The Blood Debt

Chapter 1

Roman

The first time I saw Ayla Moore was when she stumbled into my life six years ago with none of the airs and graces of her society upbringing.

My brother Rejab brought her in, dragging her by her hair into my office above The Pulp, a jazz club I used to run on the west side of Manhattan

Her face was stained with tears, her grey eyes wild with fear, looking nothing like the railroad heiress I'd seen on social media. She was the daughter of the sole remaining heir of the Robert Moore dynasty, a railroad tycoon and Manhattanite of the highest social order. She was a girl who'd spent summers in the south of France, attended operas at Carnegie Hall, and graduated from the prestigious Trinity School. She lunched with trust fund babies at places like Le vent d'Armor in Columbus Circle and other exclusive restaurants with names I couldn't pronounce. But standing in front of me in my office with Rejab's hand fisted in her long honey brown hair... I knew the first time I laid eyes on her that she was going to become my obsession.

The year she became my blood debt, she was a sophomore at Columbia majoring in Art History, something only people born into money would think of studying. The kind of people who liked to talk about art at dinner parties in that pretentious way that rich people have. She'd spent her summer vacation with her parents and younger sister in Wainscott. Back then, had anyone asked me the likelihood of someone like her and I ever being together, I probably would've laughed and told them it was about as likely as me retiring from The Corporation to join the circus.

But our paths did cross, and then they'd merged, when I demanded her life as indemnity for my brother's death. In the blink of an eye, Ayla Moore found herself being exchanged like a primitive currency in a human economy, plucked from her high society life by an ancient tribal law she'd probably never heard of. The brutality of the hakmarrja should have been a distant nightmare that happened to women who lived in antiquated worlds far far away from where Park Avenue Princesses partied. Right?

When she came into my life, my grief was all-consuming. I'd lost my brother less than a month ago. Esad was the heir of The Berisha Corporation, what we called ourselves on business cards and said in conversation when it was impolite to tell people we were the New York arm of the Albanian mafia. I was the spare; raised as a stand-by in case anything went wrong. Rejab was brother number three; he was the last resort, and we knew that if he ever took over, it was because shit had really gone down. Our youngest was Luljeta or Lou as we called her, it meant flower of life. My dad had been overjoyed to finally have a daughter after three boys and she was cherished when we weren't annoying the shit out of her, but Lou was never going to be in the running to take over The Corporation. She was getting married straight out of college to someone Esad, had he still been alive, thought would be a suitable match for our family. But that responsibility was mine now, a responsibility I was born to honour and protect along with all the other traditions and values most other New Yorkers would call outdated. But this is who we were; raised to honour family and heritage, to value the institution, and centuries old customs that make our culture what Westerners like Robert Moore III call primitive.

My life intercepted Ayla's in a business transaction she knew nothing about, much like the other secrets her old man was keeping.

Moore Enterprises was a consortium which had funded the lavish lifestyles of four generations of Moore men, the last of which was Robert Malcom Moore III - Ayla's father. Started at the turn of the century by his namesake, an early industrial pioneer, Moore Snr along with a few others had overseen the construction of the country's rail network. But Bobby Moore, as his friends liked to call him, along with his father, and his father before him, lacked Moore Snr's vision, and more than a hundred years of bad decision making and misjudged risks, had turned the consortium into a legal liability. As the once illustrious old-money empire started to bleed out, bottom feeders smelling blood started coming for Bobby Moore III, seizing nominated collateral and making threats to liquify more.

While our old man was something, having built his own empire in the space of fifty years, he'd  had a heart attack and died in his sleep 3 years ago, making Esad, our oldest brother, the head of The Berisha Corporation at 29.

He was 32 the year he met Bobby Moore at the Governor's Winter Solstice Ball, when he'd been introduced to him by another Manhattanite who'd benefited from a Berisha loan.

Esad's vision had taken the business to another level, securing him a place in a new world order that operated outside of Westchester with the help of Congressmen, Police Commissioners, Senators and Supreme Court Justices who had formed mutually profitable relationships with the family.

After their meeting, Esad lent Bobby Moore enough money to buy him some time. It was meant to give Moore some breathing room until he got back on his feet. I knew it was a bad investment and told Esad as much, but he didn't listen to me, and he paid for it with his life.