Chapter 1 - The Secret Behind the Porcelain
The blood on Dante Moretti's cuff was still tacky when he pushed open the door of his private bathroom and heard a whisper come out of the dark behind the toilet. He was thirty-five years old. He ran the north side of Chicago. He had not been surprised by anything in eleven years. The whisper surprised him. A small blonde head rose over the white porcelain — a plastic magnifying glass swinging on a shoelace around her neck, a deerstalker hat two sizes too big sliding over one ear — and a five-year-old girl put her finger to her lips and told him to be quiet, because she was spying on a bad guy. He almost laughed. Then she said a name. And Dante Moretti stopped breathing.
The blood under Dante Moretti's left cuff had gone tacky by the time he climbed the marble stairs. He noticed it the way he noticed everything — without looking at it. A dark crescent above the cufflink, drying to the color of old coffee. The meeting with the Vitelli family had ended an hour early, and it had ended early for exactly one reason: he had stood up in the middle of a sentence and walked out before someone put a bullet through the window.
His driver had taken the long route home. The rain over Chicago had turned the city into a sheet of broken glass, and every red light on Ashland had lasted a small eternity. What Dante wanted was silence. Hot water. The single malt waiting on the shelf above the sink.
He did not want a child.
He stopped in the doorway with his hand still on the brass handle. The marble floor under his wet shoes held the low amber light like a held breath. Rain pressed softly against the frosted window above the tub. Steady. Patient.
Then a small blonde head rose from behind the toilet.
"Shh."
Dante did not move.
"Shh," she said again, more urgently. "You're going to scare him away."
She wore a plastic deerstalker hat two sizes too big, tipped sideways over her left ear. A plastic magnifying glass hung from a shoelace around her neck. Her brown eyes were enormous above pink cheeks, and her finger was pressed to her lips with the solemnity of a general.
Dante lowered his hand from the door. "Who," he said quietly, "are you scaring away, little girl?"
"A bad guy." She whispered it the way you whisper a thing too dangerous to say at full volume. "A very bad one. I've been watching him for three days."
She held up three fingers. Then four. Then she corrected herself and held up three again.
Dante stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him. He crossed the marble slowly, set his car keys on the counter without a sound, and turned to face the small figure crouched behind the base of the toilet.
He knew her face. He had seen it twice in nine months, both times at the far end of the kitchen when he had come down for coffee at an unusual hour. The housekeeper's daughter. Elena's little girl. Sophie — if his memory was correct, and his memory was always correct.
"Sophie."
Her eyes widened. "You know my name."
"I know everyone's name in this house." He crouched down, slow and careful, until his face was level with hers. His knee cracked against the cold marble. "Even the bad guys."
He almost smiled. It was a small, dry movement at one corner of his mouth, gone before she could catch it. "Tell me about this bad guy," he said.
Sophie leaned closer. The magnifying glass swung against her chest. She looked left, then right, then up at the ceiling — as if the walls might be listening.
Dante waited. Rain tapped the window. Somewhere two floors below, his men were sweeping the ground floor for the second time that night. He could hear the faint murmur of boots on hardwood, a radio clicking twice. In the house of Dante Moretti, nothing moved without being observed.
Nothing, apparently, except a five-year-old girl behind a toilet.
"Promise you won't laugh," she whispered.
"I promise."
She leaned closer still. Her breath smelled like warm milk. "It's your girlfriend."
Dante did not laugh. The room seemed to expand and contract in a single instant. He kept his face completely still, carved from cold stone, but his pulse surged into his throat. His girlfriend was Julianna Vance, the polished, blue-eyed daughter of a wealthy logistics magnate. They had been together for fourteen months. She attended galas on his arm, slept in his master suite down the hall, and knew nothing of his empire’s darker corridors. Or so he had believed.
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"Julianna?" Dante’s voice was barely a rumble.
Sophie nodded so hard the giant plastic hat slipped over her eyebrows. She pushed it back up with a sticky thumb. "She has two phones, Mr. Dante. The gold shiny one, and a tiny ugly black one that lives inside her pink makeup bag. She talks to a man named Uncle Marco when you go away. And Uncle Marco doesn't sound like an uncle at all."
