Chapter 3 - The Sanctuary of Iron and Ash
The drive to Lake Forest took twenty-two minutes in Dominic’s armored Mercedes-Maybach.
Clara lay across the buttery leather of the rear bench, her head pillowed on Dominic’s folded cashmere jacket. Her breathing was shallow. Every bump on the Edens Expressway sent a white-hot spear of agony through the back of her left knee. The crude aluminum brace Tommy had bought from an unlicensed medical supply liquidator had warped, the sharp edge of the top hinge digging directly into the open, infected tear of her exit wound.
Dominic sat on the floorboard beside her. He hadn't sat on the seat. The most feared kingpin in northern Illinois sat on the carpeted floor of his own limousine so he could hold her right hand in both of his, checking her pulse with his thumb every thirty seconds.
“Stay with me, Clara,” he kept saying, his thumb rubbing the fragile skin over her wrist bone. “Look at the roof lights. Count the stars.”
The headliner of the Maybach was embedded with fiber-optic lights mimicking the night sky. Clara stared at them through a haze of fever sweat. “There are... eighty-four,” she mumbled.
“Keep counting,” he commanded softly. “When we get home, you tell me the rest.”
The iron gates of the Castiglione estate swung open like the jaws of a fortress. Set on forty acres of dense oak woods overlooking the bluffs of Lake Michigan, the house was a sprawling compound of gray limestone, bullet-resistant glass, and razor wire hidden inside manicured boxwood hedges.
When the car stopped under the heated portico, the doors flew open. Three men in tactical gear flanked the car, but Dominic waved them off with a snarled curse. He lifted Clara himself, carrying her through the towering mahogany doors into a marble-floored foyer that smelled of lemon oil, beeswax, and woodsmoke.
“Upstairs,” Dominic barked at a woman in a black apron who was waiting with clean towels. “Mrs. Gable, prepare the blue suite. The one next to mine.”
“Dr. Marino is already in the private clinic down the hall, Mr. Castiglione,” the housekeeper said quickly, her eyes wide as she saw the blood on Clara’s ivory dress. “He brought two nurses and four units of O-negative.”
“Bring him up to the bedroom,” Dominic ordered. “She’s not going into a basement clinic like a shot dog. She stays where I can see her.”
Ten minutes later, Clara was lying on a four-poster bed draped in Egyptian cotton. The wedding dress had been cut away from her waist down by the surgeon’s heavy trauma shears. Dr. Marino, an elderly man with steady hands and the haunted eyes of a doctor who had spent thirty years stitching up bullet wounds for killers, was inspecting the knee under a high-intensity portable surgical lamp.
Dominic stood at the foot of the bed, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set like an iron vise.
“Talk to me, Marino,” Dominic said. The low frequency of his voice vibrated through the floorboards.
“The entry wound was through the lateral gastrocnemius—the calf,” Marino said, adjusting his magnifying loupes. “The slug was a nine-millimeter hollow point. It didn't hit the main popliteal artery, thank God, or she would have bled out on the floor of that motel in twenty minutes. But it clipped the lateral collateral ligament and chipped the fibular head. Whoever treated this…” Marino grimaced, using forceps to peel away a strip of gauze that had fused with the scab. “…used veterinary staples and sewing thread. Then this ridiculous aluminum frame bent under her weight, forcing the ragged bone fragment into the soft tissue every time she stepped down.”
Dominic turned his head toward the door. “Vincent.”
Vincent stepped into the doorway, holding a leather folder. “Yes, boss?”
“Find the back-alley butcher who put veterinary staples into this woman. Break both his thumbs and revoke his license to breathe.”
“Wait,” Clara gasped from the pillows.
Dominic was beside her in a fraction of a second. He leaned over the bed, his broad hand coming up to hover near her cheek before he hesitated, not wanting to frighten her. “What is it, little bird?”
“Don’t... don’t hurt him,” Clara breathed, her forehead glistening with sweat. “His name is Old Doc Miller. He runs an animal shelter in South Bend. He didn't want to do it. Tommy held a gun to his head. The old man cried while he stitched me. He gave me his own antibiotics... the ones meant for horses. If it wasn't for him, the gangrene would have taken my leg two weeks ago.”
Dominic looked into Clara’s pale hazel eyes. He saw the bone-deep exhaustion, the terror, but beneath it all, an immovable, stubborn core of decency that had survived Tommy Higgins’s greed and the Chicago underworld’s filth.
Dominic looked at Vincent. “Leave the vet alone. Send him fifty thousand dollars in cash and a crate of single malt. Tell him it’s from the Castiglione family for services rendered.”
Vincent blinked, surprised, then nodded. “Yes, boss.”
Dr. Marino drew up a syringe of clear liquid. “Miss Higgins, I’m going to administer a regional nerve block and a heavy sedative. I need to debride the necrotic tissue, remove the broken staples, and realign the ligament. When you wake up, the brace will be gone, replaced with a proper surgical stabilizer. You won't feel anything in ten seconds.”
Clara felt the cold swipe of alcohol on her upper thigh. As the chemical cold began to creep through her veins, her fingers twitched on the silk duvet.
“Dominic,” she slurred, her eyelids dropping like lead weights.
He leaned down until his lips were inches from her ear. “I’m right here, Clara.”
“The boy... Leo...”
“Where is he, Clara? Tell me where you left him.”
“Not Gary...” she whispered, her voice drifting into the gray fog of the sedative. “Not Chicago... Sister Beatrice... Our Lady of Sorrows... in Michigan City. Hidden in the root cellar... behind the winter potatoes... Tell him... tell him his ladybug is coming...”
Then she went limp.
Dominic stayed bent over her for three long beats, listening to the steady, rhythmic hiss of her breath. He reached out and carefully, reverently, picked up the midnight-blue silk ribbon that Marino had cut from the twisted metal brace.
He held it to his nose. It smelled of cheap soap, copper blood, and faint, sweet lavender—Sophia’s perfume, preserved across eight months of hell.
Dominic walked out onto the second-floor gallery. Vincent was waiting, flanked by four senior lieutenants.
“Vincent,” Dominic said, his voice dropping into the terrifying register of a king preparing for slaughter.
“Boss?”
“Take six cars to Michigan City. Find Our Lady of Sorrows. Ask for Sister Beatrice. If anyone tries to stop you, level the block. If my nephew has a scratch on his body, I will burn Indiana to the bedrock. Bring him home in a velvet box if you have to, but bring him alive.”
“And Tommy Higgins?” Vincent asked cautiously. “He’s downstairs in the holding cellar. He’s weeping into his cuffs, claiming he was set up.”
Dominic looked down at the bloodstains on his white shirt cuffs.
May you like
“Keep Tommy alive,” Dominic said. “Give him water. Give him bread. And let him sit in the dark and think about what I do to men who try to sell me their sisters to pay for their own cowardice.”
***
