Chapter 2 - The Drawing in Crayon
That afternoon, Dante found Lily in the kitchen drawing. She sat on her knees on a stool, crayons spread across the marble, while the rabbit watched from beside the fruit bowl.
“What are you making?” Dante asked.
“A bad man,” she replied.
He stopped. On the paper stood a square-bodied figure colored almost entirely black, with a red slash beneath his chin. Dante picked up the page. “Who is he?”
“The man who talks to Mommy,” Lily said.
“Where?”
“The back door.”
“At the service entrance?”
She nodded. “When it’s dark.”
His voice remained calm. “How many times?”
Lily began counting on her fingers. “Four. Maybe five.”
“What does he say?”
She shrugged. “I don’t hear everything.”
“What do you hear?”
“He tells her to be good.”
Something cold tightened behind Dante’s ribs. “And?”
“He says I sleep really hard.”
Dante stopped breathing for a moment. Children misunderstood things; they confused dreams with memories and turned overheard sentences into monsters beneath beds. But children also noticed details adults dismissed. He crouched beside her. “Lily, what does this man look like?”
She tapped the drawing. “Big.”
“That describes half the men downstairs.”
She thought. “Old.”
“How old?”
“Like...” She squinted. “Older than Mommy.”
Not useful. “What else?”
She touched her chin. “He has a red hurt right here.”
Dante took the picture. “Can I keep this?”
She hesitated. “Okay.”
He folded it carefully and slipped it inside his jacket. That evening he called Julian Carver, the man responsible for security in the building. Julian had worked for Dante for thirteen years, taking a knife in the ribs during an ambush meant for Dante, sleeping outside Dante’s hospital room after the shooting on Mercer Street, and once carrying Dante’s unconscious younger cousin down six flights through a burning warehouse. If Dante had a brother, Julian was as close as he had ever come.
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“I want another camera installed at the rear service entrance,” Dante said.
Julian’s expression barely changed. “Problem?”
