Chapter 2 - The Blood Beneath the Soil
The morning wind off Lake Michigan tasted like ice and coal dust.
I stood twenty paces behind the stone wall of Elena’s dead garden, my heavy wool overcoat pulled tight against my neck, watching a three-year-old girl kneel in the wet weeds.
"Daddy said Mr. Moretti would save us… if he ever learned the truth."
The words didn't just hang in the air; they dug under my skin like jagged shrapnel. My breath caught in my throat, freezing into a pale mist that swept across the frozen grass.
Emma didn't know I was standing there. Her tiny hands, red and chapped from the cold, carefully set the tarnished metal cup beside the old photograph frame. The frame was cracked down the glass, running straight across the face of the man pictured inside—a handsome, square-jawed young man with clear, striking dark eyes wearing a faded army jacket.
I knew that face.
God help me, I knew that face better than my own reflection.
It was Michael Romano.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped beast. Michael hadn't been just another soldier in the Chicago underworld. Seven years ago, before the city was torn apart by the war between my family and the Falcone syndicate, Michael was my right-hand man. He was the kid I personally trained, the boy who took a bullet in his left shoulder on a rain-slicked alley off 22nd Street to keep my head on my shoulders.
And three years ago—on the exact same night my wife Elena and my little girl Claire died in a fireball outside our driveway—Michael Romano vanished into thin air.
For three years, the streets whispered that Michael had sold me out to Falcone. They said he took a bag of dirty blood money, set the timer on the car bomb beneath my Lincoln, and fled west like a coward. I had hunted his name across three states. I had put a hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. I swore on my daughter’s grave that if I ever caught Michael Romano, I would tear his heart out with my bare hands.
Now, his three-year-old daughter was standing in my dead wife’s garden, watering frozen weeds with a rusty cup.
"Emma," I rasped.
My voice sounded rough, broken, like dry stones grinding together.
The little girl flinched, her tiny shoulders pulling inward as she turned around slowly on her knees. She clutched her patched rag doll, Daisy, against her chest, her wide brown eyes looking up at me in terror.
"M-Mr. Stone..." she whimpered, her lower lip trembling. "I'm sorry. I didn't step on the flowers. I promise I didn't."
I took three slow, deliberate strides forward, stopping right over her. I didn't look like a boss right then. I looked like a ghost rising out of the lake fog. But when I looked down into her little face, all the fury that had kept me alive for three years turned into absolute ash.
Emma had Michael’s eyes. But she had Sofia’s gentle, stubborn mouth.
"Who told you my name?" I asked, dropping down onto one knee, ignoring the cold dampness soaking into my thousands-of-dollars tailored trousers. "Who told you to say that about your father?"
Emma looked down at the photograph lying against the stone. She reached out with one tiny, mud-stained finger and gently touched the cracked glass right over Michael's face.
"Mommy has a letter," Emma whispered, her voice so soft the lake wind almost swallowed it. "It’s hidden inside Daisy’s belly. Mommy told me never to open it unless the bad men came to the apartment again. But Daddy told Mommy before he went away... he said if anything happened to him, we had to find the giant man in the big white house by the lake."
My breath locked in my lungs. "The letter?"
Emma nodded solemnly. She turned the rag doll over, revealing a rough, crooked seam along Daisy's fabric lower back, stitched together with cheap black thread.
Before I could reach out my hand, a sharp, terrified cry echoed from the garden archway behind us.
"EMMA!"
Sofia stood near the iron gate, her maid's apron half-tied around her thin waist, her pale face drained of all color. She dropped the plastic laundry basket she was holding, towels scattering across the wet cobblestones as she sprinted across the lawn, throwing her body between me and her daughter.
"Mr. Moretti, please!" Sofia gasped, pulling Emma into her arms, her chest heaving violently as she backed away toward the stone wall. "She’s only three! She doesn't know the rules! She didn't mean to go into the private garden! Please... fire me, kill me, do whatever you want, but don't hurt my baby!"
I stood up slowly to my full height, my shadow falling completely over both of them.
"Sofia," I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous, icy hush. "Who was Michael to you?"
Sofia went dead still. The panic in her eyes froze, replaced by an agonizing, soul-crushing despair that made her look ten years older in a single second.
"He... he was my husband," she whispered, her voice cracking.
"And who killed him?" I stepped closer, my dark eyes boring into hers.
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Sofia squeezed her eyes shut, a torrent of hot tears cutting through the cold dust on her pale cheeks.
"You did," she choked out, her shoulders shaking violently as she clutched Emma tighter. "Everyone in Chicago knows... you put a hit on my husband three years ago."
