Chapter 5
He stopped two feet from her armchair.
"You haven't turned the page in thirty minutes, Hadley," he said.
His voice was quiet, stripped of the harsh authority he had used with Vane, yet carrying an edge that made the hairs on her arms stand on end.
Hadley raised her head slowly, letting her eyes widen with a soft, nervous hesitation. She smoothed her skirt over her knees.
"I was... meditating on the passage, Mr. Lombardi," she whispered, her voice breathy, small, and fragile.
Emilio tilted his head, his sharp jaw catching the pale light filtering through the high clerestory windows. He looked down at her book, then looked at her face. The faint scar through his eyebrow gave his expression an unreadable, predatory gravity.
"Read it to me," he said.
Hadley blinked. "Sir?"
"Read the line you've been meditating on for thirty minutes."
Hadley looked down at the text, selecting a passage near the center of the left page. "'Endeavor to be patient in bearing with the defects and infirmities of others, of what sort soever they be; for that thyself also hast many failings which must be borne with by others.'"
A ghost of a smile touched the corner of Emilio’s mouth, entirely devoid of warmth.
"A convenient sentiment for an uncle who sells you to wolves to pay off his bookies," Emilio noted. He stepped closer, resting a hip against the mahogany console table beside her chair. He looked massive in the quiet domesticity of the room, an apex predator lounging in a parlor. "Do you have defects, Hadley?"
"Many, sir," she whispered, looking back down at her clasped hands. "The sisters said pride was the root of all ruin."
"The sisters were fools," Emilio said flatly. "Ignorance is the root of all ruin. Peter thought he could steal two containers of high-grade freight and hide behind a ghost. Now he sits in an abandoned boardinghouse in Humboldt Park, drinking gin from a paper bag, waiting for either my men or the Detroit crews to blow his kneecaps off."
Hadley’s fingers tightened imperceptibly on the leather cover. *Humboldt Park.* That was useful. She had wondered where Peter had scuttled after Emilio stripped his warehouse deeds.
"My uncle... he means well," she lied, keeping her tone obediently meek. "He has always had difficulties with numbers."
Emilio let out a short, rough breath that was almost a laugh. "That is an understatement worthy of a saint. Your uncle couldn't balance a checkbook if you held a gun to his neck." He paused, his gaze sharpening as he leaned down slightly, bringing his face level with hers. "Which brings me to an interesting point, Hadley."
She held her breath, looking up at him through her dark lashes. "Yes, sir?"
"Yesterday morning, Mrs. Gable brought you the invoice for the pharmacy deliveries," Emilio said, his voice dropping into a low, deliberate purr. "Fourteen pages of compounded botanical extracts and bulk medicinal alcohol for the kitchen and laundry. She dropped the ledger on the breakfast bar. You were pouring tea."
Hadley’s mind flickered back to yesterday morning. *Damn it.*
"You looked at the total column for four seconds," Emilio continued, his eyes drilling into hers, dark, gold-flecked, and utterly focused. "And you told Mrs. Gable that the vendor had miscalculated the import surcharge by six percent. When she called the supplier, they discovered an arithmetic carry error in the third line item. A twelve-hundred-dollar discrepancy that my head of procurement missed."
Hadley kept her eyes completely still, fighting down the sudden rush of heat to her throat. She had done it purely on reflex—her brain processed numerical irregularities the way an ordinary person noticed a broken window or a discordant note in a song.
"It was... just a pattern, Mr. Lombardi," she stammered, pulling her shoulders inward, shrinking herself. "In the convent greenhouse, we sold lavender and chamomile tinctures to the local apothecaries. Mother Superior always made me verify the weight vouchers against the silver ledger. Six percent was the standard transport excise under the old municipal agricultural code. I just noticed the numbers didn't align."
Emilio didn't move. He stayed there, mere inches away, his breath warm against her cheek. Up close, she could see the tiny gold flecks in his dark irises, the slight roughness of his five-o'clock shadow, and the coiled, iron strength resting in his broad chest. He didn't carry himself like a thug; he was an emperor guarding his walls, acutely aware that an enemy could enter through a locked gate or a soft smile.
"A convent greenhouse," he repeated softly. He reached out, his knuckles brushing lightly against the fabric of her sleeve, tracing the line of her forearm down to her wrist.
Hadley’s skin prickled beneath the wool. She didn't pull away—to flinch too hard would be unnatural, but to lean in would be disastrous.
"You have very steady hands for a girl terrified of her captor," Emilio observed, his fingers closing gently around her wrist.
He wasn't hurting her. His touch was warm, firm, testing the fragile bones beneath his grip. He pressed his thumb against the inside of her wrist, directly over the radial artery.
Hadley deliberately slowed her diaphragm, forcing her lungs to take long, shallow, rhythmic draws of air. She could feel his thumb resting against her pulse.
*Fifty-nine. Sixty. Sixty-one.*
Emilio’s dark brows drew together slightly. He was clearly expecting the frantic, fluttering panic of a cornered doe. Instead, he found a heartbeat as steady and deliberate as a grandfather clock.
"You don't fear me, do you, Hadley?" he asked, his voice dropping an octave into something dangerously intimate.
"The Bible says that fear of man bringeth a snare, but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe," she recited, her voice quiet, delicate, and entirely serene.
Emilio stared at her for a long, suffocating moment. A strange, begrudging fascination flickered behind the hard mask of his face. He released her wrist, though his fingers lingered against her skin for a second longer than necessary before dropping to his side.
"Your Lord is not on the payroll in Chicago, little sister," Emilio said, turning his back to her and walking toward the door. "And if Peter doesn't find a way to unlock that five million by next week, all the prayers in Racine won't keep the wolves from tearing his throat out."
He stepped out onto the landing, his voice drifting back over his shoulder: "Come down to the dining room at eight. You eat like a sparrow. I don't run an ashram, and I don't keep starving hostages."
Hadley waited until his heavy footsteps receded down the mezzanine corridor before she exhaled.
She looked down at her wrist. A faint red crescent where his thumb had rested still pulsed with a strange, unbidden warmth.
She turned the page of her book with fingers that, for the first time in five years, were not entirely steady.
***
In a windowless basement beneath an auto-repair shop in Humboldt Park, Uncle Peter was losing his mind.
The air smelled of stale grease, cheap whiskey, and copper. Two empty fifths of gin rolled across the warped linoleum whenever a heavy truck rumbled down the avenue above. On the scarred laminate desk in front of him sat a battered burner phone, a half-eaten pastrami sandwich, and a Colt .45 with three rounds missing from the magazine.
