The nursery was dark except for the rain, and Dante Moretti had his hand inside his jacket

The clock in the downstairs gallery chimed two in the morning.

The penthouse was larger than some regional airports, yet it carried the dead, hollow air of a decommissioned church. The floorboards were antique French parquetry, reclaimed from an abbey in Normandy, waxed with beeswax every Tuesday morning by three silent housekeepers who were forbidden from making eye contact with the master of the house.

Dante sat behind a desk carved from a solid slab of black Belgian marble. A single brass banker's lamp with an emerald shade cast a low pool of green light over three items: a crystal tumbler containing two fingers of unpeated Scotch, an open leather folder detailing the municipal debt obligations of the South Side, and the Kimber 1911, wiped clean and resting beside a box of hollow-point cartridges.

The door to the study opened without a latch click.

Arthur stepped inside. In his hands, he carried a silver tray with a porcelain cup of chamomile tea and a fresh linen towel. Behind him, Sarah Jenkins lingered in the shadow of the doorframe.

She was wearing a borrowed gray cashmere sweater that had belonged to Dante’s sister—three sizes too large, the sleeves rolled twice over her wrists. Her hair was pulled back into an untidy knot with an elastic band, but the color had returned to her lips.

"They're asleep," she said.

Her voice had none of the deferential velvet that Arthur used. It was flat, slightly tired, carrying the flat vowels of the Humboldt Park tenements.

Dante did not lift his glass. "For how long?"

"Until five, probably," she replied, stepping into the room without waiting for an invitation. Her sneakers were dry now, but they still squeaked against the dark oak border. "Mia is sleeping with her face pressed into the back of Bella's neck. That's how they stayed in the womb. Whoever put them in separate cribs with those modern wooden rails was an idiot."

Arthur winced slightly, stepping back toward the sideboard.

Dante looked at her over the rim of his emerald-lit desk. His face remained an unreadable mask of hard angles. "The specialists were from the child development clinic in Bern. They charged twelve thousand dollars a week to tell me that physical separation promotes individual ego-formation."

"Then you paid twelve thousand dollars to torture two babies," Sarah said. She picked up the porcelain cup of tea from Arthur's tray without asking, held it between both palms to warm her knuckles, and took a long, slow sip. "They spent nine months sharing a heartbeat, Mr. Moretti. When you put them in separate beds in a room the size of a tennis court, all they hear is the echo of what's missing."

Dante leaned back in his leather chair. The chair groaned under his weight.

"You speak very freely for a girl whose brother is currently locked in a basement behind a butcher shop on Archer Avenue."

Sarah’s fingers tightened on the porcelain until her knuckles went chalk-white. The rim of the cup rattled against the saucer. For the first time, the defiance in her eyes flickered, replaced by the raw, sickening terror of a girl who had watched the men in leather jackets pull up to her front stoop every Tuesday for six months.

"You checked," she whispered.

"I am the Moretti family, Miss Jenkins," Dante said softly. "I do not allow people to breathe the air in my children's bedroom without knowing the name of their third-grade teacher and the balance of their checking account. Tobias owes forty-two thousand eight hundred dollars to Frankie 'The Hook' Kowalski. The interest compounded at six o’clock this evening."

Sarah stepped up to the edge of the marble desk. The green light hit the hollows beneath her cheekbones.

"I don't care about your family," she said, her voice shaking with an anger that was far too large for her thin frame. "I don't care about your turf, or your docks, or whatever garbage you people kill each other over. I got those girls to sleep. You saw them. They haven't slept in three years, and they are asleep right now on a blanket on the floor. Pay me what you promised the agency, and pay it tonight. Let me buy Toby back."

Dante watched her.

He had seen grown men—corrupt aldermen, union bosses, rival capos who had strangled their own brothers—weep and soil themselves on the carpet five feet from where she was standing. He had seen killers with fifteen bodies to their names drop to their knees and beg for thirty seconds to make a phone call to their mothers.

This girl, who weighed barely a hundred and ten pounds and smelled of rain and cheap tea, was looking at him as if he were nothing more than a stubborn bank teller between her and her brother's life.

He reached into the shallow center drawer of the desk.

He did not pull out an envelope of cash. He pulled out a black checkbook with gold-foil numbering along the top spine. He unscrewed the cap of a fountain pen with a single flick of his thumb, wrote three lines, and tore the paper along its perforated margin with a dry, sharp hiss.

He slid the blue slip across the polished marble.

Sarah looked down. Her eyes darted across the ink.

One hundred thousand dollars.

"The balance is forty-two," she whispered, her chest hitching. "Why is this—"

"Forty-two is for Kowalski," Dante said, his voice dropping into that dark, rhythmic register that made the hair on the back of Arthur’s neck stand up. "The rest is for you. On one condition."

"What condition?"

"You don't leave this penthouse."

Sarah pulled back, her eyes narrowing. "I have a life, Mr. Moretti. I have an apartment. I have—"

"You have an apartment with a broken radiator and two locks that can be kicked open by an eight-year-old with a screwdriver," Dante interrupted. "You have a brother who will take the extra fifty-eight thousand, buy two kilograms of uncut fentanyl from the boys on 26th Street, and find himself in a ditch with his throat cut within thirty days."

"Toby isn't—"

"Toby is a junkie, Miss Jenkins. You know it. I know it. Kowalski knows it. That is why they didn't kill him on Tuesday. A dead junkie pays no vigorish. A live junkie with a sister who works for Dante Moretti is an annuity."

He stood up.

He was nearly six-foot-three, his broad shoulders cutting off the amber light from the hallway, his presence filling the high-ceilinged room until the air felt compressed, dangerous, and thin.

"Arthur has already dispatched four men from the Second Ward to Archer Avenue," Dante said, glancing at the grandfather clock. "By two-thirty, Kowalski will have his forty-two thousand in unmarked fifty-dollar notes. Tobias will be placed on a private medical transport to an addiction facility in the mountains outside Boise, Idaho. The gates are guarded by private security. He will not leave until his blood is clean, and he will not leave until I give the order."

Sarah’s breath came in ragged, short bursts. "You kidnapped him."

"I saved his life," Dante corrected her. "And in exchange, you stay in this nursery. You sing that song every night at eight o'clock. You eat their meals with them. You wash their faces. If you try to contact your old friends, your brother's discharge papers will be shredded, and Kowalski will be given his room number in Idaho. Do we have an agreement?"

Sarah looked from the check on the desk to the Kimber resting on its velvet cloth.

She thought of the twins, curled together like two orphaned pups in the middle of that dark, feather-strewn floor, their tiny fists buried in the fabric of her damp sweater. She thought of her mother's hands, scrubbed raw with carbolic soap in the hospital basement, dying of lung cancer while the city took the house.

"You're a monster," she whispered.