Chapter 1 - The Footsteps in the Snow
The Chicago winter did not merely drop temperature; it bit through wool, through leather, and down into the bone. A brutal lake effect wind howled down Michigan Avenue, whipping fine, needle-sharp ice crystals across the desolate asphalt.
I kept a fifty-yard distance.
My dark tailcoat absorbed the shadow of the brick tenements that lined the alleyways of Pilsen. Up ahead, Beatrice Gallagher walked with a heavy, hurried limp. Her thin cloth jacket—a faded navy coat that looked as though it had been bought at a thrift store a decade ago—offered no defense against the sub-zero chill. She clutched a battered canvas bag tightly against her chest, her knuckles raw and purple from the freezing air.
Inside that bag was the cracked plastic container filled with prime rib, cold roasted carrots, and mashed potatoes. Food from my table. Food that my lieutenants would have dumped into the incinerator without a second thought.
In my world—the Vale Syndicate—the law was simple: To take without permission is to invite death.
"You're wasting your time, Boss," Lorenzo’s voice crackled softly through the earpiece fitted into my left ear. He was trailing three streets back in an armored SUV, his tactical team on standby. "She's just another poverty-stricken mouth in the South Side. Probably feeding a junkie boyfriend or selling it to homeless men for cigarette money. Let me pull her into an alley. Ten minutes, and we'll have her full story."
"Keep your mouth shut and your distance, Lorenzo," I replied into my collar, my voice dry and razor-sharp. "You move when I tell you to move."
"Boss—"
"I said stay back."
I cut the feed.
Lorenzo was my second-in-command, a man built like a steel pillar with a mind like a razor. He had served my father for twenty years before stepping into my shadow when I took over the family business. To Lorenzo, every human being outside our inner circle was either a chess piece or a target.
But I had watched Beatrice on the security monitors for three weeks.
I had watched her scrub the marble floors of my Lake Shore Drive estate until her hands bled. I had watched her flinch whenever a door slammed, her small, frail shoulders pulling inward as if she expected a blow to land on her spine. She wasn't a thief. Thieves had arrogance. They had quick eyes and clever fingers. Beatrice had only exhaustion—the deep, crushing fatigue of someone who was running out of hours.
She turned left onto 18th Street, heading deeper into an industrial wasteland of abandoned meatpacking plants and rusted rail yards. The streetlights here were dead, shattered by rocks or dark-market scavengers, leaving only the dull, orange glow of distant highway lamps reflecting off the snow.
Beatrice stopped in front of a ruined three-story brick structure—an old brick brewery that had been condemned since the late nineties. Its windows were boarded up with rotted plywood, and a rusted chain-link fence surrounded the perimeter.
She didn't use a key. She slipped through a peeled-back section of the chain-link fence, her thin jacket catching on a sharp wire spur. She gasped softly in pain, but she didn't stop. She hurried toward a low basement access hatch hidden behind a mountain of rusted oil drums.
I waited five seconds, then crossed the street silently, my leather boots sinking into the fresh powder.
I slipped through the fence gap, my hand resting casually inside my coat pocket where my custom Kimber .45 sat rested against my ribs.
I reached the basement hatch. The heavy iron door was propped open by a half-inch wood block. Heat—faint, smelling of burning coal, damp wool, and rubbing alcohol—drifted up from the dark gap, accompanied by a low, hollow coughing sound.
It was a cough I hadn't heard in twelve years.
May you like
A cough that made every muscle in my body freeze as if I had been struck by a high-voltage wire.
I pulled the iron door back millimeter by millimeter, avoiding the screech of rusted hinges, and stepped down the slippery concrete stairs into the darkness below.
