Chapter 2 - The Blood on the Glass
My thumb trembled as I swiped across the spiderwebbed screen of Clara’s phone.
A smear of her crimson blood clung to the fractured glass, blurring the illuminated notifications. The lock screen was a photograph taken four years ago along the Amalfi coast. She was laughing into the sunset, wind whipping loose curls of brown hair across her sun-kissed cheeks, looking at someone behind the camera with absolute, unguarded devotion.
She was looking at me. Back when I was still a man worthy of being looked at that way.
The screen flickered, unlocked by the emergency bypass Mateo had run through our syndicate’s tech suite. The first open app wasn't an email. It wasn't a call log.
It was an image saved from an ultrasound clinic in Lincoln Park, dated three o'clock that very afternoon.
The black-and-white printout showed a tiny, bean-shaped shadow nestled inside a glowing crescent. Beneath it, in neat, handwritten script from the technician, were the words: Healthy heartbeat detected. 10 weeks. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Valente!
My knees felt like hollow glass.
Ten weeks.
Clara was carrying my child.
She had spent the last two months waking up alone in our sprawling Gold Coast mansion, nausea twisting her stomach while I claimed I was out negotiating territory in Detroit or smoothing over port shipments in Gary. In reality, I had been renting penthouse suites for a twenty-four-year-old socialite whose perfume gave me headaches, all to feed a pathetic, swollen ego that had convinced me I was above consequence.
The emerald dress.
The memory struck my sternum like an armor-piercing round. Tonight was our fifth wedding anniversary. Two weeks ago, Clara had left a simple, gold-embossed calendar invite on my bedside table: Dinner at home. Just the two of us. I have something to tell you.
I had ignored the note. I had bought her that emerald silk dress through an assistant, told my driver to deliver it with a standard bouquet of white lilies, and texted her an excuse about a sudden union strike on the South Side docks.
Then I had taken Serena to a rooftop gala, bought her champagne, and spent three hours stroking her hand in an emergency room while she cried over hyperventilating from too much tequila.
"There's more, Boss," Mateo murmured, his voice thick with a sorrow he rarely allowed himself to show. "Swipe to the messages."
I swiped.
The sender was an untraceable burner number. The first message had arrived at 8:14 p.m.—exactly forty minutes after I had arrived at Northwestern with Serena.
It was a photograph of me.
Taken through the glass window of Serena’s private hospital suite.
The angle captured everything: my face softened with attentive care, my fingers gently brushing a blonde lock of hair from Serena’s forehead, my lips parted as I promised her, I’m not going anywhere.
Beneath the image was a text message:
Look at your Don, Mrs. Valente. While you sit waiting in your anniversary dress, he’s holding another woman’s hand. But that’s not all he gave her. He gave her the master clearance code to the South Side logistics depot. Lorenzo Moretti has the shipping manifests now. If you want to keep your husband from being indicted by the feds or buried in a concrete footing tonight, bring the family cipher ledger to the 47th Street rail yards. Come alone. Tell Valente, and we leak the photographs to the press and send the feds to his front door.
The timestamp on Clara's response was 8:32 p.m.
I'm coming. Don't hurt him.
The phone fell from my grip. It hit the linoleum floor with a sharp, hollow clatter.
Clara hadn't been running away. She hadn't been visiting an old friend. She hadn't stumbled into the South Side by accident.
She had gone into the serpent’s den, alone, nine weeks pregnant with my heir, wearing the dress I bought to pacify her, solely to protect my worthless name from scandal and federal prison. She had traded her safety for my survival while I was playing nursemaid to a girl whose only sickness was narcissism.
"Dom?"
A soft, petulant voice drifted down the corridor.
I turned slowly.
Serena stood ten yards away, clutching her silk hospital robe around her slender waist. Her blonde hair fell in artfully disheveled waves, her wide blue eyes glistening with manufactured vulnerability. She looked dainty, expensive, and fragile.
