Chapter 3 - Blood on the Snow
Eighty miles west of the Chicago city limits, the world was nothing but wind, ice, and howling gray darkness.
Nora gripped the steering wheel of the 2008 Subaru Outback until the cheap faux-leather cover dug into the palms of her hands. The windshield wipers scraped violently against a thick crust of freezing rain, leaving wide, streaky arcs through which she could barely make out the red taillights of an eighteen-wheeler fifty yards ahead.
Every muscle in her back burned. Her cesarean incision, barely ten weeks healed, throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache that sent nausea crawling up into her throat every time the car hit a rut in the unplowed asphalt of Interstate 88.
In the backseat, a faint, reedy cry rose above the rattle of the old station wagon’s heater fan.
*Mia.*
Nora’s heart seized. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The two infant car seats—cheap, standard models bought with cash at an independent discount store in Cicero three weeks ago—were buckled into the rear bench. A heavy wool blanket was tucked snugly around both shells, leaving only small openings for air.
"Mommy's here, sweet girl," Nora whispered, her voice cracked and dry. "Mommy’s right here. Just hold on. Just a little further."
Beside Mia, Leo made a wet, coughing sound.
The sound froze the blood in Nora’s veins.
Leo’s pediatric pulmonologist had been clear: *If he gets a respiratory syncytial virus, Mrs. Rinaldi, or if his bronchial tubes become inflamed before his lungs fully mature, he will be back on a ventilator within twelve hours. You cannot let him get cold. You cannot let him get stressed.*
"I know, baby," she murmured, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes and cutting warm tracks down her chapped cheeks. "I know, Leo. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
She had planned this for twenty-six days.
It had started the night she found the receipt.
Not a receipt for jewelry—Victor was too smart for that. It had been an automated maintenance charge for an underground parking space at a luxury high-rise on Lake Shore Drive, billed to a shell corporation Victor used for real estate acquisitions. Nora had worked as an executive accountant before she married Victor; she knew how to read a balance sheet better than his corrupt lawyers did. A single cross-reference of the building’s registry had given her Sylvia’s name. A two-hundred-dollar bribe to a night doorman had given her the rest: dates, times, and the fact that Victor Rinaldi visited the eighteenth floor every Tuesday and Thursday evening while Nora sat in the NICU, holding an oxygen mask over their son’s face.
She hadn't screamed. She hadn't thrown things.
When you were married to a man who could make city aldermen disappear and whose name made seasoned police detectives look at the floor, you didn't have the luxury of an emotional breakdown. You didn't make scenes. Scenes got you locked in a penthouse with private nurses and armed guards "for your own mental health."
Scenes got your children raised by nannies while your husband continued to rule his city and his mistresses without consequence.
Instead, she had spent twenty-six days becoming a ghost.
She had systematically squirrelled away cash—five hundred dollars at a time from the household allowance, exchanged for non-sequential twenty-dollar bills at grocery stores across three counties. She had bought the beat-up Subaru through an anonymous private listing on Craigslist, paying in cash and registering it under an LLC she had established in Delaware using an alias from an old college roommate who had passed away five years prior.
She had packed the insulated cooler with three months’ worth of specialized surfactant ampoules, two portable battery-operated nebulizers, and twelve cans of hypoallergenic preemie formula.
She had left the fifty thousand dollars Victor kept in the biometric safe.
She wanted nothing that belonged to him. Not a single penny of blood money. Not a single gram of gold. If she took his cash, he could call it grand larceny. He could use his bought-and-paid-for judges to issue an interstate felony warrant.
By leaving the money, she was just a mother leaving her husband. Even Victor’s pet judges couldn't easily twist that into an amber alert before breakfast.
The Subaru’s engine sputtered, the temperature gauge creeping dangerously close to the red line as the car struggled through a six-inch drift of unplowed snow near the Rochelle exit.
Nora glanced at the dashboard clock. *6:14 A.M.*
Victor was home.
He was standing in the empty nursery right now. He had smelled the missing air, seen the empty cribs, and realized that his domestic trophy had walked out the front door.
She knew what would happen next. The phone calls. The panic. Then the rage. Victor’s pride was his most vulnerable organ; he could tolerate a million-dollar loss at the docks, but he could not tolerate the world knowing that his quiet, soft-spoken wife had outmaneuvered him.
"Let him burn," Nora whispered, her voice tightening as she steered the car off the highway ramp toward a lonely, unlit gas station surrounded by cornfields.
She pulled the car behind a row of rusted diesel fuel tanks, out of the direct blast of the prairie wind. She kept the engine running, shifted into park, and scrambled into the backseat.
The air inside the car was cooling rapidly. Nora pulled Leo out of his seat first. The boy was trembling, his face flushed, his chest pulling in deep, ragged breaths that made his tiny ribs visible beneath his fleece onesie.
"Okay, baby. Okay. Breathe with Mommy," she sobbed, unzipping her heavy coat and pressing his small body directly against the bare skin of her chest.
She grabbed the portable nebulizer, fitted the infant mask over his button nose and mouth, and pressed the switch. The quiet hum of the compressor filled the car, a fine mist of albuterol and saline swirling into his lungs.
Mia whimpered from her carrier, kicking her swaddled feet.
Nora wrapped one arm around Mia’s shell, rocking her with her hip, while holding the mask over Leo with the other hand. She sat there in the back of a twenty-year-old car behind an abandoned grain silo in the middle of an Illinois blizzard, her body shivering, listening to the desperate, rhythmic hiss of her son’s medicine.
She was exhausted. Her body was broken. She had less than four thousand dollars in cash remaining in her duffel bag, no home, no allies, and the most dangerous man in Chicago was hunting her with every resource an empire could muster.
But as Leo’s breathing gradually eased, his tiny, translucent fingers curling tightly around the fabric of her sweater, Nora looked out into the howling white wilderness.
For the first time in four years, the air she breathed didn't smell like cigar smoke and expensive lies.
May you like
It tasted like freedom. And she would die in the snow before she ever let Victor Rinaldi take it back.
***
