Chapter 9 - The Reckoning at 47th Street
The warehouse on 47th Street was an expanse of corrugated iron and oil-stained concrete, surrounded by the flashing red and blue lights of private security vehicles and the silent, heavy cars of the Rossi syndicate.
Inside, the Moretti soldiers were no longer fighting. They were disarmed, kneeling on the floor with their hands behind their heads, guarded by Santos—who was wearing a bloody bandage around his shoulder—and twenty Rossi enforcers.
Leo Rossi stood in the center of the room, his long black coat covered in plaster dust, his face looking like it had been carved from the winter ice. In front of him, tied to a wooden chair, sat Arthur Kensington, his face bruised, his expensive suit torn to ribbons.
“Where are they, Arthur?” Leo asked, his voice so quiet it was barely audible above the hum of the warehouse heaters.
Arthur spat blood onto the concrete, his eyes wild with a desperate, dying arrogance. “They’re dead, Rossi. Your safe room is a gas chamber by now. You thought you could throw my family out of this city? You thought you could choose a kitchen girl over my daughter? You lost everything tonight.”
Leo slowly pulled a heavy black pistol from the inside of his coat. He didn't raise it to Arthur’s head; he leveled it calmly at the older man’s knee.
Before he could pull the trigger, the heavy metal doors of the warehouse swung open, admitting the cold wind and a flurry of white snow.
A figure stumbled into the light.
It was Beatrice. She was completely soaked, her black uniform covered in freezing mud and slime, her hair matted to her head. Her face was bleeding from three different cuts, and her boots made a wet, heavy squelching sound against the concrete.
But in her arms, wrapped tightly in a dry wool blanket she had stolen from a nearby delivery truck, she held Lily. The little girl was shivering, her face pale, but she was breathing cleanly, her small fingers still clutched around Beatrice’s torn collar.
Leo dropped the gun.
He didn't look at Arthur Kensington. He didn't look at his men. He ran across the oil-stained concrete floor, his long strides breaking the distance between them until he threw his arms around Beatrice’s broad, mud-soaked frame, pulling both her and Lily against his chest with a violence of devotion that knocked the breath from her lungs.
“You’re alive,” Leo choked out, his face buried in Beatrice’s freezing hair, his body trembling with a sob he had held back for two years. “You’re alive.”
“I told you, Leo,” Beatrice whispered, her head resting against his shoulder, her uninjured hand wrapping around his neck. “We were right here when you got back.”
Leo pulled back slightly, looking down at Lily, who reached out a wet hand to touch her father’s cheek. “Bea broke the wall, Daddy. We swam in the river.”
Leo looked at Beatrice—the heavy, broad woman who had been ignored by the high society of Chicago, who had been mocked by his fiancée, who had been treated like furniture by his enemies. She was covered in mud, blood, and ice, but to him, she looked like the only beautiful thing in a city built on graves.
May you like
He turned back toward Santos, his eyes turning back into chips of gray flint. “Take Arthur and his daughter to the federal building. Give the U.S. Attorney the files. Every single one of them. Let the law have what’s left of them.”
He turned back to Beatrice, lifting her bruised, purple fingers to his lips, kissing the raw skin with an absolute, lifelong devotion. “Let’s go home, Beatrice. Let’s go build a real house.”
