Chapter 2 - The Escape into the Fog
"Run," I whispered.
I didn't give her time to think.
I scooped Lily’s seventy-pound frame into my arms, hauling her against my chest despite the agonizing flare of pain in my cracked ribs, and bolted through the narrow alley between two towering stacks of rotted cedar pallets.
"He's heading for the loading dock! Shoot the bastard!"
CRACK. CRACK.
Two 9mm rounds splintered the pallet wood three inches above my ear, showering us in damp cedar fragments and dust.
Lily buried her face into the collar of my torn dress shirt, her small arms locking around my neck with terrifying strength. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She held her breath with the instinct of a child who had learned early that noise brings punishment.
I kicked open the rusted metal emergency exit at the rear of the warehouse.
The heavy door slammed back against the exterior brick with a concussive clang, and we burst out into the dense, suffocating white fog rolling off the waters of the Gowanus Canal.
The harbor smelled of diesel exhaust, low tide, and freezing salt spray. Visibility was less than fifteen feet.
"Down the seawall," Lily gasped against my ear, her finger pointing through the mist. "There's a hole in the chain-link fence behind the salt depot! I come through it to find scrap!"
I hit the gravel path running. Every stride felt like an iron spike driving through my sternum, but the adrenaline surging through my veins drowned the agony.
Behind us, shouts echoed through the fog, followed by the deep, throaty roar of a black Cadillac Escalade tearing down the gravel access road.
We reached the rusted fence.
Lily dropped to her knees, squirming through the gap in the wire with fluid, practiced grace. I threw my weight against the chain-link, tearing the metal opening wider with my bare hands until the links sliced into my palms, and shoved myself through just as the Escalade’s headlights flared through the fog behind us.
BLAM.
A shotgun blast blew a two-foot crater in the rotting timber fence post five yards away.
"This way!" Lily tugged my bloody hand, pulling me into a maze of rusted iron shipping containers abandoned on the abandoned municipal rail pier.
We ducked beneath the low chassis of a derelict freight car, crawling twenty yards into a rusted steel mechanical pit sunken into the concrete.
We pressed our backs against the cold iron wall, breathing in shallow, synchronized gasps as the heavy thud of tactical boots jogged past on the gravel three feet above our heads.
"Where did he go?" an enforcer cursed, his voice echoing off the containers. "Julian is going to flay us alive if Moretti reaches Manhattan!"
"Check the canal dock! He can't get far with broken ribs!"
The boots receded into the white silence of the fog.
I looked down at the little girl huddled against my ribs.
Her pink coat was torn at the elbow; her face was pale, smeared with grease, but her hazel eyes—the exact, terrifying mirror of Clara’s—looked up into mine with a ferocious, unyielding calm.
"You're bleeding on your shirt, Dominic," she whispered.
"I've bled before, Lily," I rasped, pulling off my torn suit jacket and wrapping it around her shivering shoulders.
I looked at the birthmark on her wrist, then reached into my pocket, pulling out the battered silver locket Clara had given me eleven years ago in a diner in Brooklyn.
"Where is your mother, Lily?" I asked, my voice trembling with an emotion I had not allowed myself to feel in over a decade.
"She's in our basement apartment on 4th Avenue," Lily said softly, her lip trembling for the first time. "She's very sick, Dominic. Two men in suits came yesterday and told her that if she didn't give them the key to Grandfather’s desk, they would take me away to an orphanage in Albany."
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My jaw clenched until my teeth felt ready to shatter.
"Nobody is taking you anywhere, Lily," I whispered, resting my hand over her small, bruised knuckles. "I'm going to take you home. And then I am going to end this."
