Chapter 3 - The Cold Marble
The morning sun didn't warm the forty-fourth floor of the Russo Tower; it merely turned the glass and steel into a blinding cage of white light.
I stood in the center of the reception gallery, wearing the only professional outfit I owned: a dark navy pencil skirt from a thrift store, a high-collared cream blouse with a missing top button I had replaced with a safety pin, and flat black loafers that had walked five miles through the autumn drizzle.
Around me, young women in tailored designer dresses moved with quiet, terrified efficiency, carrying encrypted tablets and leather portfolios. When they looked at me, their eyes lingered on my scuffed shoes and the worn strap of my canvas purse. They didn't know who I was, but they knew what I represented: an outsider brought into the sanctuary by the boss himself.
The heavy double doors of the inner office opened.
Frank, the square-jawed head of security who had summoned me from the club locker room seven hours earlier, stepped aside and dipped his head. “Mr. Russo is waiting, Miss Parker.”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat, squared my shoulders, and walked in.
The office was vast, smelling of fresh espresso, polished mahogany, and the cold draft of thirty-foot floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chicago River. A long conference table of black Italian marble dominated the left side of the room, surrounded by ten leather chairs.
Dante sat behind his desk.
He had shed his dinner jacket, wearing a crisp white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled twice up his forearms, exposing the corded muscle and the edge of a dark, geometric tattoo that crept down from beneath his collar to his wrist. His dark hair was combed straight back, damp from a morning shower. A porcelain cup of black coffee sat beside a stack of architectural blueprints and shipping manifests.
When he looked up, his pale gray eyes pinned me to the floor. They were the color of lake water in November—clear, lethal, and impossible to read.
“You’re seven minutes early,” Dante said, setting his gold fountain pen down on the blotter.
“My mother is currently in a private room on the seventh floor of Northwestern,” I replied, my voice steady despite the hammer of my heart against my ribs. I walked across the room until I stopped three feet from his desk, refusing to take the empty chair opposite him. “She has two nurses, a private physician, and an IV drip that costs more than my annual salary at Obsidian.”
“Good,” he said simply. “Then Dr. Sterling arrived on time.”
“You knew what she would say to me.”
Dante leaned back in his high-backed leather chair, steepling his long fingers. A gold signet ring engraved with a falcon in flight caught the morning glare.
“I knew she would tell you that David Parker was an honest man who died because he believed in justice,” Dante murmured. “And I knew she would tell you that my family used his sacrifice to conquer the riverfront.”
“Did you?” I demanded, leaning forward, resting both hands on the edge of the mahogany desk. “Did you sit in that car at nineteen and watch my father get murdered by Antonio Vega?”
The silence that descended upon the room was absolute.
Outside the glass, a helicopter drifted silently over the high-rises toward the lake, but inside the office, the air turned to liquid nitrogen. Frank, standing by the closed double doors, shifted his weight, his hand dropping casually toward his unbuttoned jacket.
Dante didn't flinch. His expression didn't change by a millimeter.
“Yes,” Dante said.
The word was dropped like a lead sinker into deep water.
“You admitted it,” I breathed, a sharp, bitter laugh tearing from my chest. “You sat there and let him die.”
“I was nineteen,” Dante said, his voice flat, stripped of all defensive heat. “My father had two men in the front seat holding pistols to my ribs. He brought me to that alley to teach me a lesson about the price of territory. He told me that when a working man steps between two empires, he gets crushed, and that a boss who bleeds for every civilian will never hold a city.”
Dante stood up. He was six feet two, broad-shouldered, moving with that fluid, predatory grace that made everyone in his orbit instinctively back away. He walked around the desk until he was standing less than two feet from me.
The scent of his aftershave—clean cedarwood, black pepper, and bitter bergamot—rolled over me, hot and dizzying.
“My father was wrong,” Dante whispered, his gray eyes burning into mine with an intensity that made the floor feel unstable beneath my flats. “A boss who allows his debts to go unpaid is not a king. He is a thief living on borrowed time.”
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a heavy brass key attached to a dark leather fob. He held it out to me.
“What is this?” I asked, keeping my hands pinned to my sides.
“The key to the executive records room on the thirty-eighth floor,” Dante said. “Every ledger my father kept. Every payoff to the harbor commission. Every bank account Antonio Vega used to finance the hit on your father.”
I stared at the key. “Why would you give that to me?”
“Because starting today, Adriana, your job is not to pour whiskey for drunken councilmen,” he murmured. “Your job is to sit in those archives and cross-reference our legal shipping manifests against Vega’s distribution networks. Antonio Vega is seventy-one years old, but his sons are moving weapons through the Calumet canal again. They are preparing for a war to take back the river.”
He reached out. His fingers, warm and unexpectedly gentle, caught my chin, lifting my face until I had no choice but to look straight into the dark storm of his eyes.
“You want retribution for David Parker?” Dante murmured, his thumb brushing lightly across the hollow of my cheek. “Help me bury the Vega family under six feet of federal indictments and concrete. Stay beside me, do your work, and your mother receives the best medical care on the North American continent until the day she dies.”
“And if I refuse?”
May you like
Dante’s lips curved into a faint, dangerous shadow of a smile that made my stomach flutter with pure, electric terror.
“You won't refuse,” he whispered, his thumb lingering on my skin for a heartbeat longer than professional before he released me. “Because you have your father’s eyes, Adriana. You don't run from wolves. You look for the throat.”
