Chapter 1 - The Darkening Room
The rain hammered against the floor-to-ceiling sheets of reinforced ballistic glass like handfuls of river gravel hurled by a furious, invisible fist. Fifty floors above the flooded asphalt of Michigan Avenue, the Chicago skyline was nothing more than a smeared watercolor of sulfur streetlights and bruised purple cloud cover.
Dante Moretti did not look away from his reflection. He was thirty-two years old, but inside the darkened mirror of the glass, the lamplight from the hallway carved his face into something excavated from an ancient tomb. His cheekbones were sharp, his jaw shadowed with three days of neglect, and his eyes—dark, rimmed with the gray exhaustion of sleepless months—belonged to a man who had already bargained away his soul and found no buyers.
Beneath his tailored charcoal coat, the custom holster pressed against his ribs. The checkered walnut grip of his Kimber 1911 was warm from his body heat. It was the only constant weight he trusted anymore. Men who commanded six hundred square blocks of the city’s concrete veins did not walk into any room unarmed, especially not the rooms inside their own home.
Behind him, the noise began.
It did not start as a whimper. It never did. It was eight o’clock on the dot, as if an internal clock made of wire and broken glass had wound itself tight within the ribcages of two four-year-old girls.
The scream was a physical tear in the quiet of the penthouse. It came through the solid mahogany archway of the nursery wing, sharp, ragged, and raw—the sound of an animal caught in an iron snare, pulling at its own flesh to get free.
Arthur, his butler and the only man who had known Dante’s grandfather before the syndicate had clean hands and legitimate holding companies, stepped into the peripheral amber glow of the study doorway. His black suit was immaculate, but the cuffs of his trousers were damp, and a muscle jumped along his jawline.
"Sir."
"The agency sent another one?" Dante’s voice was low, flat, scraped clean of inflection.
"She is in the foyer, Mr. Moretti. Her name is Sarah Jenkins. She is... quite young."
"Young means stupid, or it means desperate," Dante replied. His eyes stayed fixed on the rain crawling down the lakefront side of the glass. "Which is she?"
"Both, I suspect," Arthur murmured, keeping his gaze respectfully downcast. "Her younger brother, Tobias, owes forty thousand to the South Side bookmakers under Kowalski. They took two of his toes on Tuesday. They gave him until midnight this Friday to pay the principal, or they throw him off the slip at Calumet Harbor."
Dante let out a slow, cold breath that fogged the glass before vanishing. "Then she won't run at the first sign of blood. Bring her up. Instruct the corridor detail to remain five paces back from the threshold. If she lays a rough finger on them, she does not leave the floor alive."
"Understood, sir."
Two minutes later, Sarah Jenkins stood on the threshold of the nursery, clutching a fraying canvas tote bag to her chest like a breastplate. Her sneakers were worn thin at the soles, soaked through from running three blocks from the Red Line station in the downpour. A faded green cardigan hung loose around her slight shoulders. Her knuckles were scrubbed raw, and there was a smear of dried flour beneath one thumbnail from a bakery shift she had been fired from thirty-six hours earlier.
Around her, the nursery was a ruin.
It had once been designed by an architectural firm from Milan: pale birchwood paneling, hand-woven ivory rugs from sheep farms in the Pyrenees, a soft cove ceiling painted like a dawn sky over the Mediterranean. Now, the ivory wool was shredded and matted with spilled juice and crushed black wax crayons. Down feathers from an eviscerated comforter drifted in lazy spirals through the overheated air, sticking to the mahogany trim like filthy winter snow.
In the center of the carnage, beside an overturned bassinet of carved walnut, stood the twins.
Mia was clutching the headless torso of an antique porcelain doll, her black curls plastered to her forehead with sweat, her chest heaving as she let out another jagged, ear-splitting shriek that shook the crystals of the sconces. Her sister, Bella, sat crouched against the wall, her small fingernails digging viciously into her own forearms, tearing at the pale skin until pink scratches bloomed into dark red beads.
A middle-aged nanny from a prestigious agency on the Gold Coast was cowering behind an armchair in the corner, clutching her cheek where a brass picture frame had caught her ten minutes earlier.
Dante blocked the entryway. He did not step over the boundary. Every time he crossed that threshold, the girls looked at his black coat, smelled the gun oil and cedar that clung to him, and saw the man who had closed their mother’s casket before they could understand what death meant. His presence was gasoline on a house fire.
"You have ten minutes," Dante said, not turning his head toward Sarah. His voice was stripped of human pity. "If they are still shrieking when the clock strikes eight-fifteen, Arthur will escort you to the service elevator."
