Fiend

Chapter One

Then

There's something in the house," nine-year-old Maris Berisha says to her twelve-year-old brother, Dardan.

He's caught her in the servants' quarters, where they have been expressly forbidden to go, ever. Not that she would want to go there, normally: the rooms are small and plain and dark, nothing like the rooms upstairs. The nicest penthouse in all of Manhattan, Maris overheard a society lady say to her mother, Olga, once, and her mother practically purred with pleasure. It was not an exaggeration, Maris knows. They live in a palace in the sky, fit for a king.

Dardan has dragged her to the laundry room and closed the door and now stands, hands on hips, in imitation of Olga, clearly expecting an explanation from her. But he is as white as the stack of Belgian sheets waiting to be ironed.

"I heard a noise. It sounded like something was tapping in the walls. I followed it down here," Maris says, almost apologetically.

"It was probably a mouse. Or a rat. This is New York City. It's an old building. There're always noises." He speaks quickly. He wants to sound confident like an adult, but there's a waver in his voice.

"I've heard mice before. This is different." She frowns. "You know there's something here. You know it."

"You think we're haunted? Stop being such a baby."

She narrows her eyes at him because he's pretending. They talked, once, about the thing he claimed he saw. The unexplainable thing. Now he denies it happened.

"I've told you-only babies believe in ghosts and demons and magic. That only happens in fairy tales. When you grow up, you realize that none of that stuff exists."

"What about the church?" The old Greek Orthodox church that they attend is the most magical place Maris knows. Stepping over the threshold is like being transported to an enchanted world. Every surface is carved, inscribed, or gilded. Long-suffering saints look down from triptychs on the walls. It smells of incense. The priests wear long robes festooned with embroidery and mumble in a secret language. "The priests say there are angels all around us . . ."

And if angels exist, then so do demons.

Dardan sneers. "The church is the worst. It's just . . . superstition. You can't put too much stock in all that. Dad says those old men live in another world, a world of made-up stories and groundless beliefs. It's not real." Dardan likes to think he's all grown up, smarter than her, worldly-wise. But Maris wants to tell him, You're just parroting Zef, you don't know anything.

"It's not just the priests who believe in ghosts." She hesitates. She doesn't want to get anyone in trouble, but she has this bit of proof . . . and Dardan is being so smug that she cannot resist throwing it in his face.

"Angelo told me somebody died in this very apartment. The people who owned it before us." The words are spit out, triumphant. "He said one of the children shot himself. Found his father's gun and shot himself in the head."

Dardan's laughs meanly. "Angelo? He's just a doorman. He doesn't know . . . He's just trying to frighten you. Telling you a scary story, like at Halloween. But he shouldn't be telling stories about kids killing themselves. That's irresponsible."

"It's not a story. It's true."

But Dardan has already closed himself up. There's no getting through to him now. "Nobody died in our apartment, Maris. Ask Mother-she'll tell you." He grabs her arm, opens the laundry room door, and marches her out. Up the servants' staircase to the pretty part of the house, where Olga is talking to the housekeeper about the menu for dinner. Maids wielding feather dusters or carrying stacks of clean clothes give Maris the side-eye; she realizes she shouldn't have violated their private space.

Dardan can deny it all he wants, but Maris knows there's something bad in their home. Something malevolent. She feels it watching them, greedily. It's stronger when their father visits on Sundays, but it is here with them all the time nonetheless. It is a bad feeling, and it is inescapable.

Maris is in the room when the building manager comes to see Olga. She's playing, hidden from her mother's view by a pair of enormous chairs. In this family, it's better for children to be neither seen nor heard.

The building manager enters the room like a servant: he knows he doesn't belong there. He smiles apologetically at Olga, hands clasped like a supplicant. "Mrs. Berisha, thank you for agreeing to see me, especially over such a trifling matter-"

"I don't consider it trivial." Her mother's voice is icy.

"No, no, of course not. Please forgive me. I misspoke." He changes tack. "Nevertheless . . . I would like to ask you to reconsider the request regarding Angelo."

