Chapter 4 - The Interrogation in the Dark
The library smelled of old paper, gun oil, and spilled Macallan scotch.
The heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight across the floor-to-ceiling windows, shutting out the storm and the city lights. A single bronze reading lamp cast a harsh, amber pool of light across the center of the mahogany desk where Victor Romano sat like a king presiding over a ruined kingdom.
Nora stood on the other side of the desk.
Dante stood by the heavy oak door, his arms crossed over his massive chest, his eyes fixed on the nurse as if calculating the easiest way to break her neck if she made a false move.
Victor had not spoken for five minutes.
He sat motionless, staring down at the silver tray and the empty bowl of butternut squash soup that Nora had brought down from Leo’s room. Beside the bowl lay the syringe and the magenta testing strip.
“Why?” Victor finally asked. His voice was no longer angry. It was flat, hollow, and infinitely dangerous.
Nora looked across the desk, her green eyes steady. “Because four months ago, my younger sister, Chloe, was a nursing assistant at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She was assigned to the VIP private recovery wing. One night, she walked into a room she wasn't supposed to enter.”
Victor looked up. “Whose room?”
“A patient registered under an alias,” Nora said, her voice tightening with suppressed grief. “A man who had survived a severe vehicular trauma months earlier. A boy whose medical charts were being altered daily by a visiting physician on the payroll of State Senator Arthur Vance.”
Victor’s brow furrowed. “Leo.”
“Yes,” Nora said. “Chloe figured out that someone was tampering with the boy’s intravenous nutrition—administering micro-doses of neurotoxins to keep him in a permanent, vegetative decline. Before she could take the files to the board, she was stopped in the parking garage.”
Nora paused, her jaw clenching.
“The police called it a hit-and-run driver who was never identified. They found her body two blocks from the hospital with her purse untouched and her phone missing. The hospital board claimed she had been stealing liquid fentanyl to cover up her own drug problem. They stripped my nursing license, ruined my reputation, and made sure no hospital within a five-state radius would ever hire me again.”
She took a step closer to the desk.
“I had nothing left, Mr. Romano. My sister was dead. My career was gone. The only reason I took the job through Windy City Elite Care was because I knew Madeline Vance was the one who ordered the hit on my sister—and she was finishing what she started with your son.”
The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush bone.
Dante shifted his weight, his expression hardening. For all his ruthlessness as an enforcer, Dante had a code—and hurting children was a line that even the most hardened syndicate killers did not cross.
Victor slowly rose from his chair.
He was not a small man. Standing at six-foot-two, with broad shoulders and the imposing posture of an apex predator, he towered over the young nurse.
He walked around the desk until he was standing only inches away from her.
Nora did not back down. She tilted her chin up and met his gaze head-on.
“You knew what I was,” Victor said quietly, his dark eyes searching her face. “You knew I am a monster who cuts throats for a living. You knew that if I caught you snooping in my house, I could have dropped you into Lake Michigan with concrete shoes before sunrise.”
“I knew,” Nora replied without a tremor in her voice. “But I also knew that if anyone in this city had the power, the resources, and the ruthlessness to tear Madeline Vance and her father’s political empire apart piece by piece... it was you.”
Victor stared at her for a long, agonizing moment.
Then, unexpectedly, a dark, humorless smile touched the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of a wolf that had just found out another predator was hunting in its territory.
“Dante,” Victor said without turning around.
“Boss?”
“Get the ledger from the wall safe behind the portrait.”
Dante blinked in surprise. “The black ledger? Boss, that contains every bribe, every payoff, every politician we’ve owned for the last fifteen years.”
“Get it,” Victor commanded, his eyes still locked on Nora.
Dante hurried across the room, unlocked the heavy portrait of Victor’s grandfather, and pulled a thick leather-bound book from the hidden wall safe. He brought it back and placed it on the desk.
Victor opened the book to a dog-eared page covered in neat, handwritten columns of names, dates, and offshore account numbers.
“Senator Arthur Vance,” Victor murmured, running his index finger down a column of figures. “A man who preaches family values on television while laundering campaign contributions through Chicago port authorities.”
He looked up at Nora.
“You want revenge for your sister?”
“I want justice,” Nora corrected. “And I want Madeline to pay for what she did to Leo.”
Victor closed the ledger with a sharp thud that echoed through the library.
“Justice in this city is a myth, Miss Hayes,” Victor said softly. “In my world, we don't wait for courts to hand down verdicts. We write the verdict ourselves.”
He turned to his enforcer.
“Dante. Make a call to our contacts at the Tribune. Tell them we have a special investigative report to drop tomorrow morning—complete with medical records, bank transfers, and chemical test results proving that the future stepmother of the Romano syndicate is a serial poisoner.”
Dante grinned, a cruel, vicious expression breaking across his scarred face. “Consider it done, Boss. What about Madeline?”
May you like
Victor walked back to his desk, picked up the empty bowl of butternut squash soup, and looked down at it with eyes as cold as winter ice.
“Madeline is having dinner with me tomorrow night,” Victor said smoothly. “And we are going to celebrate our upcoming wedding.”
