Chapter 2 - The Altar of Ghosts
The silence inside St. Jude’s Cathedral was no longer the reverent hush of prayer; it was the suffocating, electrified stillness of a firing squad waiting for the drop of a handkerchief.
Two hundred members of Chicago’s underworld—capos in bespoke Brioni wool, crooked aldermen with diamond pinky rings, and button men carrying suppressed Glock 19s beneath their silk-lined jackets—stared down the center aisle. None of them could process what they were seeing. Dominic Castiglione, a man who had put three rival caporegimes into the concrete pilings of the Dan Ryan Expressway without blinking, was on both knees on the cold Italian marble.
His knuckles, usually scraped raw from the heavy bag at his River North gym, were bone-white as they hovered over Clara’s bare, bleeding calf.
“Clara,” Dominic whispered. His voice did not sound like the voice that commanded five thousand armed men across three states. It cracked. It rasped with the agony of a man who had spent eight months screaming into an open grave. “Look at me. Look at my face.”
Clara Higgins swallowed against a throat coated in bile and fear. She gripped her bouquet of white hydrangeas until the stems crushed, weeping sap onto her gloved fingers. Her leg was throbbing—a sickening, rhythmic pulse that made the stained glass windows above the altar swim in red and violet streaks.
“I looked at it,” she managed, her voice barely louder than the rustle of her tulle skirt. “At the motel. The boy had that same picture in his pocket. It was folded into four squares. The edges were taped with clear packing tape.”
Dominic closed his eyes. A single shudder ran through his massive, tailored frame—a tremor so violent that the fabric of his tuxedo jacket strained against his broad shoulders. Behind them, standing near the third pew, his consigliere, a gray-haired viper named Vincent Corva, took half a step forward.
“Boss?” Vincent called, his hand resting instinctively near his left armpit. “What is it? Is there a problem with the Higgins girl?”
Dominic didn’t look back. “Shut your mouth, Vincent.”
The command wasn’t loud, but it cut through the cavernous church like a straight razor across silk. Vincent froze.
Dominic’s thumb, trembling with an impossible gentleness, traced the rough edge of the midnight-blue silk ribbon knotted around Clara’s rusted leg brace. “This silk,” he murmured, his dark eyes locked on the crude bow. “It was the lining of Sophia’s overcoat. The cashmere coat I bought her for her thirtieth birthday. She was wearing it the night the car went off the pier into the Calumet River.”
A collective intake of breath rustled through the front pews. Everyone in Chicago knew about Sophia Castiglione. Eight months ago, Dominic’s younger sister—the only innocent thing left in his bloodline—had been ambushed on the Skyway. Her town car had been riddled with armor-piercing rounds before plunging forty feet into black, icy water. Divers had pulled her body out three days later.
Her six-year-old son, Leo, had never been found. The police assumed the current had swept his small body into the lake. Dominic had spent seven million dollars dredging the river basin from the harbor to the Indiana border, pulling up old rust, drowned cars, and ghosts—but never his nephew.
“He wasn’t in the car,” Clara whispered. Tears spilled over her lower eyelids, carving hot lines through the heavy bridal powder on her cheeks. “The boy. Leo. He said his mama pushed him through the shattered back window before the water filled the roof. He said she told him to run along the train tracks and never stop until he found a place with a neon sign that didn't flicker.”
Dominic stood up.
He didn’t rise gracefully; he rose like an ancient, vengeful monolith emerging from stone. At six-foot-three, he towered over Clara, his chest heaving under his pleated tuxedo shirt. He looked toward Tommy Higgins, who was standing three paces back, clutching his rental lapels and sweating so profusely that his cheap pomade was dripping into his eyebrows.
“Tommy,” Dominic said. The softness was gone. The voice was dead, flat, and colder than Lake Michigan in January.
Tommy dropped to his knees right there on the aisle runner. “Dominic—Mr. Castiglione—I swear to God, I didn’t know! I didn’t know about any boy! I swear on our mother’s grave, I just owed the juice to Sal! I took the loan to pay for Clara’s surgery after she got hit in Gary!”
“You told me,” Dominic said, stepping slowly toward the trembling brother, each boot heel landing with the finality of a gavel, “that your sister caught a stray bullet during a convenience store robbery on 5th Avenue.”
“That’s what she told me!” Tommy shrieked, his voice climbing into a terrified falsetto. “Clara, tell him! You told me it was a corner store!”
Clara didn’t look at Tommy. She couldn’t. The memory of that night was burning behind her eyes, hotter than the lead that had shattered the head of her fibula.
“I lied to Tommy,” Clara said, her voice steadying as the adrenaline burned away her faintness. “Because Tommy talks. Tommy owes money to bookies on Taylor Street, to loan sharks in Bridgeport, to anyone with five grand and a baseball bat. If I told Tommy who was hunting that little boy, Tommy would have sold the boy to pay off his tab before sunrise.”
A murmur of shock rippled through the guests. Several capos exchanged dark, assessing looks.
Dominic didn’t look at his men. He looked only at Clara. He took off his tuxedo jacket, dropped the six-thousand-dollar garment onto the dusty carpet, and rolled his crisp white sleeves up over forearms scarred by shrapnel and street wars.
Then, before the priest could cross himself, before Vincent could object, and before Clara could gasp, Dominic scooped her up.
One powerful arm hooked beneath her knees, lifting the wounded leg with surgical care, while the other braced her spine against his chest. Her ivory silk train spilled over his arm like falling snow, pooling on the floor, stained at the hem with dark, oxidized crimson.
“The wedding is over,” Dominic announced to the ceiling of St. Jude’s. His voice echoed off the gilded arches, silencing the organist who had just touched the keys in hesitation. “Clear the vestibule. Vincent—bring the surgeon to the estate. If Dr. Marino isn't in Lake Forest within twenty minutes, I will take his hands.”
“Dominic,” Vincent warned, stepping directly into their path at the back of the nave, his expression taut with syndicate politics. “The Donati family is sitting in the fourth row. The Lucchese underboss flew in from New York. You can’t just walk out of your own wedding with a Higgins girl in your arms without an explanation. It looks like weakness.”
Dominic didn’t break his stride. He stopped an inch from Vincent’s face, his eyes twin coals of black volcanic glass.
“Vincent,” Dominic whispered, “if you do not move out of that doorway in three seconds, my sister’s ghost won’t be the only one haunting this church.”
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Vincent swallowed hard, looked at the blood dripping from Clara’s white satin slipper onto the stone floor, and stepped aside.
***
