Chapter 3 - Shadows Over Brooklyn
The neon sign of the twenty-four-hour pharmacy hummed a sickly yellow in the damp night air as Aleandro’s car pulled up to the curb once again. This time, he didn't wait in the car.
He walked up the rotting wooden steps of the apartment building, his heavy boots echoing like gunshots through the hollow stairwell. The scent of damp plaster and cheap cooking oil filled the air. When he reached apartment seven, he didn't knock. He simply pressed his palm against the warped wood of the door, feeling the faint vibration of life inside.
Before he could raise his hand to strike the wood, the door clicked open.
Ruth Bennett stood in the doorway. She looked paler than she had hours earlier, leaning heavily against the doorframe for support. Her silver hair was loose now, falling around her drawn, exhausted face. She didn't look surprised to see him. She looked resigned.
"I knew you'd come back," Ruth said, her voice raspy, fighting off a cough that threatened to tear her chest apart. "Men like you never leave loose ends. You finish what your father started."
Aleandro stepped past her into the cramped apartment without an invitation. The room was deathly quiet. On the floor in the corner, wrapped in his black wool coat, little Annie was fast asleep, her small chest rising and falling in steady rhythms, still clutching the empty red plastic pharmacy bag in her fist.
"I didn't come to finish anything, Ruth," Aleandro said, his voice shockingly low, devoid of its usual lethal authority. "I came for the truth."
Ruth turned slowly, walking back to her armchair, her joints popping in the quiet room. She sat down, gesturing stiffly to the scratched wooden dresser where the tilted photograph sat.
"Your father told you she was dead, didn't he?" Ruth asked bitterly, her eyes fixing on his. "Or maybe he told you she took the money and ran off with another man. That’s what old Don Castellano told everyone in the syndicate to protect his precious legacy."
Aleandro stopped in his tracks. The air in the room felt sucked out. "Where is she?"
A tear finally broke free from the corner of Ruth’s eye, cutting a clean path down her weathered cheek. "Died three years ago, right after Annie was born. Her heart gave out—partly from the sickness, mostly from the terror of knowing your father’s men were hunting her across three states. She hid out in a basement in Queens, changing names, running scared, until she collapsed on my doorstep with a newborn baby and nothing else."
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Ruth pointed a trembling finger at the sleeping child on the floor.
"That's not just some random little girl you helped out of the rain, Aleandro. That's Sophia's daughter. And by all the laws of blood and nature... she's yours."
