Chapter 3 - The Cold Rain on Michigan Avenue
The interior of the vintage black Mercedes-Benz was dead silent, sealed against the gray noise of the city by double-pane glass and thick, hand-stitched leather.
Hannah sat in the rear passenger seat, her hands clasped tightly over her canvas bag on her lap. She had refused to let Marco take the bag; she held it against her abdomen like armor, her back rigid, refusing to lean against the plush calfskin seatback.
Outside the tinted glass, Chicago rolled past in a blur of wet asphalt, smeared yellow taxi lights, and huddled pedestrians battling umbrellas against the gusts coming off Lake Michigan. They were moving west, crossing the river over the LaSalle Street bridge, the dark, murky water churning below between the concrete retaining walls.
Marco drove with an effortless, mechanical grace. He did not check his rearview mirror compulsively; he kept his eyes on the road, his broad hands resting loosely on the steering wheel at ten and two.
"Where are you taking me?" Hannah asked, her voice tight, breaking the twenty-minute silence that had held since they left the subterranean ambulance bay.
"Where would you like to go, Miss Brooks?" Marco answered, his tone polite, conversational.
"You said you were taking me to Paulina Street."
"I said Mr. Moretti instructed me to ensure you reached your residence safely," Marco corrected smoothly, signaling a right turn onto Grand Avenue. "However, if returning to that apartment is not in your best physical interest this morning, I have alternative instructions."
Hannah’s knuckles turned white where she gripped the strap of her bag. "You have no right to interfere in my private life."
"I have no desire to interfere in anything, Miss Brooks," Marco said, his eyes flicking briefly to the mirror before returning to the road. "I am an employee. I carry out directives. But I have worked for Damen Moretti since he was twenty-eight years old, and I have never seen him cancel a closed-door dinner with three members of the state commerce commission to sit on a plastic chair in an emergency room waiting area."
"He doesn't know me," Hannah said, her chest heaving beneath her coat. "I am a nurse at a community clinic. I fainted because I skipped two meals. People collapse on sidewalks every day in this city."
"Not in front of him," Marco replied.
He pulled the heavy sedan to the curb half a block from a three-story brick walk-up with a rusty fire escape zigzagging across its facade—Hannah’s building on Paulina Street.
The street was gray, lined with parked sedans covered in wet leaves. Outside the front entrance of the building, parked directly beneath the bare branches of a dying maple tree, was a silver BMW coupe.
Hannah saw the car and went completely, utterly rigid.
Her heart hammered against her ribs with such violent force that she felt the blood rushing through her ears like a roaring wind.
Arthur’s car.
He was supposed to be in court until two in the afternoon. He was supposed to be presenting a preliminary discovery motion in a commercial land-use suit in the Daley Center. Yet there his car sat, its windshield wipers resting, its exhaust pipe cool, parked in the spot he always took when he arrived home early to find her missing.
"He’s upstairs," Hannah whispered, the words escaping her lips before she could stop them.
Marco did not look back. He shifted the Mercedes into park, the engine purring beneath the hood with a quiet, continuous vibration that felt like a coiled spring.
"Mr. Vance arrived at eight-fifteen this morning," Marco stated calmly, as if reading a weather report. "He kicked the front security gate open because the magnetic latch was jammed. He went up to apartment 3-B. He came back down to the stoop at eight-forty, smoked two cigarettes, made three phone calls to your clinic director demanding to know why you hadn't reported for shift, and then went back inside."
Hannah stared at the back of Marco’s silver head in genuine horror. "You've been watching my apartment?"
"Two of our men have been on this block since midnight, Miss Brooks," Marco said. "Not to watch you. To watch him."
"Why?" Hannah choked out, tears of rage and humiliation stinging the corners of her eyes. "Why does Damen Moretti care what happens to me?!"
The lock on the front passenger door clicked.
The door opened, letting in a gust of cold, rain-scented wind, and a tall figure slid smoothly into the front seat beside Marco.
Hannah shrank back into the leather cushions.
Damen Moretti did not look back immediately. He pulled off a pair of black lambskin driving gloves, tucking them into the breast pocket of his charcoal wool overcoat. His dark hair was damp from the rain, brushed back from a high, severe forehead. His jawline looked as though it had been chiseled from cold limestone, unyielding, shadowed by twenty-four hours of dark stubble.
He turned his head slowly, looking over his shoulder into the rear seat.
His eyes were not the predatory, calculating eyes of the mobster her father had described. They were gray—the color of deep, frozen water under an overcast sky—and they settled on Hannah with an intensity that seemed to strip away her clothes, her skin, her excuses, and the careful, smiling mask she had worn for twenty-eight years.
"Miss Brooks," Damen said. His voice was that same quiet, low baritone that had held her in the dark.
Hannah clutched her canvas bag so hard her nails tore through the cotton weave. "Mr. Moretti. Tell your driver to let me out."
May you like
Damen’s gaze dropped for a fraction of a second to her wrists, where her hands were locked in white-knuckled terror, before returning to her eyes.
"You can get out of this car whenever you choose, Hannah," Damen said softly. "The doors are unlocked. But if you walk up those three flights of stairs right now, you will be in that room with him alone. And he has already decided that your absence last night was an act of rebellion that requires a lesson."
