Chapter 3 - The Safehouse in Queens
The rain was coming down in sheets across the East River as the beat-up white produce van rattled across the Queensboro Bridge.
I drove with both hands glued to the wheel, glancing every three seconds into the rearview mirror. The van smelled of damp earth, bruised basil, and copper. In the passenger seat, Matteo was barely holding onto consciousness, his hands clamped over a thick wad of shop towels I had found under the seat to stem his bleeding.
In the back, tucked inside a wooden crate filled with dry burlap sacks, Lily was fast asleep, clutching her stuffed rabbit. Children have an incredible ability to retreat into sleep when the world around them becomes too vast and terrifying to process.
"Where are we going?" I asked, keeping my speed precisely two miles below the limit. "If Bianca controls the family, your regular safehouses are compromised."
"Not... all of them," Matteo rasped, pointing a shaking finger toward the industrial skyline of Long Island City. "Forty-second Avenue. Old brick meatpacking plant. The sign says... Valenti Cold Storage."
"Who runs it?"
"Nobody," he breathed. "It was my mother’s family business before she married my father. Bianca doesn't even know the deed exists. It’s held under a blind trust in Panama."
Twenty minutes later, I backed the delivery van into the dark, covered loading bay of the abandoned cold storage facility. The heavy iron door creaked as I manually lowered it, sealing us inside the cavernous, icy concrete building.
I helped Matteo out of the vehicle. He collapsed onto an old leather couch in the facility's disused office, his skin dangerously grey, his pulse thready.
"There’s an emergency medical kit in the safe behind the desk," he pointed weakly. "Morphine... surgical thread... antibiotics."
"I was two months away from graduating nursing school when Thomas died," I told him, rolling up my sleeves and turning on an overhead desk lamp. "I know how to wash a wound, stitch muscle, and administer local anesthesia. But this is going to hurt. A lot."
Matteo let out a harsh, bitter laugh. "Claire... after finding out my sister traded my life for a corporate seat, physical pain is a welcome relief."
For the next two hours, while the rain beat a steady rhythm against the corrugated metal roof, I worked under the harsh yellow light of the desk lamp. I cleaned the entrance wound near his ribs, extracted bullet fragments that had lodged against his intercostal muscle, cauterized the bleeding vessels, and closed the wound with sixteen precise silk sutures.
Matteo didn't make a sound. He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth clicked, his knuckles white as he gripped the armrests of the leather sofa.
When I finally finished and bandaged his chest with clean gauze, I slumped into the office chair, exhausted beyond measure, my hands covered in the blood of the most dangerous man in the city.
Lily wandered into the office, rubbing her eyes. She walked straight to the couch, pulled a wool blanket from a nearby shelf, and draped it over Matteo’s legs.
"All done?" she asked me softly.
"All done, baby," I said, pulling her into my lap and kissing her forehead.
Matteo looked up from the sofa, the morphine slowly easing the sharpest edges of his pain. He looked at my daughter, then at me, taking in the bloodstains on my housekeeper's apron, the dark circles under my eyes, and the quiet, fierce determination in my posture.
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"Your husband was a brave man, Claire," Matteo said quietly, his voice raspy. "He died protecting his family. But tonight... you proved you are the dangerous one."
"I’m not dangerous, Matteo," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "I’m a mother. And there is nothing on this earth more terrifying than a mother who has nothing left to lose."
