Chapter 3 - Blood on the Leather
The black SUV tore through the rain-drenched industrial alleys of Fulton Market, its darkened windows deflecting the glare of the Chicago streetlights. Inside the cabin, the only sound was the rhythmic hum of the high-output engine and Roman’s ragged, shallow breathing.
Roman pressed his palm hard against his left flank, feeling the hot pulse of blood between his fingers. His head thudded back against the leather headrest. His mind was spinning—not from the wound, but from the impossible reality sitting two feet to his left.
Bridget Sullivan drove with the cold precision of an operative. Her hands gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, her gaze flicking rhythmically between the side mirrors and a digital heads-up display mounted near the dashboard. The tablet she had used in the warehouse was now docked, rapidly streaming strings of green and blue encrypted data across its interface.
“You’re taking me to St. Anthony’s,” Roman rasped, his voice gravelly. “Doctor Vasquez... on the payroll. Back entrance.”
“Vasquez took a wire transfer of four hundred thousand dollars from a shell company in Panama two hours ago,” Bridget replied without looking at him. “The transaction was routed through an intermediary bank in Lisbon. If I take you to St. Anthony’s, you’ll be dead on the operating table within eight minutes, and Vasquez will sign a death certificate citing cardiac arrest from gunshot trauma.”
Roman stared at her profile, his breath catching. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I spent the last seventy-two hours taking apart Lorenzo Rossi’s shadow network piece by piece,” she said evenly, taking a hard right onto an obscure, unlit service road bordering the Chicago River. “Your consigliere doesn't use the family accounts for wet work. He uses a series of numbered accounts managed by Philip Sterling at Apex Capital. What Lorenzo forgot—and what you were too arrogant to realize—is that my father built Sterling’s encryption architecture fifteen years ago. Every back door Arthur Sullivan left open is sitting in my hard drive.”
Roman felt a chill that had nothing to do with the freezing temperature of the car. Arthur Sullivan had been presented to him as a broken man—a pathetic, debt-ridden gambler whose only remaining utility was signing over his real estate assets and handing over his daughter to satisfy a blood debt.
“Your father was a drunk,” Roman hissed through clenched teeth. “A degenerate gambler.”
“My father was a coward who used alcohol to drown out the noise of what he had done for men like your father,” Bridget corrected, her tone devoid of emotion. “He was weak. But he was a mathematical savant. And he made damn sure I knew how to find the pulse of any financial institution on earth before I was twelve years old. He didn't lose that five million dollars to you, Roman. He let you take it because he knew if you took our assets, you would take me. And he knew that the only place safe from the coming war was inside the house of the man everyone was trying to kill.”
She pulled the vehicle into a dilapidated, unmarked brick structure near Goose Island—an old municipal pump house that looked abandoned to the outside world. She hit a remote transmitter on the dash; a rusted steel gate rattled open just enough for the SUV to glide inside before grinding shut behind them.
Bridget killed the engine. The silence inside the damp, cavernous space was deafening.
She turned in her seat. For the first time, she looked Roman dead in the eyes. Her gaze was penetrating, stripping away every shred of the ruthless Don persona he had worn like armor since his twenty-fourth birthday.
“Shirt off,” she ordered.
“What?”
“The slug went through the flank above the iliac crest. If it hit the peritoneum, you’re septic by sunrise. If it’s an exit wound with muscle tearing, I can pack and suture it. Shirt off. Now. Or bleed to death on my leather seats.”
Roman was a man who commanded hundreds of hardened killers. Men trembled when he lowered his voice. Yet looking at Bridget Sullivan right now, under the dim yellow glow of the interior dome light, he found his hands obeying her before his pride could intervene.
He stripped his torn, ruined cashmere coat and pulled his blood-soaked shirt over his head, groaning as the fabric tore away from the clotted wound. The flesh was ragged, purple and crimson, blood oozing steadily down his washboard abdomen.
Bridget moved with terrifying efficiency. She climbed into the back, pulled a heavy trauma bag from beneath the bench seat, and returned with surgical shears, antiseptic, hemostatic gauze, and a field suture kit.
She knelt beside him, her face inches from his chest. Roman caught the scent of her—not the heavy, synthetic floral perfumes the mob mistresses wore, but crisp rain, clean soap, and gunpowder. Her hands were broad and solid, but her touch was shockingly steady.
She swabbed the wound with iodine. Roman sucked in a sharp, hissing breath through his teeth, his hand shooting out to grasp her shoulder. His fingers dug into the heavy fabric of her tactical jacket, feeling the dense, powerful muscle underneath.
Bridget didn’t flinch. She didn’t even tell him to let go.
“Through and through,” she observed, probing the wound with gloved fingers. “Missed the intestine. Tore through the oblique. You’re lucky, Roman. You’re a remarkably stupid man, but you’re lucky.”
“I’m stupid?” Roman grunted, sweat beading on his forehead as she packed the wound with hemostatic sponge. “I built this syndicate’s revenue by forty percent in three years.”
“You built a glass house on top of a sinkhole,” Bridget said coldly, threading a curved suture needle. “You looked at spreadsheets and saw profits. You never looked at the flow of customs clearance bribes at the port. You never noticed that your trusted capo, Victor Romano, was purchasing three times the amount of ammonium nitrate and high-grade munitions than your security contracts required. You let Lorenzo handle the banking because you thought numbers were beneath a boss.”
She pushed the needle through the torn flesh.
Roman’s grip on her shoulder tightened until his knuckles turned white. A low growl tore from his throat. He looked down at her—at the sweep of her dark eyelashes, the firm line of her mouth, the broad, unapologetic strength of her shoulders.
All these months, he had left her in the West Wing. He had treated her like a piece of furniture, an unwanted burden foisted upon him by a transactional marriage. When the wives of his captains had snickered at her frame, when they had mocked her weight and her quiet demeanor at the few functions she attended, he had simply looked away, indifferent to her humiliation.
He had thought she was nothing.
A ghost in his house.
“Why didn't you let them kill me?” Roman asked, his voice strained as she tied off the first knot. “If I die, the marriage contract dissolves. You could have taken the Sullivan properties back during the chaos and vanished to Europe. Lorenzo wouldn't have bothered hunting you. You would have been free.”
Bridget paused, her fingers resting lightly against his bare skin. The heat of his body seemed to radiate into the cold vehicle.
She looked up, her dark eyes locking onto his with an intensity that made Roman’s pulse hammer against his ribs.
“Because Lorenzo Rossi killed my brother six years ago,” she said softly, each word dripping with venomous clarity. “They called it an overdose in a hotel room in River North. But Lorenzo orchestrated it because my brother wouldn't falsify the audit on Apex Logistics. Lorenzo thinks I don’t know. He thinks nobody knows.”
She pulled the thread tight.
May you like
“You aren't dying tonight, Roman Moretti,” she whispered, leaning in so close he could feel the ghost of her breath against his lips. “Not until I use you and your empire to tear Lorenzo Rossi and Victor Romano into so many pieces that the city of Chicago forgets they ever existed.”
***
