Chapter 3 - The Broken Ledger
Dominic did not move. Her fingers lingered against his silk robe for two seconds before she pulled her hand back and tucked it into her pocket.
"Marco was twenty-two," Dominic said, his mind moving through the long, dark corridors of family history with cold precision. "He was working the docks under my brother Julian. He didn't have access to the shipping manifests."
"He had access to Julian’s desk," Nora said. "My father kept a second ledger. He wasn't stupid, Mr. Reyes. He knew that men like your father didn't let yardmasters retire with a pension. He wrote down every license plate, every time stamp, every voice he heard behind the freight office. When Marco came to our house after the shooting, he was looking for that book."
"Did he find it?"
"If he had found it," Nora said flatly, "I wouldn't be standing here talking to a man who smells like hospital disinfectant and expensive cigars. I would be buried under the gravel in East Chicago like my father."
Dominic stepped closer to her, closing the remaining distance until the front of his robe brushed her cotton shirt. He was six foot two, broad-shouldered despite his weight loss from the gunshot wound, but she did not back up an inch. She stood her ground, her heavy chest rising and falling in steady, rhythmic breaths.
"Where is the book, Nora?"
"It’s in a safety deposit box at a union bank on Blue Island Avenue," she said. "The key is hidden inside the frame of a painting of the Virgin Mary in my sister’s room at the hospital."
"And what do you want?" Dominic asked. "Money? Your sister’s medical bills paid? Safe passage out of the state?"
Nora let out a single, short laugh—a dry, bitter sound that held zero humor.
"My sister has stage-three leukemia, Mr. Reyes. The hospital threatens to move her to a county ward every third Monday because her insurance capped out in July. I need eighty-four thousand dollars by the end of the month just to keep her in the experimental trial."
"That’s nothing," Dominic said immediately. "I can have eighty-four thousand in cash in your hands before sunrise."
"I don't want your cash," she snarled softly, her brown eyes flashing with a dark, dangerous fire that startled him. "If I take your cash, Marco finds out. He’s been watching my sister’s hospital room since August. Every time a payment goes through, his people check the routing number. He’s waiting for me to pull that ledger out so he can finish what he started twelve years ago."
She leaned in closer, her face inches from his. He could see the dark golden specks in her brown irises, the small, fine lines around her mouth earned through years of stress and silence.
"I don't want your money, Dominic," she whispered, using his first name for the first time. "I want Marco Reyes dead. I want his name stripped off the union boards. I want his children to know that he was a thief and a coward who sold his own family for ninety thousand dollars and a line of cocaine in a South Side club."
Dominic stared at her.
In his world, women were usually quiet, decorative, or terrified. They were daughters offered for territorial alliances, wives who ignored the late-night phone calls, or mistresses paid off with high-rise condos along the lake.
Nora Castillo was none of these things. She was a weapon that had been forged in the dirty water of the Pilsen railyards, aged for twelve years in small apartments and overnight shift rosters, and delivered directly to his bedside by the very fate he had spent his life trying to control.
"Marco is upstairs," Dominic said quietly. "He brought three men from the south side. They're sitting in my lower lounge drinking my scotch."
Nora’s eyes flicked toward the door. "Does Callahan know?"
"Callahan knows what I tell him," Dominic said. "No more, no less."
"Then you're a fool," she said flatly.
Dominic’s eyebrow twitched. "Excuse me?"
"Callahan’s second-in-command—the guy with the broken nose and the tattoo of the anchor on his wrist?" Nora said, leaning her shoulder against the wall. "He was at the hospital on Thursday. He wasn't guarding your perimeter, Dominic. He was standing by the nurses' station talking to Marco’s chief driver."
Dominic felt a sudden, icy stillness settle over his chest, colder than the October lake wind.
"Vince?" he whispered.
"Vince," she confirmed. "I know his face. He was sixteen when he worked the gate at the 41st Street yard. He was the one who unlocked the padlock the night my father was hit."
Dominic closed his eyes for three long seconds. The world he had built—the fortress on the lake, the seven security men, the armored cars, the doctors paid in cold cash—was not a shield. It was a cage, and the lock was held by men he had known since he was a boy.
When he opened his eyes, the gray was gone, replaced by a dark, terrible clarity.
"Nora," he said softly.
"What?"
"Can you drive a manual transmission?"
She looked at him as if he had asked her if she knew how to breathe. "I drove a three-ton flatbed for a laundry supply house for four years, Mr. Reyes. I can drive anything with wheels."
"Good," Dominic said. He reached into his robe, pulled out a heavy silver key on a thin steel wire, and placed it in her palm. "Go to the third garage behind the boathouse. The dark green Land Cruiser. Don't start the engine. Unlock the side door, put this key into the ignition override under the dashboard, and wait for my call."
Nora looked down at the silver key, then back up at his face. "What are you going to do?"
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Dominic straightened his back, enduring the sharp bite of pain in his shoulder without a flinch.
"I’m going to go pay my cousin for the scotch," he said.
