protect themselves from association.
"Please," Bowen begged at last, voice stripped of bravado. "I'll give you everything. I'll—I'll do anything."
"Anything?" Quinn asked. "What about the broken children? What about the families?"
He had no words for them anymore. The cameras loved it. The room recorded his fall and the clips went viral across platforms in minutes.
This was public punishment. It was not court judgement; it was the court of light and people. It was worse, in a way he had never considered.
*
After the arrests, the fallout rippled. Bianca's social connections evaporated. Sponsors who once collaborated sent statements distancing themselves. Her three companies' boards convened emergency meetings and sent legal teams to cleanse their images. The ones who had taken money from Bowen's donors now returned checks and issued apologies. People who had smiled for photos now deleted them.
"People will watch and they'll judge," Quinn said.
"They will," I said. "They should."
Bowen was taken away in a police SUV, his face a study in disbelief and rage. On the curb, someone pushed a microphone up to him. "Do you regret anything?" the reporter asked.
He looked at the sea of phones and said, "No," but the no sounded tiny.
"People will turn on him," a woman nearby said. "He'll have no one."
He would go from king to pariah. He would lose money, friends, and his charities. He would be the man whose face filled newsfeeds and who was discussed in whispers at dinners. He would not eat peacefully again.
"That is not enough," I told Quinn.
"Punishment does not always mean prison," Quinn said. "Sometimes it means being stripped of the things that made you think you were untouchable."
Bowen's public collapse satisfied something inside the room. People had seen power fall. The crowd's tastes changed from admiration to a shallow hunger for spectacle. They would talk about it for months.
"You will live with what you did under the light," Quinn said. "No smoky rooms for you anymore."
"He hurt me," I said. "He took everything. Did you see how he begged?"
"I saw," Quinn said. "But don't confuse justice with a show's catharsis."
A few nights later, in a courtroom where the charge sheets were longer than the judge's patience, Bowen sat in the defendant's chair. But the moment that the lady reporters had caught live at the gala was the beginning. The rest would be legal, slow, and exacting.
Bianca's boards had already voted to remove her. Her name would be scrubbed. Her accounts frozen. The charity she managed was now under protective oversight. She would live in solitary regret and the humiliation of having been unmasked. She had wanted to be elevated; instead she was exposed.
"Do you feel any remorse?" the camera asked Bianca at her exit interview.
"I thought I was protecting him," she whispered. "I thought he was the only stability I had."
"You and he destroyed lives," I said, on the record, and the line cut across the air, as sharp as anything.
*
I went home that night with a jar of plum candy in my pocket. It was empty. The tin that had been a tool of manipulation had been tested and used as evidence. I held the badge Quinn had put back into my hand the night after the gala.
"You did well," Quinn told me quietly.
"I lost a child," I said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "We couldn't save everything."
"I hate him," I said. "I don't feel relief."
"You will," he said. "Recovery is measured in small things."
"Like rain," I said. "My knee screams at the rain."
Quinn smiled sadly. "Then we will watch the rain together."
Weeks later, Bowen's trial began. He sat behind glass and swallowed as witnesses testified one after another. The courtroom was full of people who had once eaten his favors. They sat like a gallery of mirrors reflecting a man who had burned them all.
The punishments varied. Bowen was stripped of his properties and faced legal revenge: long sentences, seizure of assets, and public vilification. Bianca watched from the back as courtroom doors closed on her last chances to explain herself; she was fined, disbarred from charity boards, and watched her social circles dissolve as former friends turned off their phones.
Some of Bowen's lieutenants were arrested and brought to their knees in interrogation rooms. Some begged, some broke, some testified. One of his muscle men tried to sue for character defamation and was laughed out of court.
The most satisfying part was not the legal sentence but the public nature of the fall. Bowen's arrogance had been a showpiece. Its collapse was the opposite: a small man collapsing under the bright, merciless glare of the world.
When the judge finally pronounced, "Guilty," Bowen's shoulders slumped like a man who had been wearing a heavy coat his whole life and had at last been made to take it off. The cameras were merciless. The crowd in the court foyer hissed and photographed. People who had once followed Bowen's shadow now walked past him in radio silence.
Bianca's punishment was different. She wasn't dragged to a prison the moment the verdict fell. She lost trust, money, position, and any sense that she had been in control. Her life became small. People who once opened doors for her shut those doors. She went from central to erased, and watching her try to find footholds in the new world she had helped create was its own punishment.
The man who had bought me at seven, Gilbert Vogt, never had a judgment. Bowen had found him and killed him before our plan had come fully to light. I thought about retribution handed out in private and in violence, and I hated Bowen for it.
"Did you know?" I asked Quinn once, about Gilbert.
"That he existed?" Quinn said. "We knew. We tried. But some debts are paid in blood."
I swallowed and tasted the shore of rage and sorrow.
"You wanted him dead too," I said.
"I wanted you safe," Quinn said. "Not dead."
"There's a difference."
"Yes." He did not answer further.
*
Months after the gala, I still walked the city carefully. People recognized me sometimes. They would fold their faces and look away instead of asking questions—some of them were the types who preferred not to touch news that hurt. I kept a small plum tin on my shelf, empty and harmless, like a relic.
"I will rebuild," I told Quinn one evening. "Maybe not everything. Maybe not my body or that child."
"You will rebuild more than you imagine," he said. "You will do better."
"How do you know?"
He smiled. "Because you can turn pieces into tools. You already did."
I thought of the basement where Gilbert had sat. I thought of the night Bowen killed him and how even in violence we had not been free. The city still smelled like rain and concrete and something darker. My knee still flared when the clouds gathered.
"Will you stay?" I asked Quinn.
"I will," he said. "Until I'm not needed."
In the months after, I testified in depositions, sat in interviews, and worked to help close the clinics Bowen had used as fronts. We built new systems. We locked doors. We opened clinics properly.
"Do you ever think about being someone else?" Dion asked me once, sipping black coffee.
"I am someone else now," I said. "I am Jocelyn Renard, ex-undercover, surviving woman."
"You never wanted to be a cop?" he asked.
"I wanted to stop what took me," I said. "Being a cop was the only way Quinn could give me purpose."
"And Carolina?"
"Carolina was a mirror," I replied. "A reason. A wound."
"We gave her a voice," Quinn said softly.
"Did we give her justice?" I asked.
"We tried," he said.
That night when rain hit the window and my knee complained, I opened the little plum tin and let the sound of the metal meet the raindrops. I kept the small thing like a scar: ugly, telling, honest.
"You used to hum sometimes," Quinn said quietly.
"I remember," I said.
"You'll hum again," he promised.
I put the tin back on the shelf. It had once been a tool of cruelty. Now it was evidence, a memory, a final lesson.
"Keep the badge," Quinn said.
"I will," I said. "But not for the mission. For the promise that we saw and stopped him."
The rain came down hard that night, and my knee ached like a bell. I slept with the badge pressed into my palm.
My life had been stolen and sold in a market of men like Bowen. I had taken it back, not because revenge satisfied me, but because I could not stand letting him buy the world and call it charity.
I had been a ghost in his house. I had been his favorite. I had been his secret.
Now, when the rain comes and the old scars speak, I touch the tin and the badge and think: I survived.
The End
— Thank you for reading —