Sarah didn't look at the moneyed man in the tailored coat. She looked at Bella’s hands, which were now tearing at the collar of her cotton nightgown, suffocating herself in an agony she had no language to name.
Sarah took a step forward. Her wet sneakers squeaked against the dark oak floorboards.
She didn't reach for the girls. She didn't coo or produce peppermint drops from her pockets like the four women who had preceded her that month.
She walked past the shattered porcelain. She walked to the wall switch beside the bathroom door, reached out her thin hand, and turned off the overhead lights.
Then, she stepped to the brass floor lamps and clicked them dead, one by one.
The room plunged into total, suffocating blackness, relieved only by the pale, slate-gray wash of the city storm bleeding through the rain-streaked window.
"What the hell are you doing?" Dante roared.
His hand was inside his coat before the last syllable cleared his teeth. The steel slide of the Kimber cleared leather with a sharp, lethal rasp. "Every specialist in Zurich told me to keep the lumens up! Light chases the memory! Put the lights back on!"
"They aren't running from memories, Mr. Moretti," Sarah said. Her voice was trembling, but it didn't crack. She didn't flinch away from the dark silhouette filling the doorway, or the faint, oiled gleam of steel in his hand. "They're running from the shadows the lamps make against the white walls. Every time you turn on a light, you give the monsters back their faces."
In the sudden darkness, the screaming ceased.
It didn't taper off into whimpers; it snapped off like a severed wire.
The silence that rushed into the room was terrifying. Dante’s pulse hammered behind his ears. The girls were too quiet. A child who stops screaming in a heartbeat is either dead or preparing to strike. His finger tightened against the trigger guard.
"Mia?" Dante rasped into the shadows. "Bella?"
Nothing. Only the steady, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the lake wind against the structural glass.
Then, down in the center of the dark carpet, Sarah Jenkins sat. She didn't clear away the broken porcelain or the feathers. She simply sat cross-legged on the floor, folded her hands into her lap, and tipped her chin toward her chest.
A sound came out of her throat.
It was not a nursery rhyme from an English primer. It was low, modal, broken at the turns like water falling over rough river gravel—a Sicilian dialect so archaic that even the older capos in the North Side clubs only spoke it after the third bottle of grappa. An old lullaby from the olive groves of Piana degli Albanesi, perched in the limestone hills above Palermo.
Chi dormi nun pigghia pisci,
Ma cu dormi si scorda li guai...
Dante Moretti went utterly, perfectly rigid.
The gun in his fist lowered an inch. The blood in his carotid artery pounded so hard his vision narrowed to a sharp tunnel of black and gray.
That melody.
Isabella had hummed that exact cadence into the curvature of her bare stomach while she lay across the linen sheets of their summer villa in Mondello, four months before the silver BMW was lifted off the road by two bricks of plastic explosive. She had sung it with her fingers tangled in his hair, laughing because the local dialect was too thick for his northern tongue to mimic.
Nobody outside of Isabella’s maternal grandmother knew that third verse. Isabella had never written it down. She had died before the girls had names for their hands and feet.
Dante crossed the nursery floor in two long, soundless strides.
He didn't care about the glass crunching beneath the soles of his handmade Italian leather shoes. He reached down through the dark, his broad, scarred fingers wrapping like iron bands around Sarah’s slender upper arm, yanking her up until her face was three inches from his own.
His breath smelled of cold espresso and pure, homicidal adrenaline.
"Where did you hear that song?" Dante hissed, the barrel of the Kimber pressed flush against the soft wool of her cardigan, directly beneath her sternum. "Who sent you into this house? Tell me the truth, or I will drop your body into the Chicago River before the rain stops."
Sarah looked up into the darkness. She didn't look at the gun. Her eyes were wide, clear, and steady despite the iron grip bruising her bicep.
"My mother was an orderly at Saint Jude's Trauma Center," she whispered. Her breath was warm against his chin. "Three years ago, on the night of the rainstorm. She held your wife’s hand for forty minutes in the emergency hallway while the surgeons were busy with the mayor’s son. Isabella didn't have her ring, and she didn't have her purse. She only had that song. She sang it until the monitor went flat, Mr. Moretti. She told my mother: 'Give this to the man with the scar on his wrist. Tell him the girls must hear it in the dark, or they will think I left them in the fire.'"
Dante’s fingers trembled.
May you like
Slowly, the Kimber slipped from his grip, thudding heavily onto the soft, ruined wool of the rug.
From the corner by the wall, two small, warm shapes crept forward through the dark, their little hands reaching out until their fingers tangled in the fraying hem of Sarah Jenkins’s damp green sweater.
