Chapter 2 - The Logic of the Forty-Seventh Floor
The penthouse of Reyes Tower was a monument to the absence of friction. Every surface was leather, polished slate, or dark, grainless walnut. There were no photographs on the mantelpieces. There were no blankets left over the backs of chairs. The temperature was maintained at precisely sixty-eight degrees, and the only sound was the distant, subterranean thrum of the city’s elevated train six blocks away.
Sophia did not look at the view. When the private elevator opened directly into the living room, she simply dragged her purple suitcase over the silk rug, sat down on the low Italian leather sofa, and began to unbutton her yellow raincoat with methodical, clumsy fingers.
“The buttons are hard,” she muttered, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she battled a large yellow disk near her throat.
Dominic stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass, his hands in his pockets, his coat discarded on a nearby chair. He watched her like a scientist observing an unknown specimen that had somehow bypassed the bio-hazard filters.
“Leave it,” he said.
“No,” Sophia said, not looking up. “Mama said if you leave your wet clothes on, the frost gets into your chest and then the doctor has to use the big silver needles. I don't like the silver needles.”
Dominic’s mind, which usually operated like a high-speed Swiss watch, was stuck on a single image from six years ago. A small, wood-framed house in Del Mar. The smell of salt water and jasmine. Elena Vasquez standing in the kitchen with flour on her nose, telling him that his world was too small for her because it only had room for people who were afraid to bleed.
“You think you’re a king, Dominic,” she had told him the night she packed her single suitcase—the very suitcase that now sat on his living room floor. “But you’re just a guard in a very expensive prison. I won't let my children learn how to count bullets before they learn how to count stars.”
He had let her go because he thought she was right. He had let her go because a man with twenty-two active indictments and a target on his spine had no business keeping a woman with soft skin in his perimeter.
He hadn't known she was already pregnant.
“Where are the cookies?” Sophia asked suddenly, her raincoat finally conquered and dropped onto the leather sofa like a deflated yellow duck. She sat there in her dinosaur dress, her small legs sticking straight out, her socks damp at the heels.
“There are no cookies in this apartment,” Dominic said.
“Why? Are you poor?”
Dominic’s left eyebrow twitched. Felix, who had just entered the room with a silver tray containing a glass of milk and a plate of sliced turkey, had to turn his head toward the wall to conceal a sudden, violent cough.
“The boss is not poor, little miss,” Felix said, stepping forward and setting the tray on the low table in front of her. “He simply prefers his food to have fewer sprinkles.”
Sophia looked at the turkey, then at the milk, then up at Felix with an expressions that was terrifyingly identical to the one Dominic used during union negotiations. “He looks like he doesn't eat anything except rocks.”
“He tries,” Felix murmured. “Boss, Dr. Vance is downstairs. He’s waiting for your word.”
“Bring him up,” Dominic said. He walked over to the sofa, his shadow falling over Sophia until she was completely obscured by his dark navy silhouette. He reached down, picked up the purple suitcase, and set it on the table.
“What’s in here?” he demanded.
“My life,” Sophia said, her mouth already full of turkey. “Mama said everything that matters fits in a small bag if you roll the clothes tight.”
Dominic unzipped the bag. It didn't contain gold, stock certificates, or secret ledgers from the West Coast syndicates. It contained three small pairs of denim overalls, five t-shirts with faded cartoon characters, a plastic cup shaped like an elephant, and a small, leather-bound diary with a brass lock that had been broken open with a screwdriver.
At the very bottom of the bag, wrapped in a silk scarf that smelled of Elena’s old lavender perfume, was a heavy, steel-plated Colt .45 automatic pistol.
Dominic lifted the weapon by the grip. It was fully loaded, the safety engaged, the serial numbers filed down with the clean, professional precision of someone who had grown up in the Chicago underground before escaping to California.
He looked from the gun to the five-year-old girl who was currently using her sleeve to wipe a drop of milk from her chin.
“Did your mother teach you how to use this?” Dominic’s voice was skin-crawlingly quiet.
May you like
Sophia looked at the gun without a single trace of fear. “No. She said that was for the men who come through the window. She told me if anyone came through the window, I was supposed to hide in the laundry basket and count to one hundred. If they were still there when I got to one hundred, I was supposed to throw the rabbit at them and run away.”
Dominic slowly lowered the weapon back into the bag. The realization hit him then, not like a sudden blow, but like the slow, crushing weight of an avalanche: Elena hadn't hidden the child from him out of spite. She had hidden her until she could no longer protect her herself. And then, when the shadows finally caught up to her in that San Diego hospital, she had sent the child back to the only monster in America big enough to keep the other monsters away.