At the mention of the doorman, Maris freezes. She turns her head in their direction.

Angelo is one of the few workers in the building who will talk to residents' children. The rest, Maris has found, keep them at arm's length, refuse to engage, eye them frostily as they traipse through the lobby behind their parents on the way out to their waiting cars. But Angelo is different. He will crouch down to tell you a funny story or ask how it's going in school or, if you're wearing your soccer uniform, ask if you won the game. He is older, with kind eyes and a wistful smile, so shrunken that he swims in his burgundy doorman's livery.

Though lately, he's been acting differently. Strangely.

The building manager starts to wring his hands. "It's because of the accident. You see, Angelo lost his only grandchild last year. It was a tragedy. You know how it is . . . Something like that can change a person. He's still grieving and sometimes he says"-the man looks pained as he takes a deep breath-"inappropriate things."

"He told one of my children that someone died in our apartment." Olga's voice has grown louder, shriller. "Now she's afraid. She doesn't want to live here."

An exaggeration. Maris frowns to herself.

The building manager shakes his head no, no, no. "Very regrettable, Mrs. Berisha. I agree completely. But-Angelo has worked in this building for over forty years. He is our longest-tenured employee. He has dedicated his life to the well-being and security of the tenants. Whatever it is he's going through, I'm sure it will pass."

"Can you guarantee that? If your job depended on it?"

The building manager looks as though he is going to cry. "Please, Mrs. Berisha. If we let Angelo go, he won't be able to find work. No one will hire a man his age. How will he support his family? How will they survive?"

There is a long moment of silence, but Maris does not feel the air thaw one iota. Finally, her mother says crisply, "That is not my concern. The safety of my family-that is my concern. Now, I believe I have made my wishes known, Mr. Perrotta. Good day."

That evening, Olga sits on the edge of Maris's bed and explains that the previous owners of the penthouse had been a childless couple, now living in Tuscany. "So, you see, it's not true. Nobody has ever died in our home. There are no ghosts," Olga says as she draws the covers up to Maris's chin.

Maris sees her chance. "I understand. I'm okay. I really am. And . . . please forgive Angelo. Don't send him away. He didn't mean to scare me. Dardan shouldn't have said anything to you." Her brother is such a suck-up. Always looking for approval.

Olga has dimmed the bedside light and is walking to the door. "Nonsense, darling. Your brother was right to bring this to my attention. That's his duty as the only son: to protect this family. To protect you." She closes the door gently, leaving Maris alone.

It feels like the room is breathing as it watches her.

Watches and waits. The tapping noise starts again. As though whatever is making it is trying to send her a message.

As for Angelo, Maris never sees him again.

Chapter Two

Now

Maris luxuriates in her office on the penultimate floor of a Midtown high-rise. Her family name-BERISHA-beams over the city in giant, glittering letters.

The sign outside the door reads Special Adviser to the Chief of Strategy.

Her desk is a huge sheet of glass anchored with piles of papers and reports, scattered with a few high-end tchotchkes. A Clichy millefiori paperweight, a handful of insanely expensive fountain pens that she never uses. There are two laptops, closed, but no monitors, nothing to spoil her bird's-eye view of Upper Manhattan. There are no photographs. No sentimental mementos, no talismans of affection to offer comfort during stressful moments.

Marisa wears a smart Prada pantsuit. Her dark, wiry hair is tamed as best it can be to look professional, if not sleek. She sits with her chair rocked back at a leisurely angle, the heels of her Louboutin boots resting on the edge of the desk.

On the phone in Maris's hand, a nearly naked man writhes on pale pink sheets. She recognizes those sheets. They are on her bed, where she left the nearly naked man a few hours ago.

He is handsome and painstakingly fit. Skin stretches tautly over the peaks and valleys of his chest and abdomen. He's like a statue of a Greek god toppled on its side and wrapped in a pink toga.

If a statue came to life to masturbate.

"Are you watching this, baby?" he whispers. A single, perfectly oiled lock of black hair falls over his forehead. He closes his large doe eyes and slips a hand under the waistband of his pin-striped Parke & Ronen briefs.

