Chapter 2 - The Ghosts of South Street
Rain fell over South Philadelphia like a dirty curtain, slicking the cracked asphalt of Christian Street and washing the grime of the city into the gutters.
Evelyn walked fast, her chin tucked into the collar of her oversized olive jacket. Her knuckles burned. It was an old ache, a familiar phantom fire deep within the metacarpals that signaled cold weather and violent memories. She had broken her right hand in a bout in Macau seven years ago; her left had been shattered three days later in an alley behind a casino when two men with tire irons tried to ensure she wouldn't make the rematch.
*Stupid,* she berated herself, her boots splashing through black puddles. *Stupid, undisciplined girl.*
She had kept her head down for six years. Six years of scraping grease off industrial fryers, folding laundromat sheets, cleaning blood and vomit from dive bar floors, and finally serving high-end steaks to sociopaths at the Bellweather Room. All of it to disappear. All of it to ensure that the people who wanted her dead would forget her name.
And tonight, because an overgrown ape grabbed her wrist and insulted a frightened boy, she had thrown six years of invisibility into the fire.
She climbed the narrow, decaying steps of a three-story brick walk-up, unlocked the rusted exterior door, and took the stairs two at a time to the third floor. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and damp drywall.
Her apartment was tiny: a mattress on the floor, a single cast-iron radiator that clanked incessantly, a small laminate table, and two wooden chairs. On the counter sat a kettle and a jar of instant coffee. There were no photographs on the walls. No letters. No sentimental trinkets. A person living here could pack everything they owned into a duffel bag in ninety seconds.
Evie reached under the sink, pulled out a black gym bag, unzipped it, and pulled out an unregistered Sig Sauer P229. She checked the magazine, chambered a round, and set it on the small table.
She was unlacing her boots when she heard the faint, rhythmic click of dress shoes on the stairs outside.
Not the heavy, dragging footsteps of Mr. Kowalski from 2B, or the erratic scuffing of the college kids on the first floor. These steps were light, measured, deliberate. The steps of a man who moved with absolute certainty.
Evie’s hand closed around the grip of the Sig Sauer. She backed against the wall beside the door, her thumb sliding the safety off.
The lock clicked.
A slender slip of flexible steel slid back through the jamb, and the door swung inward without a sound.
Roman Vale stood in the threshold.
He had removed his overcoat. He wore a midnight-blue three-piece suit that cost more than this entire building, an umbrella dripping water onto the floorboards in his left hand. Behind him, standing in the gloom of the narrow hallway, were Bennett and two other men she hadn't seen at the restaurant.
“You have five seconds to clear your men from my doorway,” Evie said, raising the Sig Sauer until the three-dot night sights were aligned perfectly with Roman’s forehead.
Roman didn’t step back. He didn’t flinch. He looked at the barrel of the gun, then slowly lifted his eyes to hers.
“Elena used that exact model,” Roman said quietly.
Evie’s heart slammed against her ribs with the force of a battering ram. The breath caught in her throat, cold and sharp.
“Get out,” she whispered.
“Evelyn Cross,” Roman said, reading the words from an invisible ledger in his mind. “Known in the underground circuits as the Valkyrie. Twenty-eight wins, zero losses by knockout. Disappeared six years ago. The exact same night my wife, Elena, was ambushed and killed on the corner of Fourth and Chestnut.”
Roman stepped into the room. He didn't care about the gun. His face was a mask of cold, suppressed grief and absolute fury.
“For six years,” Roman said, stepping closer until the muzzle of her weapon was less than two inches from his chest, “I believed you were the driver who sold her out. I believed you took three hundred thousand dollars from the Moretti syndicate to leave the back door of the garage unlocked and let their hit team slaughter the mother of my child.”
Evie’s hands remained steady, but her eyes burned with sudden, savage tears. “If I had sold her out, Mr. Vale, I wouldn’t be living in a twenty-dollar-a-week rat hole eating canned beans.”
“Then why did you vanish?” Roman roared, breaking his aristocratic calm for the first time. The sound was like a whip cracking through the tiny apartment. “Why did the police find your blood on the asphalt next to my wife’s body, and then nothing? No hospital records. No obituary. Nothing!”
“Because I was dying!” Evie snarled back, her voice shaking with raw fury.
With her free hand, she grabbed the collar of her olive jacket and tore it open. She pulled her undershirt down, exposing her left shoulder and upper torso.
Roman’s breath stopped.
Across her collarbone and running down through her ribs were three jagged, star-shaped keloid scars—the unmistakable entry wounds of hollow-point 9mm rounds.
“Three bullets,” Evie whispered, her jaw trembling. “One took out a rib. One collapsed my right lung. One missed my aorta by four millimeters. Elena didn't die because I ran away. She died in my arms while I tried to drag her behind the engine block of the Mercedes!”
Roman stared at the scars. His face paled, the cruel lines around his mouth softening into horror.
“The hit wasn't just Moretti’s men,” Evie said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. “They had radio codes. They knew the alternate route. They knew Elena had brought Lily into the city that day for an ice cream trip that wasn't on the official family schedule. Only three people knew that route, Roman.”
Roman’s eyes widened. “Who?”
Before Evie could answer, the small window looking out onto the alley shattered in a spray of deadly, crystalline shards.
*Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!*
Suppressed fire shredded the drywall behind them. Bennett screamed out in the hallway as a bullet tore through his shoulder.
May you like
Evie didn't hesitate. She lunged forward, tackled Roman Vale around the waist, and drove him hard into the small kitchen alcove just as a hail of submachine-gun fire pulverized the wooden chairs they had been standing next to seconds before.
***
