Chapter 4 - The Shadow of Silas Vance
Silas Vance was a disease that operated in the gutters beneath my feet.
There were men of honor in the underworld—men who understood that power was a balance of leverage, commerce, and restraint. And then there were vermin like Vance. He ran illegal payday loan operations, predatory check-cashing fronts, and human collateral rackets in the city’s poorest wards. He preyed on single mothers, desperate addicts, and undocumented laborers. He didn't build an empire; he picked the bones of the dying.
I had ignored him for years because he stayed in the mud, far beneath the high-finance operations of my syndicate. That was my first mistake.
“Mrs. Gable,” I called out.
My housekeeper, an austere woman of fifty who had managed my household for a decade without asking a single question about the bloodstains she occasionally had to clean from my clothes, stepped into the dining room from the pantry.
“Take Lily upstairs to the second-floor guest suite,” I ordered. “Draw a warm bath. Find clothes that fit her—call the boutique on Michigan Avenue and tell them to open their doors immediately and send over wardrobes for an eight-year-old and a toddler. Then prepare food. Soup. Bread. Roast beef. Anything she can keep down.”
Lily immediately pulled away from Mrs. Gable, retreating toward the table where Sam lay hooked to the oxygen monitor. “I’m not leaving him.”
“Lily,” I said, walking over and crouching until we were at eye level. “Your brother is sleeping. He won’t wake up for six hours. If you don’t eat, you won’t have the strength to take care of him tomorrow. You haven’t eaten since yesterday, have you?”
She looked down at her battered sneakers. “We had half a bagel on Sunday.”
Today was Tuesday.
A cold rage, pristine and absolute, settled into my marrow. “Go with Mrs. Gable. She will feed you. The door to this room will remain guarded by my men. Nobody touches that baby. You have my word as Dominic Vale.”
She searched my eyes for any sign of a trick. Finding none, she slowly took Mrs. Gable’s outstretched hand. As she reached the arched doorway, she stopped, turned her head, and looked back at me.
“Mr. Dominic?”
“Yes, Lily?”
“You forgot your candy.” She pointed to the cardboard box sitting on the antique entryway table. “You paid for it.”
The corners of my mouth softened. “I’ll keep it safe until after dinner.”
The moment the door closed behind her, the gentleness vanished from my face. I turned to Marco, my voice descending into a register that made Dr. Morales shrink further into his armchair.
“Get Frank and Leo. Tell them to bring their utility vans. I want everything we have on Silas Vance on my desk in ten minutes. Who funds him, where he sleeps, which precinct captains he pays off, and who gave him permission to operate an extortion racket within three miles of my district.”
“Dominic,” Marco cautioned, his voice strained. “We have an active threat from Victor Castiglione. If we divert our crews to deal with a street gutter like Vance, Castiglione will take the South Side railyards without firing a shot. We’ll look weak.”
I walked to the sideboard, poured two fingers of aged scotch into a crystal tumbler, and drank it down without feeling the burn.
May you like
“Let Castiglione take an empty warehouse,” I whispered, staring out the reinforced bay windows into the gathering dusk of Chicago. “A piece of real estate can be reclaimed with six men and a drum of gasoline. But a man who hunts an eight-year-old girl and her dying brother in my city... that is not a business dispute, Marco. That is an insult to God. And I intend to make Silas Vance pay for every penny of that debt.”
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