An hour ago, I would have rushed across the tile to wrap an arm around her shoulders and guide her back into bed.
Now, as I looked at her, I felt a disgust so profound, so suffocating, that my vision tunneled into black edges.
"Dom, who was on that stretcher?" she whined, taking a step toward me, her bare feet padding against the polished floor. "You just ran out of the room. The nurses are being so rude to me, and my chest feels tight again. Can't we just get a private car back to the Gold Coast? I want to sleep in your bed."
I walked toward her.
My combat boots left faint, sticky prints of my wife’s blood on the clean hospital floor. The air around me seemed to drop ten degrees. Mateo and the four armed enforcers standing beside him stiffened, their hands drifting instinctively toward their holsters. They knew that walk. They had seen it in abandoned warehouses and locked backrooms across Illinois.
It was the walk of a man who was preparing to slaughter everything in his path.
Serena’s pout vanished. She stopped moving, her instincts finally screaming at her that the wealthy benefactor she had wrapped around her finger was gone. Standing before her was Dominic Valente, Don of the Chicago Outfit, a man who had earned his throne over a mountain of dead men.
"D-Dom?" she stammered, taking a cautious step back. "You're scaring me."
I didn't stop until I was standing six inches from her face. The smell of her expensive French perfume hit me—the same scent that had lingered on the lapels of my tuxedo jacket while Clara bled in the crushed remains of our town car.
"How much did Lorenzo pay you, Serena?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm, barely louder than a whisper.
Her eyes widened in genuine, paralyzing horror. "What? What are you talking about? Who is Lorenzo?"
I didn't blink. I didn't raise my voice. I leaned down until my lips were an inch from her ear, speaking with a venom that made her entire body shudder.
"The photographer outside the window," I murmured. "The window you insisted on opening because you felt 'stuffy.' The clearance codes to the South Side that were stored in the safe inside the apartment I bought for you on Michigan Avenue. The panic attack you staged twenty minutes after my wife left her house."
Serena’s jaw trembled. The mask of innocence fractured, revealing the calculating, desperate creature underneath.
"Dom... listen to me..." she gasped, tears of real terror finally spilling over her mascara. "He threatened my family! He said if I didn't keep you in the hospital tonight, he would burn my mother’s house down! I didn't know he was going to hit Clara's car! I swear to God, I thought he just wanted the paperwork!"
"You knew," I whispered.
"No! Dom, please! You love me! You said I was everything she wasn't!"
I reached out, took her slender wrist, and squeezed just enough to let her feel the raw, crushing force of my grip.
"I never loved you," I said, each word dripping with ice. "I used you because you were easy. Because you required nothing of my soul. But my wife... my wife carries my life in her body. And you handed her to a butcher."
I released her wrist as if it were contaminated with plague.
I looked over my shoulder at Mateo.
"Take her," I ordered coldly. "Strip her of every piece of jewelry, every deed, and every credit card with the Valente crest. Put her in the holding cells beneath the River North garage. Hand her phone, her banking records, and her signed confession over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation alongside Lorenzo Moretti’s indictment file."
"Dom, no! You can't put me in jail! You can't do this to me!" Serena shrieked as two stone-faced enforcers grabbed her by the elbows, lifting her bodily off the floor and dragging her toward the service elevators.
Her screams bounced off the sterile hospital walls until the heavy doors slid shut, cutting her voice out of my universe forever.
Before I could exhale, the double red doors of the trauma bay burst open.
A surgeon stepped out, his surgical scrubs soaked in dark, arterial blood. His cap was crooked, his mask hanging loosely around his neck, his eyes hollow with exhaustion.
"Where is Dominic Valente?" the doctor shouted into the corridor.
I crossed the hallway in two strides, my heart slamming violently against my ribs. "I'm here. I'm her husband."
May you like
The doctor looked at my bloodstained hands, then up into my eyes.
"Mr. Valente," he said, his voice flat with impending doom. "Your wife’s heart just stopped on the table. You need to come with me right now if you want to say goodbye."
