Chapter 2 - The Shadows of Cicero
The streets of Cicero were narrow, shadowed, and smelled of coal smoke and wet asphalt.
Alexander Moretti’s black sedan idled three car lengths behind the battered blue sedan that Sophia Romano had parked beside a flickering streetlamp. He kept his headlights off, relying on the dashboard glow to illuminate the rain-slicked pavement.
He had followed her taxi—or rather, her car—all the way from the North Shore suburbs into the sprawling, gritty working-class heart of the city.
He watched as Sophia hurried up the concrete steps of a decaying brick apartment building at 414 Elm Street, fumbled with a heavy brass key, and disappeared inside.
Ten minutes later, the light in the third-floor front window flickered on.
Alexander killed his engine, stepped out into the freezing drizzle, and pulled the collar of his overcoat high around his neck. No one recognized him here. In Lake Forest, men stepped aside and lowered their eyes when Alexander Moretti walked by. In Cicero, he was just another face in the dark—a tall, silent shadow passing through the rain.
He walked quietly up the concrete steps of the apartment building. The front door had a broken latch; it swung open with a rusty groan at his touch.
He climbed the stairs one by one, his expensive leather shoes making no sound against the worn linoleum runners.
At the third floor, he found Apartment 3B.
The door was an old wooden slab with peeling white paint. A sliver of warm, yellow light shone through the wide gap beneath the threshold. And from inside, coming through the thin panels, came the soft, musical murmur of a little girl’s voice.
Alexander stepped closer, pressing his shoulder gently against the peeling wooden frame.
Inside, the kitchen was no larger than a walk-in closet at the Lake Forest estate. A small gas stove, a scarred Formica table, and a single overhead bulb suspended by a frayed cord.
At 12:47 in the morning, three-year-old Lila Moretti—though she shared no blood with him, her name echoed strangely in his mind—was standing on a wooden step stool beside the counter.
She held a dull butter knife in her small hand.
Alexander watched through a hairline crack in the doorframe as she carefully divided a half-loaf of coarse rye bread.
She wrapped the larger piece in a sheet of greasy wax paper, pressing the edges down with her thumb.
“For Mommy,” she whispered to the empty room. “She says she isn't hungry when she comes home, but I know she is.”
She poured the last inch of milk from a cardboard carton into a chipped glass, added a splash of tap water from the sink to make it last, and placed it beside the bread.
Then, she reached down to the floor, picked up a framed photograph of a rugged-looking man with kind eyes—her late father—and propped it up against the sugar bowl right across from her chair.
“So you don't have to eat alone, Papa,” she told the glass portrait.
She climbed up onto the vinyl chair, took one careful bite of the dry bread, and chewed slowly, her eyes staring up at the peeling wallpaper where water stains formed strange, map-like shapes.
“I promised I would take care of her until she doesn’t cry anymore,” the child whispered to the photograph.
Outside in the dark hallway, Alexander Moretti’s hand tightened around the peeling doorframe. Wood splintered beneath his leather-gloved fingers.
A sharp, unbearable ache bloomed behind his breastbone—a sensation so fierce and sudden it felt like a physical blow.
For three years, he had believed that grief was a closed room, locked forever, the key thrown into the lake. He had believed that his heart had turned to stone the moment his wife and daughter were incinerated on St. Agnes Chapel road.
Yet, standing in the cold hallway of a rundown tenement in Cicero, watching a half-starved toddler share her meager crust of bread with a dead photograph, Alexander felt the stone crack.
Hot, heavy tears spilled over his lower lashes, tracking silently down his cold cheeks into the stubble of his jaw.
He had everything the world could buy—money, power, fear, respect, thirty-acre estates, and fleets of luxury cars. And yet, this little girl, who owned nothing more than a broken plastic duck and half a loaf of rye bread, possessed a wealth of human spirit that made Alexander’s entire empire look like a graveyard.
He stepped back from the door, his chest heaving with a sob he forced back down his throat with iron will.
He turned and walked down the stairs, his boots echoing in the empty stairwell like gunshots.
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He did not know that the child inside had already begun to save him.
And he certainly did not know that across town, sitting in the velvet-lined drawing room of a penthouse overlooking the Magnificent Mile, another woman was watching him through the digital lens of a private security camera—and smiling a very dangerous smile.
