Chapter 2 - The Red Lining
The air in the locker room felt suddenly thin, as if the oxygen had been vacuumed out through the ceiling vents.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text message from an unknown number:
*Don't look out the alley window. Vincenzo is already by the dumpsters. He's carrying zip ties and a silenced .22. Three minutes until he realizes you're taking too long.*
I shoved the phone into my pocket, my heart thumping against my ribs with sickening velocity. Every survival instinct I had developed over eight years of surviving on Chicago’s South Side screamed at me to run, but panic would get me killed.
I ripped off my stained apron, traded my nonslip work clogs for my worn winter boots, and threw my heavy wool coat over my shoulders. Slipping the fifty-thousand-dollar check and the handwritten note into the zipped inner pocket of my coat, I turned toward the emergency exit at the end of the narrow hallway.
The door had a metal push bar marked with a weathered red sticker: *EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.*
I pulled my utility multi-tool from my bag—the one Marco had given me to open stubborn wine crates—and jammed the blade into the sensor latch above the hinge, severing the magnet contact before throwing my weight against the bar. The heavy door clicked open with a faint groan of rusted steel, venting a blast of sub-zero Chicago air against my cheeks.
No alarm screamed. Just the whistling rush of the winter wind howling between the brick canyons of the Loop.
I climbed. The iron rungs of the exterior fire escape were coated in a slick glaze of black ice. My fingers went numb within seconds through my thin knit gloves, but adrenaline surged through my veins, hot and electric. When I reached the fourth-story landing, I risked a single glance down into the alleyway below.
Beneath the sickly yellow glow of a sodium vapor light, a hulking figure stood motionless near the restaurant's commercial trash compactors.
Vincenzo.
His breath plumed into the freezing night air like steam from an engine. His right hand was shoved deep inside his trench coat. Even from four stories up, the cold, predatory patience in his posture made my stomach twist into knots.
He was waiting for an exhausted waitress to walk out with her backpack so he could erase her existence for translating a four-word joke.
I turned away, tears of cold and terror pricking my eyes, and climbed onto the gravel-strewn roof of Bellamy's. The wind hit me like a physical wall, throwing swirls of heavy snow across my vision. I scrambled across the tar paper toward the neighboring building—a four-story brick structure housing a high-end European bakery. The gap between the parapets was barely three feet, but looking down into the dark abyss between the walls made my knees turn to water.
*If you go home tonight, you won’t wake up tomorrow.*
Caleb’s words echoed in my mind.
I leaped. My boots hit the frozen gravel of the bakery roof with a dull thud. I stumbled forward onto my hands and knees, scraping my palms, but I scrambled up immediately and sprinted toward the external service staircase that descended toward Michigan Avenue.
Three minutes later, my boots hit the sidewalk.
Downtown Chicago was an expanse of slush, blinding headlights, and hurried pedestrians ducking beneath umbrellas. I pulled my hood low over my face, scanning the line of idling vehicles along the curb.
There, just past the bus stop at the corner of Adams, sat a sleek, unmarked black Lincoln Town Car.
License plate: *4-Echo-November.*
I approached the passenger side with extreme caution, my hand buried in my pocket, gripping the utility knife with the blade flicked open. I reached for the rear door handle.
Before I could touch it, the door clicked and swung outward.
The interior smelled of rich leather, expensive cedarwood, and the faint, bitter trace of gunpowder.
Sitting in the shadowed corner of the rear seat, wearing a tailored charcoal wool coat with the collar turned up, was Caleb Vale.
He looked nothing like the broken, vacant son who had sat across from Dominic forty minutes ago. His posture was straight as an iron girder, his broad shoulders squared, his piercing blue-gray eyes sharp, watchful, and intensely alive.
He looked up at me, raised both hands, and signed with crisp, commanding fluidity:
*Get in. Close the door. Keep your head below the window line.*
I climbed inside and slammed the heavy door shut. The car smoothly accelerated into traffic before my seatbelt was even clicked, gliding effortlessly into the stream of evening commuters.
I turned to him, breathing heavily, anger and terror wrestling inside my chest. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded aloud.
Caleb didn't flinch at my voice. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out an ultra-thin tactile tablet, and typed something rapidly with one hand before flipping the screen toward me.
*I am the man who just saved your life, Hannah. And if you speak aloud, the driver will hear you. He is loyal to me, but walls have ears, and my father's network owns half the cell towers in Cook County. Sign to me. It's the only language they can't bug.*
I stared at him, my heart hammering against my ribs. I lifted my trembling hands, framing the words carefully in ASL.
*Your father sent Vincenzo to murder me because of a steak order?*
A dark, bitter shadow crossed Caleb's handsome features. He set the tablet aside and raised his hands, moving with an eloquence that seemed almost lyrical against the violent reality of our situation.
*My father did not send him for the steak, Hannah. My father sent him because Vincenzo caught the way you looked at me. He realized you saw a man, not an idiot.*
Caleb leaned closer, his eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that made the breath catch in my dry throat.
*My father has spent fourteen years convincing the Five Families of Chicago that I am an incompetent mute who cannot manage a corner convenience store. Because as long as he believes I am useless, he doesn't consider me a threat.*
My fingers moved frantically. *A threat to what?*
Caleb’s jaw hardened, the muscles in his cheek twitching as his hands delivered a chilling, silent decree:
May you like
*To the empire he stole over my mother’s dead body.*
***