She recognizes the underwear. They were a present from her.

Of course I'm watching, you slut. "I'm at work," Maris growls. "I don't have time for this-"

A lazy grin. "What do you mean, you don't have time? You're the boss lady."

"I'm not the boss lady." Yet.

She doesn't turn it off, though. Ricardo is right. No one is going to stop her. No one ever comes to her office, not to demand so much as a minute of her time. Her father may have given her an impressive job title, but no one knows exactly what she does, including Maris herself. Which means she is free to do whatever she wants.

And the best use of her time at this very moment, it seems, is watching her little amuse-bouche jerk off.

She doesn't say anything as he performs for her, moaning and writhing and arching his back, but it's having the desired effect, making her tingle in all the right places. She's thinking about calling it quits and trotting the five blocks to her apartment to join Ricardo on that massive, aircraft-carrier-sized bed . . .

And that is exactly when the glass door to Maris's office flies back and her assistant, Keeley, bursts in.

Maris fumbles to shut off the phone.

Usually, Keeley keeps her expression completely neutral in front of Maris, but at this moment, her face is lit up like a child's at Christmas. "Maris, you're wanted in your father's office-now!"

The words Maris has been waiting to hear.

She's out the door in the blink of an eye, jogging toward the elevators. "What's this about?" she asks Keeley, who tries to keep up with her boss on thick, stubby legs.

"They didn't say. Just that you're needed in the conference room."

Keeley has fallen behind by the time Maris reaches the elevators. It's only one flight up, but the special elevator will deposit her right in her father's suite. The CEO's suite. Maris is alone in the mirrored box, smoothing a few stray flyaways and checking her teeth and practicing her serious expression, the one she uses in the presence of her father's advisers. The pleasant tingling grudgingly evaporates. What could Zef want? Maris tries to remember her father's schedule, delivered by email every day by eight a.m. You'd think it would be exciting, running one of the largest import-export companies in the world, a company that rivals Koch Industries and Cargill, dwarfs Nucor and Daifuku. But Zef's schedule was a daily disappointment: there were no tête-à-têtes with the G7 or midnight meetings with the mysterious cabal of CEOs purported to rule the world, and only rarely was he whisked away on the corporate jet. No, his schedule was much the same every day-one dreary appointment blurring into the next, and that's if he comes into the office at all, as he often chooses to work out of his mansion a few blocks away-and so she stopped paying attention to it.

The doors to the special elevator open. Maris barrels through the waiting room and past her father's executive assistant, a middle-aged woman named Cicely.

Cicely leaps up as Maris heads toward Zef's office. "What are you doing, Maris?" There's a warning high note in her voice. She fancies herself Zef's watchdog.

"He asked for me," Maris yells over her shoulder. She doesn't slow down. She feels a drop of self-satisfaction, realizing that Cicely doesn't know. Cicely likes to think she's closer to Zef than anyone, that she knows Zef better than his own children. His wife.

Needless to say, on that glorious day when Zef is gone, Cicely will be history.

Maris passes glass walls that see into the conference room. There's a group gathered around the table. Her father is in his usual seat at the head, hunkered down like a boulder. She is struck, as she is nearly every time she sees him, by how Middle Eastern he looks. The hawklike brow, prominent nose, piercing eyes. But he's not; he's one hundred percent Albanian, and he would tell you so proudly. (The birthplace of the blood feud! Zef likes to brag to strangers, but Maris is pretty sure this is not something to be proud of.)

To Zef's right is Maris's older brother, Dardan, first in line to inherit the throne. To Zef's left is the head of their legal department, Walter Slocomb, a man who has worked for her father for as long as she can remember. On the other side of Walter is the head of corporate communications, Sally Bright. To Dardan's left, Ajax Danielopoulos, the COO.

Their heads turn when they see Maris charge past them on the other side of the glass. Maris bursts through the last set of doors and stops to catch her breath, all eyes on her.

How prickly and cold those eyes are. You are not needed here, you are not welcome here. She is the odd one out again. Not part of the inner sanctum.