Chapter 7 - The Shadow of the Pier
The peace of a syndicate house is never an armistice; it is merely the interval between the chambering of two rounds.
By Saturday night, the rain had returned to the Midwest, a low, freezing sleet that coated the bridges along the Chicago River in sheets of invisible, treacherous glass.
Sarah woke at three in the morning to an empty room.
The small cot Arthur had set up for her in the corner of the nursery was warm, but the double bed beneath the window was cold.
The blankets were thrown back.
"Mia?" she whispered, sitting up, her heart instantly kicking against her ribs like a trapped bird. "Bella?"
The nursery door was unlatched, swinging three inches open in the draft from the service gallery.
Sarah threw off her quilt, not bothering with her shoes. The marble floor of the corridor was ice against her bare soles.
She ran down the long, unlit hall toward the grand salon.
The penthouse was black. The soft forty-watt bulbs had been extinguished. The only illumination came from the massive bay windows, where the blue-white flashes of the municipal harbor beacons three miles out swept rhythmically across the vaulted ceiling like the arms of an ancient clock.
In the center of the vast, empty ballroom, standing on the bare floorboards with their noses pressed against the ballistic glass, were the twins.
They were wearing their yellow flannel nightgowns, their small hands flattened against the cold pane.
Behind them, sitting on an overturned timber crate with his forearms resting on his knees, was Dante.
He was not wearing his suit coat. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, showing the long, purple scar that ran from the heel of his palm to the inside of his elbow—the scar Isabella had kissed in the hospital room before the monitors went flat.
His Kimber lay on the floor between his bare feet, its safety engaged, its black steel catching the blue sweep of the harbor beacon.
Sarah stopped at the edge of the wood.
"They're awake," she whispered.
Dante did not turn his head. "They heard the horn on the salt barge. Isabella always told them the salt barges were sea monsters coming up from the Gulf to eat the dirty snow."
Sarah walked slowly across the floorboards. She sat down on the wood beside the crate, her knees pulled up to her chest, her bare feet tucked under the hem of her nightdress.
"You didn't sleep," she said.
"Men who do what I do don't sleep in November, Miss Jenkins," Dante replied, his voice low, scraping along the bottom of his chest. "November is when the old debts come due. The frost gets into the concrete, and the people who think they were cheated start looking through the windows."
He looked down at her.
In the blue light from the lake, her face looked even younger than nineteen. The harshness of the city had carved lines around her eyes, but her mouth was soft, and her skin had the clean, scrubbed smell of the rosemary oil she had been using to comb out the twins' wild curls.
"Antonio’s boat docked in Naples six hours ago," Dante said.
Sarah’s fingers tightened around her shins. "Did he... did he go to the hills?"
"He went to the old house," Dante said. "Marco is staying at the inn down the road. He will have three sheep, an acre of almond trees, and a television that gets two channels from Rome. He will not see this city again."
Sarah looked at the twins' small silhouettes against the glass.
"He was your father's brother," she said.
"He killed my wife," Dante replied. There was no rage in his tone; only the terrifying, granite certainty that had made the Moretti name a synonym for survival in three states. "In our world, Miss Jenkins, blood is not an excuse for betrayal. It is merely the reason you don't leave the body in the street."
He reached out his hand.
It was a slow, deliberate movement. His fingers—broad, scarred across the knuckles from thirty years of violence—touched the side of her neck, right where his hand had pinned her against the dining room table four days earlier.
His thumb was warm. It brushed the pale, soft skin over her pulse point.
Sarah did not pull away.
Her heart hammered beneath his thumb—fast, light, like the heart of a sparrow—but she looked directly into his dark, ruined eyes without flinching.
"You should leave," Dante whispered.
"The contract was for six months," she said.
"The contract was written when I thought you were just another girl from the neighborhood who could be bought with a roll of fifty-dollar bills," Dante said, his thumb lingering against the curve of her jawline. "The people who watch this house... they know who you are now. They know the twins come when you call them. They know that when you are in the room, I don't check the locks three times before I sit down."
He pulled his hand back, his fingers curling into a tight fist against his knee.
"That makes you a target, Sarah. In this city, whatever Dante Moretti loves is eventually put into a box and dropped into forty feet of cold water."
Sarah looked from his closed fist to the reflection of the two children against the glass.
Mia had turned around. She was watching them, her thumb in her mouth, her small head tilted with that ancient, solemn curiosity that had returned to her eyes.
"Then I guess you'll just have to keep the locks greased, Mr. Moretti," Sarah said.
She stood up, walked to the glass, took Mia by the hand, and scooped Bella up against her hip with the effortless, unthinking grace of a sister who had carried children through five years of tenement winters.
May you like
"Come on," Sarah told the dark. "The salt barge is gone. The sea monsters went back to the lake to sleep."
Dante sat alone on his timber crate for a long time after the nursery door clicked shut, watching the blue harbor light sweep across the floorboards until the dawn began to turn the clouds above the water into the color of fresh lead.
