Chapter 2 - The Interrogation
The lock clicked on the bedroom doors, sealing me in with the most dangerous man in northern Illinois. Desmond reached over to the motorized control panel mounted to the bedframe, pressing the elevation button with his left thumb. The head of the bed rose smoothly, bringing him upright. Even sitting with paralyzed legs beneath a linen sheet, his broad shoulders and commanding frame seemed to fill every inch of the vaulted room.
"Come here, Nora," he said quietly.
My heart was pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs, but my stubbornness refused to let me cringe against the wall. I walked back toward the edge of the bed, stopping two feet from where he sat.
"Search me if you want," I said, my voice shaking slightly before I forced it steady. "Search my car. Check my phone, check my bank account, run my fingerprints through whatever corrupt FBI agents you have on your payroll. I took this job because you pay three times the union hospital rate and I have forty thousand dollars in student loans. That’s it."
Desmond leaned forward, resting his powerful forearms on his thighs. "My car was parked outside an Italian bakery on Taylor Street on April twelfth. Two pounds of military-grade C4 detonated under the driver's floorboard. My driver died instantly. My lumbar spine was severed at the L1 vertebra. For six months, half the syndicates on the East Coast have been waiting for me to rot in this chair so they can carve up my shipping docks."
"I know what happened to you," I countered, looking straight into his cold eyes. "I’ve seen your surgical scans. I’ve seen the titanium rods holding your spine together. And I’m telling you on my mother’s grave that Tyler Vance didn't do this."
"The money came from his account, Nora."
"Then someone put it there!" I snapped, taking an involuntary step closer, pointing an accusatory finger at his chest. "Tyler is twenty-four years old! If you put a gun in his hand, he’d drop it! Someone set him up, and whoever did it probably figured out that I work for you, which means both of us are walking straight into an ambush!"
Desmond stared at me. The silence stretched between us, thick with lethal potential. Any other mob boss would have had me dragged down to the basement before sunrise. But Desmond was calculating. He had survived twenty years in the Chicago underworld not because he pulled triggers faster than everyone else, but because he saw the angles nobody else noticed.
"You didn't run when Frankie pulled his piece," Desmond murmured, his voice softening just a fraction.
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"I don't run from people who need their medication," I retorted, crossing my arms over my chest. "And you still need that baclofen."
A faint, grim smirk touched the left corner of Desmond's lips. "Call your brother. Put him on speaker."
