Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the Penthouse
The penthouse at the top of Cavallaro Tower had never felt like a home, but tonight it felt like an operating theater in hell.
The polished white marble floors disappeared beneath layers of sterile medical packaging, opened trauma kits, heated blankets, and blood-soaked towels. Dr. Samuel Evans, a weary trauma surgeon who owed Dante twenty lifetimes of debt, moved with swift, silent efficiency between the bed and the mobile surgical lights he had dragged up from his clinic.
Dante stood outside the master bedroom, leaning his shoulder against the glass partition.
He hadn't taken off his overcoat. He still had dried blood—her blood—smeared across the lapel where her face had rested against his chest during the terrifying, silent drive from the South Side.
Rocco stepped out of the bedroom, wiping his hands with a sterile gauze pad. His face was grim, every harsh line carved deep into his weather-beaten skin.
“How is she?” Dante asked, his voice sounding like grinding stones.
“She’s septic, boss,” Rocco said quietly, keeping his voice low so it wouldn't carry through the open door. “Evans managed to clean the burns on her arm and set her left wrist, which has been broken and reset badly at least once already. She’s got three cracked ribs, advanced starvation, and... well, doc says she’s been heavily sedated for months. They were keeping her in a fog, boss. Feeding her just enough to keep her heart beating while they pulled whatever information they thought she had.”
Dante closed his eyes. The images flashed behind his eyelids with nauseating clarity: Sophie laughing in the Cavallaro kitchen six months ago, holding up a burned batch of blueberry scones with a cheeky grin; Sophie sitting at his desk, reading Shakespeare while waiting for him to finish signing execution orders; Sophie standing in the rain...
While he had spent six months hating her, believing she had betrayed him, she had been locked in one of Vane’s basement slaughterhouses, being burned with hot iron to make her confess to a theft she never committed.
“Who put her there, Rocco?” Dante asked.
The question wasn't loud. It carried no theatrical rage. It was the quiet, absolute certainty of a death sentence.
“We’re pulling the security feeds from every commercial lot within a mile of where we found her,” Rocco replied. “And I’ve got the boys leaning hard on Vane’s low-level dealers down in the river wards. Somebody dumped her in that alley tonight on purpose, boss. They wanted you to find her.”
“I know,” Dante opened his eyes. They were completely devoid of light. “They wanted me to see what happens to the people who cross the Cavallaro family.”
“What about Julian?”
Dante turned his head slowly toward his enforcer. “What about him?”
“He was awfully eager to convince you she was a thief six months ago,” Rocco noted, spitting the words out like bad food. “And he was awfully eager to remind you she was gone tonight before you even walked out the door.”
Dante didn't answer immediately. He pushed off the glass partition and walked into the bedroom.
Dr. Evans looked up from the bedside monitor, wiping sweat from his forehead. “She’s stable for the moment, Dante. I pumped her full of broad-spectrum antibiotics and intravenous fluids. But she’s delirious. She keeps mumbling names.”
Dante walked to the edge of the king-sized bed.
Sophie looked impossibly small beneath the down comforter. Her honey-blond hair had been sheared off on one side, exposing a nasty, healing scalp laceration. Her face was a canvas of purple and yellow bruises, her lips cracked and dry.
As Dante stepped closer, her eyelids fluttered. A soft, terrified whimper escaped her throat.
“No... Julian... please...”
Dante stopped dead.
The air in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees.
Dr. Evans paused, looking up at Dante with a confused frown. “Did she just say—?”
“Get out,” Dante said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the doctor drop his clipboard.
“Dante, she needs monitoring—”
“Get out, Evans. Now.”
Rocco grabbed the doctor by the shoulder and gently guided him out of the room, pulling the heavy mahogany door shut behind them.
Dante sank slowly onto the edge of the mattress. He reached out with a hand that trembled only slightly, and brushed a lock of matted hair away from Sophie’s clammy forehead.
“Sophie,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyelids fluttered again. She didn't wake up, but her lips parted, forming words against the cold air of the room.
“...the safe... he made me... copy the keys... Julian... he said if I told you... he’d kill my mother...”
The room spun.
The last pieces of the puzzle slammed into place with the force of a freight train.
Julian hadn't just suspected Sophie was a convenient scapegoat. Julian was the one who had emptied the safe. Julian was the one who had stolen the ledger. And when he needed someone to take the fall so Dante would never look at his own blood, Julian had handed Sophie over to Silas Vane as a parting gift, spinning a web of lies that had kept Dante blind for half a year.
Dante stood up from the bed.
His face was completely, terrifyingly blank.
He walked out into the penthouse living room, where Rocco was waiting by the wet bar with a loaded shotgun.
“Boss?” Rocco asked, reading the look in Dante’s eyes.
Dante reached inside his coat, pulled out his phone, and dialed a familiar, internal extension.
“Julian,” Dante said when the line picked up on the third ring.
“Dante? It’s three in the morning, what on earth—”
“Get down to the basement garage,” Dante interrupted, his voice cutting through the phone like a razor blade. “We’re going for a drive.”
“At this hour? Are you insane? What about the harbor vote—?”
“Bring the ledger, Julian,” Dante whispered, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the snowy Chicago skyline where the lights of Cavallaro Tower pierced the dark. “Bring the ledger out of your private safe, or I swear to God I will dig a hole right through the center of this tower and bury you in it.”
The line went dead silent.
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Then, a nervous, high-pitched laugh crackled through the speaker. “I... I don't know what you’re talking about, Dante—”
“Ten minutes,” Dante said, and hung up the phone.
