Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Hit
Augustine caught her before her knees hit the marble.
His arms were surprisingly gentle, catching her beneath the shoulders and lifting her effortlessly against his chest. For a split second, Dela felt the incredible, coiled strength in his frame, the heat radiating through his wool jacket, and the faint scent of cedarwood and cold rain that clung to his lapels.
“Teddy!” Augustine called out, not raising his voice, but pitching it with an authority that brought the kitchen door flying open instantly.
Teddy rushed into the room, a clean tablecloth in her hands, her eyes wide as she saw Dela cradled in the boss’s arms.
“Get the medical kit from my private elevator,” Augustine ordered, carrying Dela toward the leather lounge suite in the corner of the room, away from the broken glass and spilled wine. “And tell the lobby captain to bring the Mercedes around to the private loading dock. No sirens. Dr. Chen is already waiting at Northwestern Memorial.”
“No,” Dela gasped, her hands gripping Augustine’s forearm through his sleeve. Her knuckles were white, her breath hitching as another contraction seized her lower abdomen with the force of an iron band. “No... I can’t pay... the deposit...”
Augustine laid her down gently on the deep leather sofa, sliding a soft velvet cushion beneath her head.
He looked down at her, his sea-gray eyes dark with an emotion Dela could not identify—not pity, not triumph, but something older and infinitely more dangerous: respect.
“The hospital has already been paid, Delilah,” Augustine said softly. “The entire pediatric wing was endowed by my family foundation fifteen years ago. You will have the chief of obstetrics, four neonatal specialists, and a private suite on the top floor. No one is sending you to Cook County.”
Dela closed her eyes as the contraction peaked, her teeth gritting against the pain until the wave finally broke, leaving her gasping for air on the leather cushions.
When she opened her eyes, Augustine was sitting on the low mahogany coffee table across from her. He had unbuttoned his tuxedo cuffs and rolled them back twice, revealing thick, corded forearms marked with faint silver scars.
In his hand, he held a heavy leather-bound ledger.
“Elias’s notebooks,” Dela whispered.
“Three of them,” Augustine said, placing the ledger on her lap. “He gave them to my courier twelve hours before he died. He knew they were coming for him, Dela. He knew Arthur’s people had tapped the port authority switchboard.”
Tears finally spilled from Dela’s eyes, hot and silent, tracking through the pale dust on her cheeks. “If he knew... why didn't he run? Why didn't he take me and get on a plane?”
“Because he was like you,” Augustine said, his voice dropping into a register that was almost tender. “He was an honest person who believed that the law could be used as a shield against monsters. He thought if he gathered enough proof—enough documents, enough signatures, enough manifests—that the system would protect him.”
Augustine shook his head slowly.
“The system doesn't protect people like Elias, Delilah. The system is an auction block where men like Arthur Sinclair buy judges, inspectors, and coroners by the gross. The only thing that protects people in this city is absolute, unyielding power.”
Dela looked down at the notebooks. She touched the cracked black leather with her fingertips.
Inside was Elias’s neat, microscopic handwriting—hundreds of pages of dock manifests, crane inspection logs, and serial numbers of shipping containers that had disappeared into the Chicago night.
“You used him,” Dela said, her voice shaking with a mixture of grief and rising rage. “You used my husband as bait to trap Sinclair.”
“I gave him the resources to do what he wanted to do,” Augustine countered without flinching. “Elias came to me, Delilah. He walked into this building seven months ago, sat in that very chair, and told me he was going to expose the Calumet terminal whether I helped him or not. He knew what the stakes were. The only mistake he made was underestimating how desperate Arthur was.”
Augustine reached out and picked up Dela’s blue fountain pen from the table. He laid it gently beside the ledger on her lap.
“When Elias died, I thought his work died with him. Then you showed up in my dining room seven months ago with a forged identity card and silver tape on your shoes. You thought you were being invisible, Delilah. But a woman who graduated top of her class at Northwestern cannot hide the way her mind works. I watched you listen to my guests. I watched you remember every name, every dock number, every dollar amount.”
Augustine leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
“I didn't leave that envelope under your door to torment you. I left it because I needed to know if you were going to spend the rest of your life running from the men who killed your husband... or if you were ready to help me finish what he started.”
Dela looked at him through her tears.
The pain in her abdomen was returning, duller now, but steady. A rhythmic reminder that within hours, she would no longer be fighting only for herself and a dead man’s memory. She would have a child in her arms.
“Arthur Sinclair is only one man,” Dela whispered. “The Calumet terminal had partners. City inspectors. State senators. The shipping cartels in Montreal.”
“Yes,” Augustine said. A cold, feral smile touched his lips. “They all signed riders in that forty-page contract tonight. By nine o’clock tomorrow morning, every single one of them will realize that their signatures are attached to federal racketeering charges.”
He stood up, looking toward the glass wall.
Outside, the blizzard was raging with biblical intensity, sheets of white snow obliterating the Chicago skyline, turning the vast lake into an endless, frozen abyss.
“The war for this city’s docks is just beginning, Delilah,” Augustine said without looking back. “Arthur was the opening move. The people who backed him—the syndicate in Montreal and their friends in the Department of Justice—will not let three billion dollars in maritime transit go without blood.”
The service elevator chimed softly.
Two paramedics in navy uniforms, flanked by Teddy Brightwater carrying Dela’s winter coat, stepped quickly into the salon with a wheeled gurney.
Augustine turned back to Dela.
“Go to the hospital. Have your child. Let my doctors take care of you.”
Dela allowed the paramedics to lift her onto the gurney, the softness of the mattress a shock to her bruised body. As they strapped the safety belt across her chest, she reached out and caught Augustine’s sleeve one last time.
“And what happens when I leave that hospital, Augustine?”
Augustine looked down at her, his sea-gray eyes reflecting the cold, distant lights of the snowbound city below.
“That depends on you, Counsellor,” he said softly. “You can take your child, take the two-million-dollar whistleblower bounty the federal court will award you from Sinclair’s seized assets, and buy a quiet house in Vermont where nobody knows your name.”
He leaned down, his voice barely audible above the hum of the gurney’s wheels.
May you like
“Or you can come back to the forty-second floor. Elias was an inspector, Delilah. But you... you have the mind of an executioner. And I have an empire that needs a general counsel.”
***
