Chapter 5 - Dawn Over Edison Park
The digital clock on the dashboard of Adrian’s customized Mercedes Maybach glowed 3:45 a.m. as the heavy sedan rolled quietly down the sleepy, tree-lined residential streets of Edison Park on the far northwest side of Chicago.
The neighborhood was entirely asleep. Small brick bungalows sat shrouded in darkness, their front lawns untouched by the violent underworld politics playing out down on the Gold Coast.
The Maybach pulled smoothly to the curb in front of a modest, single-story home with a white picket fence and a wooden tricycle resting near the porch steps. A warm, yellow light burned steadily inside the front window.
Samuel Reed sat at his old laminate kitchen table, wearing a faded plaid bathrobe over his pajamas, his round reading glasses dangling from their beaded cord around his neck. He was hunched over an open ledger book, a cup of lukewarm tea beside him, painstakingly balancing household utility bills by hand because he still refused to trust online banking autopay.
Adrian and Mara sat in the back of the parked car, watching him through the tinted window.
“You’re not going to tell him what nearly happened tonight, are you?” Mara asked softly, turning her head to look at Adrian.
Adrian rested his elbow against the center console, gazing out at the humble bungalow where his surrogate father was quietly working away. “No,” Adrian said quietly, his voice carrying a rare, profound gentleness. “Samuel has lived an honest life. He doesn’t need to know that monsters exist just outside his front door. That’s why we built the walls high, Mara—so people like him never have to see the blood on our hands.”
Mara smiled, reaching across the leather seat to interlock her fingers with his. Her hand, which had struck Conrad Rourke so decisively just hours earlier, felt warm and steady resting against his palm.
“You handled that back at Le Cygne like a true mob boss,” she teased softly.
Adrian turned his head, his winter-ice eyes softening as he looked down at her. “I handled it like a man who realized he was about to lose the only person in the world smart enough to keep him from destroying himself.”
He leaned over the console, pressing a slow, deliberate kiss against her lips—free of the tension of the boardroom, free of the paranoia of his empire, clean and true.
May you like
Inside the bright kitchen window of the bungalow, Samuel Reed suddenly paused his writing. He looked up, peering through the glass toward the darkened curb where the luxury sedan sat idling in the shadows. For a fleeting second, the old man squinted into the night, as if he could sense the two figures watching over him. Then, he offered a gentle, tired smile, shook his head, and went back to balancing his ledger.
Adrian shifted the Maybach smoothly into gear, the powerful engine humming a quiet, invisible purr as they pulled away from the curb and vanished into the Chicago dawn.
