Chapter 6
Peter was drenched in sweat, his silk shirt stained yellow beneath the armpits.
"He took everything, Sean!" Peter screamed into the receiver, his voice hysterical and thin. "He took the Cicero yards. He took the dry docks. He put his capos on my loading bays! I don't even have access to my safe deposit boxes at Northern Trust!"
On the other end of the line, the gravelly, flat voice of Sean Gallagher—the underboss of the Detroit syndicate Peter had tried to secretly sell the Rotterdam freight to—sounded like grinding sheet metal.
"You promised us the high-grade precursor shipments by Tuesday, Peter," Gallagher said. "Our labs in Flint are sitting cold. We paid you a two-hundred-thousand-dollar down payment, and now you tell us Lombardi is holding the cargo in a bonded warehouse?"
"Lombardi doesn't have the cargo!" Peter shrieked, raking his greasy fingers through his thinning hair. "The cargo is locked in Green Bay! The digital escrow froze the whole manifest! Apex froze it!"
"Don't give me ghost stories about Apex, you stupid mick," Gallagher barked. "Apex is a clearinghouse. They clear funds when the bill of lading matches the port manifest. You tried to forge the transit route, didn't you? You tried to double-dip on Lombardi’s balance sheet."
Peter swallowed dryly, his throat clicking like a dry pump. "I... I can fix it, Sean. I have a plan."
"You don't have a plan. You have twenty-four hours before my people come down I-94 to collect our deposit in bone marrow."
"Listen to me!" Peter leaned forward, his bloodshot eyes bulging in the dim light of the hanging tube. "Emilio is holding my niece in his private penthouse on Lake Shore Drive. She’s my blood pledge. Emilio thinks she's just a bargaining chip, but Emilio’s core servers—his entire private routing network—is anchored in that penthouse."
A pause fell over the line. Gallagher’s tone grew suspicious. "What does that have to do with us?"
"The five million in Apex collateral is locked because of a transit dispute between the Outfit and my shell firm," Peter hissed, leaning in as if the rusted walls had ears. "If Lombardi's compound is hit—if we orchestrate a violent extraction to 'rescue' Hadley—we blow Emilio's private terminal off the grid. If Lombardi's node goes dark during an active audit, Apex’s automated risk protocol assumes Emilio defaulted on the trade! The entire seven million automatically liquidates back to the sender’s primary routing account—to *my* account!"
It was, of course, complete gibberish. Peter had read a single pamphlet on algorithmic escrow during a seminar in Nassau three years ago, understanding just enough of the buzzwords to construct a lethal, delusional fantasy. He truly believed that if he smashed Lombardi’s servers and took Hadley back, the automated black-box system would assume Emilio was dead and dump the millions into his lap.
"You want to hit Emilio Lombardi’s private residence?" Gallagher asked, sounding incredulous. "He has twenty men in that tower. He sleeps with a Benelli shotgun under his mattress."
"Not on Saturday night," Peter whispered feverishly. "Saturday is the Feast of San Gennaro. The Lombardi family hosts the charity gala at the Drake Hotel. Emilio has to show his face. He'll leave a skeleton crew at the penthouse to guard the girl. We go in through the service elevator with eight heavy shooters. We grab the girl, wipe his local drive, and leave him with the blame. Apex will think Emilio robbed the pipeline. Detroit gets its cargo, you get your cut, and Lombardi gets buried under an Apex liquidation order!"
Gallagher went quiet. The greed of mid-level gangsters was a predictable, rotting thing; it always mistook desperation for genius.
"If the girl talks..." Gallagher muttered.
"She won't talk," Peter snarled, his eyes narrowing into cold, murderous slits. "She’s a terrified, brainless little nun. The second we clear the state line, she gets an overdose of sleeping pills and a weighted chain in the middle of Lake Michigan. Nobody will ever know she left that cellar."
"Eight shooters," Gallagher said after a long beat. "Saturday at midnight. If you're lying, Peter, you're the first one we put through the woodchipper."
"I swear it on my mother's soul," Peter whispered, his hand shaking so violently he nearly dropped the phone.
He disconnected the call, leaned back in his squeaking leather chair, and reached for the bottle of gin with a ragged, triumphant grin.
***
Saturday evening fell over Lake Michigan with a violent, freezing sleet that rattled against the high glass windows of the penthouse like handfuls of buckshot.
The vast apartment was hushed. As Peter had anticipated, most of Emilio’s primary capos were down on Michigan Avenue, maintaining security for the Outfit’s annual public-relations circus at the Drake.
Hadley sat at the long dining table of polished black quartz. Before her sat an untouched plate of pan-seared sea bass and braised endive, steam rising in thin, fragile curls into the cool air.
At the head of the table sat Emilio.
He had not gone to the gala.
He had shed his tuxedo jacket over the back of an adjacent chair, leaving him in a black waistcoat, his silk tie loosened, his collar unbuttoned to reveal the hollow of his throat. He sat with his elbows resting on the table, rolling an amber tumbler of twenty-year-old Scotch between his scarred palms.
"You're not eating," Emilio said.
Hadley kept her fork neatly aligned beside her knife. "It’s very good, Mr. Lombardi. I’m just... not very hungry."
"You've said that for five days," Emilio murmured, his gaze tracing the modest line of her high-collared gray dress. "You've lost half an inch around the waist. I can see it in the way the wool hangs."
Hadley’s eyes darted up, meeting his. There was no mockery in his expression. Only a dark, simmering intensity that made the quiet room feel dangerously small.
"I am used to fasting," she said softly. "During Lent, the sisters—"
"Stop talking about the sisters, Hadley," Emilio interrupted, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that resonated through the quartz table.
Hadley fell silent, keeping her breath shallow.
Emilio set his glass down with a soft, definitive *clink*. He stood up, picked up his glass, and walked the length of the table, stopping just behind her right shoulder.
He smelled of rain, peat smoke, and that persistent, clean sharpness of oiled steel. He reached down, his fingers brushing against the nape of her neck as he gently pushed aside a stray lock of her dark hair.
Hadley froze. Every instinct told her to sweep his legs, draw the ceramic blade tucked into her boot, and put him through the window. But the heat of his skin against hers was disorienting—a heavy, protective warmth that didn't belong to a man who ordered executions in warehouse cellars.
"You think I don't see you?" Emilio whispered, leaning down until his lips were inches from the curve of her ear.
His hand moved from her hair to rest on the crest of her shoulder, his thumb pressing lightly through the wool against the collarbone.
"I see the way you track my men in the corridor," he said, each word deliberate and steady. "I see the way you calculate the seconds it takes for the elevator to rise from the lobby. You move like someone who has spent her life surviving in places where one wrong step means an open grave."
