Chapter 8 - The Ghost of Christmas Past
By the third week of December, the snow outside Ravenwood was three feet deep. The war with the Morettis was grinding on, a brutal war of attrition fought in darkened warehouses, frozen rail yards, and anonymous dockside containers.
The men were exhausted. They slept in shifts, their eyes hollow with fatigue, their nerves frayed to the breaking point. The laughter that had slowly begun to fill the dining room was gone, replaced by the grim, heavy silence of men waiting for a bullet.
One evening, after the dinner plates had been cleared, I found Roman sitting alone in the dark kitchen.
He had removed his suit jacket, rolling his crisp white sleeves up his forearms. A glass of amber whiskey sat untouched before him on the stainless-steel table. In his hand, he held a faded photograph of a young woman with dark hair and a little boy standing in front of a modest brownstone house.
He didn't look up when I walked in, but he spoke anyway.
“My sister, Elena,” he said softly. “And my nephew, Leo. Ten years ago, the Morettis put a bomb under her car. They thought I was inside.”
I pulled a chair out and sat across from him. I didn't offer empty platitudes. Grief doesn't want comfort; it wants acknowledgment.
“My mother worked sixty hours a week in a textile mill,” I told him, looking at the dark reflection of the kitchen windows. “Her hands were always cracked from the cold and the bleach. When she got sick, the company canceled her insurance on a technicality. I spent every penny I had trying to buy her three more months of life. In the end, I couldn't even afford a headstone. Just a wooden marker in a municipal cemetery.”
Roman looked up from the photograph, his eyes studying mine. For the first time, I didn't see the ruthless crime lord or the cold billionaire. I saw a man carrying a graveyard on his shoulders, just like me.
“Why did you refuse my money at the bus shelter, Maggie?” he asked quietly. “You were dying out there. You knew who I was. Most people would have begged.”
“Begging makes you a victim,” I answered. “A victim takes whatever crumbs are thrown at them and waits for the boot to come down. I wanted a job. I wanted to earn my place. My mother always said: *‘If you can feed people, you will never be useless, and you will never be small.’*”
Roman looked at the photograph one last time, then slid it into his breast pocket. He stood up, towering over me in the dim light of the range hoods.
“Walter is doing well,” Roman said abruptly.
My heart skipped a beat. “You checked on him?”
“Dr. Mercer cleared his lungs last week. I bought him a small residential duplex in South Philly. He has a pension fund now, Miss Sullivan. He thinks it’s an old military benefit that finally cleared the bureaucracy. He spends his mornings reading the newspaper on a heated porch.”
Tears sprang into my eyes before I could stop them. I looked away, angry at my own weakness, wiping my face with the corner of my apron.
“Why did you do that?” I choked out.
Roman reached out, his bare hand warm and remarkably gentle as his fingers brushed against my chin, lifting my face back to his.
May you like
“Because you asked me to,” Roman said, his voice dropping to a low, intense timbre. “And because a woman who feeds my family while asking nothing for herself deserves to have her debts paid in full.”
***