Chapter 2 - The Walnut Desk
It was not an office. It was a private library that looked as though it had been excised from a Milanese palazzo and dropped into the brick core of River North.
The floor was covered in an antique Heriz rug, its geometric patterns of madder-red and indigo worn down to the soft knotting along the borders. A marble fireplace, carved from black Belgian stone, held a low bed of cherry-red coals that radiated an intense, dry heat. Above the mantel hung no oil portrait, no corporate charter—only an unvarnished steel crucifix that had been beaten flat by hand, its iron nails dark with old rust.
Behind a walnut desk the size of a billiard table sat a man.
He was in his early thirties, with hair the color of raw pine shavings, cut short at the temples but curling slightly where it met the high, stiff collar of his unbuttoned black shirt. His shoulders were wide, functional, unpadded by tailoring; the sleeves of his shirt were rolled to mid-forearm, exposing forearms corded with ropey muscle and covered in a dense, dark sleeve of ink that vanished into his cuffs.
To his right, standing against the dark oak wainscoting with their arms crossed over their chests, were two men in dark, charcoal suits. Their hands were empty, their postures relaxed, but their eyes—cold, flat, and identical in their total lack of curiosity—hit Emily the instant her stockinged feet touched the rug.
The blond man didn't move.
In his right hand, he held a crystal tumbler containing two fingers of dark, amber liquid. He hadn't brought it to his mouth; it remained three inches above the green leather desk blotter, perfectly level, not a single ripple disturbing the surface of the alcohol.
His eyes were not blue like Derek’s. They were an amber-hazel, like swamp water over gravel, clear, cold, and unnervingly still.
He looked at her bare feet.
He looked at the torn hem of her oyster-white skirt.
Then his gaze climbed slowly, without haste, until it settled upon her left wrist.
The red marks had deepened into a livid, purple bracelet that showed the precise contours of four long fingers and an oval thumb-print that had ground the skin down to the white dermis.
"Who did that?" the blond man asked.
His voice was lower than Derek’s, carrying a rough, raspy edge that sounded as if it had been scraped across rough iron, yet it had an effortless weight that made the air in the high-ceilinged room feel suddenly pressurized.
"My... my husband," Emily whispered.
Outside the heavy walnut panels, footsteps sounded on the concrete corridor.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Leather soles, moving with rapid, rhythmic precision.
"Emily! Stop playing games. You’ve left your bag on the table."
Emily dropped.
She didn't plan it; her knees simply buckled under the weight of three years of terror. She hit the floorboards at the side of the enormous desk, her palms flat against the cold wool of the rug, her fingers trembling so hard they could barely grip the pile.
"Please," she choked out, looking up at the blond man through the curtain of her loose hair. Her breath was coming in short, dry hitches that tasted of bile and copper. "Thirty seconds. Just... thirty seconds until he walks past. I’ll go out through the alley. I’ll go anywhere. Please don't tell him I'm here."
One of the men against the wainscoting—the taller one, with a broken nose and a scar that ran from his earlobe into his beard—took half a step forward, his hand drifting naturally toward the left lapel of his charcoal jacket.
The blond man didn't look at him.
He simply lifted his left hand from the armrest and raised a single, blunt-tipped index finger.
The tall man stopped mid-stride. He stepped back against the paneling as smoothly as if he had been pulled by a wire, his hands returning to his sides, his face returning to stone.
The blond man looked down over the edge of the carved walnut.
His eyes didn't show pity. They didn't show disgust. They held the terrifying, clinical focus of a surgeon looking at a gangrenous limb that had been brought into his theater thirty minutes too late.
"Under," he said.
The word was barely louder than the crackle of the coals in the hearth.
Emily didn't wait. She scrambled on her hands and knees into the kneehole of the desk, pulling her silk skirt tightly around her shins, tucking her bare feet beneath her thighs until she was curled into a ball between the heavy mahogany pedestals.
The desk smelled of beeswax, old parchment, and the dry, smoky leather of the chair above her. Two inches from her shoulder sat the polished leather heel of the blond man’s black Oxford shoe. It was motionless.
Then the door handle rattled.
It didn't turn; the lock held. Then came a heavy, impatient shove, and the walnut door slammed inward against the brass stop with a violent, reverberating crack.
