Chapter 6 - Shadows on Lake Shore Drive
By 2:00 AM, the penthouse felt like a command bunker during a siege.
A private medical transport team—vetted personally by Dante through years of trusted, off-the-books operations—had whisked Marco away to a secure clinic in Oak Park. My needle decompression had bought him just enough time. The surgeon had patched his collapsed lung, and Marco was currently handcuffed to a hospital bed under armed guard, heavily sedated, but stable.
Back on the eightieth floor, the shattered glass in the solarium had been covered with reinforced steel plating. The bodies of the hit team had been removed through the freight elevator, leaving only dark, bleached stains on the hardwood floor.
Luca sat behind his massive mahogany desk in the private study.
He was fully dressed now—a charcoal bespoke three-piece suit, crisp white shirt, no tie. The color was fully back in his face, his eyes sharp, cold, and calculating. On the desk in front of him sat three items: my portable glucometer, the altered insulin pen, and a thick leather folder Dante had retrieved from the penthouse safe.
I stood across from him, sipping black tea from a porcelain cup. My scrubs were ruined, stained with Marco’s blood and drywall dust, but I hadn't asked to leave. In this world, you didn't ask for permission to exit until the business was concluded.
“Sit down, Emma,” Luca said.
I sat in the high-backed leather chair opposite him.
“You saved my life twice tonight,” Luca said. His voice was quiet, lacking the theatrical bombast of Hollywood gangsters, which made it ten times more dangerous. “Once with sugar. Once by keeping my idiot brother from choking on his own blood. Why?”
“Because that’s my job,” I replied evenly. “I took an oath. It doesn't come with an exception clause for organized crime figures.”
Luca allowed himself a faint, rare smile. “Most people would have run out the door the second the shooting started.”
“Most people don’t owe eighty-four thousand dollars in medical debt for a family member dying of dementia, Mr. Moretti,” I countered, setting the teacup down. “I need the money. And dead patients don’t pay their bills.”
Luca leaned back in his leather chair, steepling his fingers. “Practical. I like practical people. Ideologues get you killed. Opportunists get you betrayed.”
He tapped the thick leather folder on the desk.
“This was drawn up two weeks ago,” Luca said. “By Dr. Sterling’s private notary. It’s an irrevocable power of attorney, granting Vanessa sole conservatorship over my personal assets and proxy voting rights in the Moretti Logistics Corporation in the event of my ‘medically verified cognitive incapacitation.’”
“She didn't want you dead,” I deduced immediately. “Dead, you trigger the succession protocol. The captains vote. Marco takes the street operations, and the syndicate fractures. But if you’re alive... breathing, drooling, unable to speak in a high-end nursing facility...”
“She controls the checkbook,” Luca finished the sentence. “She signs the corporate leases. She diverts the shipping manifests through the port of Montreal. And behind her, pulling the strings, isn't my brother.”
“Then who?”
Luca slid a black-and-white surveillance photograph across the desk toward me.
It was a grainy telephoto shot taken outside a luxury hotel in Geneva. It showed Vanessa, wearing a white fur coat, laughing as she entered a limousine. Holding the door open for her was an older man with silver hair, impeccable posture, and a cane topped with a carved silver eagle.
“Salvatore Valenti,” Luca said. “The patriarch of the New York syndicate. For five years, we’ve held the Midwest corridor against them. They couldn't break our lines with bullets. So Salvatore sent a gift.”
“Vanessa,” I murmured.
“Three years ago, she appeared at a charity gala in Miami,” Luca said, his voice laced with bitter self-reproach. “Charming. Cultured. Daughter of a disgraced Sicilian banker. She played the part of the devoted lover to perfection. And all along, she was Valenti’s private viper, waiting for the right moment to hollow me out from the inside.”
“And Dr. Sterling was on their payroll,” I added.
“Sterling was a degenerate gambler,” Dante spoke from the corner of the room, arms crossed over his chest. “Owed three million to the Valenti sportsbooks in Atlantic City. They bought him for pennies.”
Luca stood up, walking over to the window that looked out over the frozen expanse of Lake Michigan. The snow had stopped falling, leaving the city below blanketed in an eerie, pristine white.
“Vanessa fled through the service tunnel,” Luca said, staring into the dark glass. “Dante traced her vehicle to a safehouse near the Navy Pier docks. A private yacht—*The Silver Siren*—is registered to a Valenti shell corporation. It’s fueled and scheduled to depart for Canadian waters at sunrise.”
He turned back to face me.
“She thinks I’m still recovering,” Luca whispered. “She thinks the hit team succeeded in crippling our command structure. She thinks Marco is dead and that I’m surrounded by dead guards and shattered glass.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Luca reached into the desk drawer, pulled out a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in brown paper, and tossed it onto the desk in front of me.
“That’s one hundred thousand dollars, Emma. Three times what your agency quoted. Your contract is fulfilled. Dante has a driver waiting downstairs to take you to O’Hare. A private charter will fly you and your mother anywhere in North America before sunrise.”
I looked at the money. It was enough to wipe out my aunt’s memory-care debt completely. It was enough to buy a small house in rural Indiana where nobody knew my name.
Then I looked at the autoinjector still sitting on the desk.
“You’re going to the docks,” I said.
“That is none of your concern,” Luca said coldly.
“Your autonomic nervous system is still fragile, Mr. Moretti,” I said, standing up. “Your glycogen stores are completely depleted. If your adrenaline spikes during a prolonged firefight, your cortisol levels will crash, your blood pressure will bottom out, and you will collapse in the snow before you pull the trigger.”
Luca narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me how to run a war, Nurse Reed?”
May you like
“No,” I replied, picking up my medical bag and slinging it over my shoulder. “I’m telling you that if you want to walk away from that dock alive, you need someone who knows how to keep your heart pumping when the adrenaline runs out.”
***
