Chapter 2 - The Price of Survival
“What do they usually want?” I asked quietly.
Lily didn’t look away. Her eyes—a pale, washed-out hazel that looked far too large in her hollow-cheeked face—held the kind of flat, exhausted wariness that took most street veterans twenty years in a federal penitentiary to cultivate.
“Everything,” she whispered. “They want the stroller. They want the coat. Or they grab your arm and ask where your mother is so they can call the cops, and then the cops take you to the shelter where other kids steal your shoes while you sleep.”
She glanced back at the baby. Little Sam let out another shuddering, rattling breath. The sound was like dry autumn leaves scraping across rough asphalt. A faint, bluish tint hovered around the edges of his pale lips.
I didn’t need a medical degree to know that child had hours, not days, before his lungs collapsed under the fluid.
“Marco,” I said, not shifting my gaze from the girl.
“Boss?” Marco stood four paces behind me, his overcoat unbuttoned just enough to keep his service weapon accessible. His eyes darted down the crowded sidewalk, cataloging every pedestrian, every parked sedan, every potential threat. In our business, standing still on an open Chicago street corner was an invitation to a bullet.
“Call Dr. Morales. Tell him to get to the Gold Coast brownstone within twenty minutes. If he isn’t standing in my foyer by the time I walk through the door, tell him I’ll revoke his clinic’s lease and audit every prescription he wrote last year.”
“Dominic,” Marco lowered his voice, stepping closer so only I could hear. “Castiglione and the Moretti brothers are sitting in the private room at Carmine’s right now. They’ve been waiting forty minutes. If you don’t walk through those doors, Castiglione is going to think you’re refusing to divide the rail yard territory. It will mean war by midnight.”
I stood up straight, towering over the little girl. The cold lake wind whipped the hem of my coat against my trousers.
“Let them think whatever keeps them awake at night,” I said evenly. “If Victor Castiglione wants to start a war over a missed lunch, he can come knock on my front door and see how many of his captains walk back out to their cars. Call Morales.”
Marco swallowed hard, recognized the finality in my tone, and immediately pulled a encrypted burner phone from his breast pocket. “Yes, boss.”
I turned back to Lily. She was already shrinking away, her fingers turning white around the cardboard edge of the candy box. She had seen the hardness in my voice. She knew, even if she couldn't name my rank, that I was a predator.
“I’m not calling the police,” I told her, dropping my voice an octave, keeping my hands deliberately visible and empty. “And I’m not taking your shoes. But your brother is drowning on his own phlegm, Lily. Look at his chest.”
She looked down. The baby’s ribs were retracting deeply beneath his stained onesie with every ragged gasp—a frantic, hollow pulling that meant his diaphragm was failing.
Lily’s lower lip trembled. The fierce mask of an adult she had constructed over her eight years of life began to crack down the center. A solitary tear carved a clean trail through the grime on her cheek.
“The clinic on Fourth Street turned us away,” she choked out, her pride finally crumbling under the weight of sheer desperation. “The man behind the glass said we needed forty dollars just to see the nurse. I only had thirty-seven. I told him I’d get the other three dollars by sunset. I begged him. I told him Sam wouldn’t stop shaking.”
My jaw tightened until the enamel of my molars ground together. A man who owned half the commercial real estate on this boulevard, who spent fifty thousand dollars a week on political contributions and imported cigars, was listening to a starving child who was three dollars short of keeping her brother alive.
“The clinic made a mistake,” I said softly.
“Are you going to hurt us?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to separate us?”
“Never.”
I bent down, not waiting for her permission this time, and scooped the entire battered stroller up into my arms. It weighed almost nothing. The baby inside felt feather-light, radiating a dry, blistering heat that penetrated straight through the cheap acrylic blanket and burned into my chest.
“Come with me,” I said.
May you like
Lily stood frozen on the concrete for two seconds. Her survival instincts were screaming at her to run into the safety of the alleyways. But then Sam let out a weak, mewling whimper, and the tie that bound her to that child proved stronger than any fear. She gripped her cardboard box of candy bars like a shield and followed me straight into the open door of my armor-plated Mercedes.
***