"Sorry," Derek said.
He stood in the doorway, breathing slightly through his nose, his dinner jacket unbuttoned, his tie slightly crooked. His face held that tight, patronizing smile he reserved for junior associates who had submitted a draft five minutes past the deadline.
He didn't look at the room. He didn't look at the two men against the wall.
His eyes were searching the floor, tracking the faint, dusty smudges her damp stockings had left across the parquet before she reached the rug.
"My wife came in here," Derek said, his voice instantly dropping back into that smooth, reasonable, North Shore register. "She gets emotional after a couple of glasses of wine. Thinks she can wander through the service areas like she owns the place."
From her dark space beneath the walnut, Emily closed her eyes.
Even here, she thought, the tears finally breaking over her lashes, hot and silent against her knuckles. Even to three armed strangers in a locked room, he is explaining me away. He is making me the crazy one.
Derek took three long steps into the room.
His leather shoes stopped three feet from the edge of the desk.
"She’s small," Derek said, chuckling softly, though the sound was tight, stretched thin like wire over bone. "Blonde hair, white dress. She can't have gotten past you. If you could just point her out, I’ll take her off your hands. We have a car waiting out front."
Above her, the leather chair didn't creak.
The blond man set his crystal glass down on the green leather blotter. The sound of the heavy glass base meeting the hide was tiny, but in the silence of the room, it landed like an iron hammer.
"You're in my office," the blond man said.
Derek blinked. For the first time, he seemed to look at the man behind the desk—really look at him. He saw the rolled black sleeves, the ink trailing across the tendons of the wrists, the heavy platinum signet ring on the left pinky bearing the crest of a three-towered fortress over an open sickle.
A tiny, uncertain tremor appeared at the left corner of Derek’s thin mouth.
"I... I apologize for the intrusion," Derek said, though his chin stayed high, that stubborn, prep-school arrogance refusing to give up the floor. "I’m Derek Vance. Senior Associate at Caldwell & Vance. My father is on the board of the Northwestern Memorial Trust. We’re regulars here. Mr. Moretti usually gives us the corner table in the atrium."
The two men against the wall didn't move, but the shorter one—the one with the silver watch chain—let out a single, wet breath through his teeth that sounded like a laugh that had been strangled in the throat.
The blond man leaned forward.
The shadow of his shoulders fell across the front panel of the desk, plunging Emily into deeper darkness.
"You know my father," the blond man said quietly.
Derek’s posture stiffened. The name—Moretti—seemed to travel from his ears down into his collar, stiffening his neck until his shoulders rose two inches.
"Mr. Moretti," Derek stammered, his voice losing its music, turning thin and dry like paper left in the sun. "I didn't... I assumed this was the banquet manager's office. I didn't realize Alexander was..."
"My father died four years ago," Alexander said. "The table in the atrium belongs to anyone who can pay ninety dollars for the lamb. This room belongs to me."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't lean back. He simply held Derek’s gaze with those cold, swamp-water eyes until Derek’s right hand unconsciously drifted to his collar, his fingers hooking inside the starched cotton to pull it away from his throat.
"Of course," Derek said quickly. "Of course. My apologies, Mr. Moretti. I’ll... I’ll have the maître d' look for my wife. If she came down this hall, she must have gone out the delivery bay."
He took half a step backward toward the open door.
Then he stopped.
His eyes had dropped.
On the dark red wool of the Heriz rug, three inches from the carved base of the left pedestal, lay a single pearl earring. It had slipped from Emily’s lobe when she hit the floor—a small, teardrop pearl set in cheap white gold that her mother had given her for high school graduation.
Derek stared at the pearl.
His breath hitched. The reasonable, apologetic mask vanished from his features in an instant, replaced by that ugly, familiar twist of the jaw that Emily knew better than her own face.
"She's down there," Derek whispered.
He took a step toward the desk, his hand reaching out, his fingers curved into claws. "Emily! Get out from under there right now! You're making a spectacle of yourself in front of—"
Alexander Moretti didn't stand up.
He didn't draw a weapon.
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He simply picked up a heavy, brass fountain pen from the grooved tray beside the blotter, tapped the nib once against the green leather, and said two words:
"She decides."
