Chapter 2 - GHOSTS IN THE FREEZING RAIN
The icy wind howled down the narrow alleyway, rattling the loose panes of the tenement window like dry bones. Inside the decaying room, Clara’s chest rose and fell in rapid, frantic gasps. She jumped between me and the wheelchair, clutching an empty plastic bowl against her chest like an absurd shield. Her knuckles were white, cracked red from scrubbing marble floors in freezing water.
“Mr. Moretti,” she choked out, her voice scraping against the dry terror in her throat. “Please. Please, it was just food. It was going in the trash. She hasn't eaten protein in three days. Kill me if you want, but don't hurt her. Please, God, she has nothing to do with this.”
I didn't draw my weapon. I didn't step back. The bitter Chicago cold bit through my heavy wool coat, but inside my veins, molten lead had replaced my blood. I pushed the rotting wooden door open with one gloved hand. The rusted hinges gave a long, agonizing shriek before snapping entirely, dangling by a single screw.
Lorenzo would have fired twice through the door by now. Lorenzo would have demanded an apology on their knees. But as I stepped onto the linoleum, feeling the icy draft rising straight from the unheated basement below, I was no longer the don who commanded three thousand men across Cook County. I was an eighteen-year-old boy trapped behind a bent steering column, choking on burning transmission fluid while the world turned red and black.
“Clara,” the older woman said softly. Her voice was thin, raspy, damaged by smoke inhalation that clearly hadn't healed in fifteen years. “Step aside, baby.”
“Mom, no! You don't know who he is—he's Dante Moretti. He kills people, Mom!”
“I know who he is,” the woman whispered. She lifted one scarred hand, her fingers trembling violently from severed nerves, and rested it against Clara’s hip. “He had that same cut across his brow the night the tanker hit him on the Dan Ryan Expressway. He looked like an angry stray dog then, too.”
My breath hitched. The scar above my left eye throbbed beneath my skin, an involuntary ghost ache waking after fifteen years of silence.
“What is your name?” I asked. My voice sounded stripped, devoid of the cold baritone that made city aldermen tremble.
“Evelyn,” she answered, holding my gaze without flinching. “Evelyn Vance. Though back then, they called me Miller.”
“Evelyn,” I repeated. The name tasted like ash and redemption. “Why didn't you stay at the hospital? I left three million dollars in escrow for whoever pulled me out of that wreckage. My father put half the state police on payroll just to find you. You were gone before the sunrise.”
Evelyn gave a brittle, soundless laugh that shook her wasted shoulders beneath the threadbare blanket. “Your father. Don Antonio Moretti. You think I didn't know whose car that was? You think I didn't know who set the fire?”
The small room grew suffocatingly silent. Only the hiss of the radiator—clanking empty, producing no heat at all—broke the stillness.
“What did you say?” I stepped closer, my shadow swallowing the tiny dining table where a single crust of bread lay on a chipped plate.
“It wasn't an accident, Dante,” Evelyn said, leaning her head back against the faded vinyl of her chair. Her eyes reflected the dim yellow glow of a single hanging bulb. “I was a triage nurse heading home from the midnight shift at Mercy Hospital. When your car spun out, another black sedan pulled up behind you. Men in suits got out. They didn't come to pull you out; they tossed an incendiary flare under your ruptured fuel tank and watched it ignite. When I screamed and ran toward you, one of them turned a gun on me. I tackled you through the passenger side window just as the gas tank ruptured.”
She reached down, pulling back the blanket with her trembling left hand.
There was nothing beneath the coarse wool except two withered, lifeless limbs, crisscrossed with graft tissue that resembled melted wax.
“The blast threw us thirty feet down the embankment,” she whispered. “A piece of the chassis crushed my spine at T-10. The explosion burned my skin to the bone. Those men thought we were both dead in the ditch. But as I lay there, choking on dirt, I heard one of them speak on a burner phone before they drove away. He said: ‘It’s done. The boy is burning. Tell Antonio his prodigal son won’t be taking the throne after all.’”
A thunderclap seemed to detonate behind my eyes.
“Antonio?” I whispered, the word tearing out of my throat. “My father died seven years ago. He spent the rest of his life grieving that crash—it drove him mad with paranoia.”
“He wasn't grieving you, boy,” Evelyn said coldly, tears finally spilling over her scarred cheeks. “He was cleaning house. But the man on the phone didn't work for your father. He worked for the man who whispered in your father's ear every single day. The man who raised you after Antonio died.”
Before I could answer, Clara gasped.
Outside, tires screamed against the black ice of the alley. Twin beams of high-intensity headlights flashed through the frost-cracked window, illuminating the room in blinding white. A heavy car door slammed, followed by the metallic, unmistakable slide of a submachine gun bolt chambering a round.
May you like
Lorenzo’s voice boomed through the freezing dark outside.
“Boss! You in there? Security dispatch picked up your tracker! Step back from the thief—we're clearing the room!”
