Chapter 1 - The Ledger of Blood and Bread
Marcus Hale didn't ask questions often. In the Moretti syndicate, asking questions was a habit that shortened a man’s lifespan. But as he stood across from Adrian in the dark, wood-paneled study of the estate, he watched his boss’s hands.
Adrian was holding a faded silver pocket watch—the one his father had passed down to him—and his fingers were trembling so faintly that only someone who had bled beside him for fifteen years would notice.
"Does she know what, Boss?" Marcus asked softly, his deep voice cutting through the hum of the rain against the bulletproof glass.
"Does she know who I am?" Adrian asked, his gaze fixed on the rain-streaked window. "Does she know that the man paying her twelve dollars an hour to scrub marble floors commands four hundred men across Cook County?"
"She knows you're Mr. Moretti," Marcus replied. "She knows you own real estate, shipping yards, and meatpacking plants. To her, you're just a rich widower with a silent house. She doesn't know about the docks. She doesn't know about the families in New York or Miami."
"Find out about the husband," Adrian commanded. "Find out how Daniel Romano died. Find out why a widow with a three-year-old child is living in a fifth-floor walkup in Cicero with no heat, half a loaf of bread, and a landlord threatening to throw her onto the street by Friday."
Marcus nodded once, his expression shifting from curiosity to professional focus. "I'll have the file on your desk by midnight."
"Not on my desk," Adrian corrected softly, turning around. "Bring it to the Lincoln. I'm going back to Cicero tonight."
"Adrian," Marcus cautioned, stepping forward. "That neighborhood belongs to Victor Caldwell. He runs loan-sharking and protection rackets out of that territory. He’s small-time, but he’s vicious. If he sees your car parked outside one of his tenement buildings—"
"I don't care about Caldwell," Adrian interrupted, his eyes turning to cold obsidian. "I care about the child."
Three hours later, the rain had turned into a thick, slushy snow that blanketed the neon-lit avenues of Cicero. Adrian sat in the back of his father’s old Lincoln, parked in the shadow of an abandoned warehouse across from Sofia’s building. The heater hummed low, but Adrian felt colder than he had in three years.
The streetlamp flickered above the entrance of the building. Through the cracked, grimy glass of the third-floor window, he could see the silhouette of Sofia Romano moving back and forth. She was hanging wet laundry over a makeshift line stretched across the cramped living room.
A moment later, Marcus slipped into the front passenger seat, pulling a manila folder from inside his heavy wool coat. He snapped on the small reading light.
"Daniel Romano," Marcus began, reading from the papers. "Twenty-eight years old. He was an auto mechanic at a shop on 22nd Street. Good guy. No criminal record. Paid his taxes, went to church, loved his wife."
"How did he die?" Adrian asked.
"Eighteen months ago, he took out a fifteen-thousand-dollar loan from Victor Caldwell," Marcus said, his voice dropping. "Not for gambling or drugs. For Sofia. She had a high-risk pregnancy with Emma, needed emergency surgery at Northwestern, and they didn't have insurance. Caldwell’s interest rates were twenty percent a month."
Adrian’s jaw tightened until the muscle near his ear throbbed. "Daniel couldn't pay."
"He paid back twenty-two thousand dollars over a year," Marcus revealed, turning the page. "All interest. He was working eighteen-hour days. One night, six months ago, he was staying late at the garage to finish a transmission job for extra cash. Caldwell’s enforcers came to collect the principal. There was a struggle. They pushed him off a hydraulic lift. He hit his head on a concrete engine block."
The silence inside the Lincoln was heavy enough to crush bone.
"The police recorded it as an accidental workplace fall," Marcus added quietly. "Caldwell paid off the local precinct detective—a guy named Miller—to lose the security camera footage. Two weeks after Daniel died, Caldwell showed up at Sofia’s apartment and told her that her husband’s debt didn't die with him. She owes him thirty-four thousand dollars now."
Adrian leaned back into the leather seat, staring up at the yellow light of the third-floor window.
Thirty-four thousand dollars. To the men in Adrian’s world, thirty-four thousand dollars was tip money at a steakhouse in the Loop. It was the price of a watch, a suit, or a dinner meeting.
To Sofia and Emma Romano, it was the difference between survival and starvation. It was the reason a three-year-old girl cut a loaf of bread into unequal pieces and drank watered-down milk while talking to a photograph of her dead father.
"Who is Caldwell’s landlord representative in that building?" Adrian asked quietly.
"A guy named Sal. A cheap thug who collects the envelopes on Fridays."
"Where is Caldwell tonight?"
"He runs a backroom poker game behind an auto body shop on 31st Street," Marcus said. "He’s there every Wednesday."
Adrian reached down, pulled his heavy leather gloves over his scarred hands, and checked the action on his custom Kimber .45 pistol tucked into his shoulder holster.
May you like
"Boss," Marcus warned softly, watching the mirror. "If you march into Caldwell’s den and wipe him out over a maid’s rent, the Commission in New York is going to ask why the head of the Moretti family is doing street enforcement in Cicero. It will look like a turf expansion."
"Let them ask," Adrian replied smoothly, racking the slide of his weapon with a sharp clack. "Tell the men to get the cars ready. We're going to pay Mr. Caldwell a visit."
