Chapter 2 - THE EDGE OF LIFE AND DEATH
The scent of antiseptic in the corridor of Northwestern Memorial Hospital was sharp enough to burn the throat.
Dante Russo, the undisputed king of Chicago’s underworld, stood frozen against the sterile white wall. His bespoke charcoal suit—tailored by hand in Milan—felt like a suffocating cage of lead. His breathing was shallow, his pupils blown wide beneath heavy, dark brows that had made hardened killers weep for mercy in cold basement interrogations.
Beside him, Dr. Kenneth Evans, the city's foremost maternal-fetal trauma surgeon, was covered in dried arterial crimson from his forearms to his plastic apron.
“What did you just say to me?” Dante’s voice came out dangerously low, a rasp pulled across jagged glass.
“Twins, Mr. Russo,” Dr. Evans repeated, refusing to drop his gaze despite the lethal aura rolling off the mob boss. “Two heartbeats. Or rather... there were two distinct, viable heartbeats when the paramedics scooped your wife off the marble floor of your foyer. Right now, both infants are in acute bradycardia. The placental abruption is severe. If we do not operate within the next three minutes, you will lose all three of them.”
*Twins.*
The word struck Dante’s chest like a hollow-point bullet. His ears roared with an unbearable ringing. For eight months, he had operated under the assumption that his arranged marriage to Emily had produced a single, routine complication—a pregnancy he had kept at arm’s length because the syndicate’s war with the northern boroughs was reaching a boiling point. Emily had been quiet. She had been meek. She had never demanded his time, never thrown tantrums like the socialites who chased his wealth.
And he had ignored her.
Eleven missed calls.
His mind flashed back to two hours ago. He had been sitting in the penthouse suite of the Drake Hotel, sipping vintage bourbon while Vanessa Laurent draped herself over the back of his leather armchair, whispering about quarterly shipping manifests and the logistical needs of the Russo foundation. Every time his personal phone had vibrated against the mahogany surface, Vanessa had smoothly reached out with manicured, crimson-tipped fingers, sliding the screen face down.
*“Don't let domestic trivialities distract you, darling,”* she had purred into his ear, her perfume thick with jasmine and amber. *“Emily is resting comfortably at the estate. The head housekeeper assures me she is merely looking for attention. You know how needy common girls get when they marry up.”*
And Dante, preoccupied with a cartel supply route out of Veracruz, had allowed it. He had left his phone on silent.
Now, he looked down at the wheeled stainless-steel gurney parked in the corner of the trauma bay. Sitting atop it was a clear plastic biohazard bag containing the belongings cut from his wife’s body.
Dante stepped forward, his legs numb. His heavy, signet-ringed fingers reached into the bag and pulled out the garment.
It was not the Italian silk loungewear he paid thousands for. It was not the soft cashmere robes he ordered his assistants to stock in her master closet.
It was a coarse, stiff, black cotton dress with a cheap white polyester apron pinned roughly at the waist. The hem was frayed. The cuffs were stiffened with dried floor wax and bleached lemon water. The front was soaked through with a wide, horrifying smear of dark uterine blood.
“Where did she get this?” Dante whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, uncooperative rage.
Frank Carlotti, his right-hand man and underboss of twenty years, stepped up behind him. Frank held Emily’s cracked iPhone in a gloved hand.
“Boss,” Frank muttered, his face drawn tight as drumskin. “The paramedics didn't pick her up in the master wing. They found her at the base of the servants' staircase, just past the laundry chutes. She was alone. No staff was attending to her. The private security team you assigned to the perimeter... they weren't at their posts.”
Dante’s head snapped around. His gray eyes, usually as dead and unreadable as winter frost over Lake Michigan, flashed with an untamed, feral madness. “What do you mean, they weren't at their posts?”
“The gate logs show Vanessa dismissed your personal guard detachment at dawn,” Frank answered, his voice dropping to a grim whisper. “She told them you ordered a tactical rotation to the south docks. She brought in her own private contractors. Men from the West Side.”
“Moretti men,” Dante snarled, the pieces slamming together in his mind with the force of an avalanche.
Before Frank could answer, the red emergency doors of the surgical suite swung open with a violent metallic clatter.
“Crash cart! We’re losing the maternal pulse! Push one milligram of epi now!”
Dante surged toward the doors, but two burly surgical orderlies instinctively moved to block him.
“Get out of my way,” Dante breathed, his hand dipping inside his suit coat toward the custom 9mm tucked against his ribs.
“Dante, no!” Dr. Evans barked, grabbing the don’s forearm with surprising strength. “Shoot them, shoot me, shoot whoever you want, but if you cross those sterile doors, you introduce pathogens into an open peritoneal cavity, and your wife dies on that table. Sit down, shut your mouth, and let me save your family!”
No man had spoken to Dante Russo like that in fifteen years. Any soldier who dared raise his voice in Dante’s presence would have been dumped in a barrel of quicklime before nightfall.
Yet Dante stood paralyzed. His chest heaved. His hand slowly slipped out of his jacket, empty.
The heavy double doors swung shut, the frosted glass hiding the frantic silhouettes of scrub nurses and surgeons descending upon the small, pale body of the woman he had promised to protect at the altar of Holy Name Cathedral.
Dante turned slowly toward Frank. The numbness was gone, replaced by a scalding, volcanic hatred that made the air in the corridor crackle with lethal tension.
“Frank.”
“Yes, Don Dante?”
“Bring the car around. We are going home.”
“Boss, the doctors said—”
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“The doctors are fighting for their lives in there,” Dante said, his voice dropping into the quiet, terrifying monotone that preceded his most brutal massacres. “I am going to ensure that anyone who laid a finger on my wife never gets the privilege of dying quickly.”
***
