Chapter 5 - A BULLET THROUGH THE GLASS
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Moving Emma into the east wing of the estate took less than an hour.
She owned so little it was sickening. Two duffel bags contained her entire life: four worn cotton sweaters, three pairs of jeans, a handful of paperbacks with broken spines, and a cardboard shoebox filled with black-and-white family photographs.
When Mrs. Gable showed her to the suite—a bedroom with vaulted ceilings, a king-sized four-poster bed, an Italian marble bathroom, and French doors leading out to a private balcony overlooking the lake—Emma had stood in the center of the Persian rug, clutching her bags like a refugee who had stumbled into a royal court by accident.
"She cried for twenty minutes after I closed the door," Luke told me that afternoon, leaning against the doorframe of my study. He had an unlit cigar between his teeth and a bandage across his left temple.
"Did she unpack?" I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the financial spreadsheets on my monitors.
"Eventually," Luke replied. He walked over, pulling a chair around and dropping into it. "The streets are talking, Danny. Sal Moretti is going crazy. He lost four of his best operators last night, and the word from the coroner's office is that the boss himself took out two of them from the second-floor gallery."
A cold, grim satisfaction settled in my chest. "Good. Let them remember that a wolf with broken legs can still tear out a throat."
"That's fine for the streets," Luke said, his voice dropping an octave. "The problem is the syndicate board. Senator Hayes called my burner phone twenty minutes ago. He's terrified. He says if the violence spills onto Lake Shore Drive again, the federal task force is going to step in. Hayes wants a sit-down. Tomorrow night. At the Grand Regal Hotel downtown."
I stopped typing.
A sit-down. In public.
For two years, I had refused to leave this house. The thought of being wheeled into a public ballroom or a hotel suite, surrounded by politicians and rival bosses who had known me when I walked like an emperor, made something inside my stomach turn cold and rotten. They would look at the wheels. They would measure my weakness. They would calculate how many months of life I had left before they could carve up my territory like a Sunday roast.
"Tell Hayes I don't do sit-downs," I said flatly.
"If you don't go, Danny, they'll assume the rumors are true," Luke insisted, leaning forward, his eyes burning with intense urgency. "They'll think you're dying. And if the board votes to revoke your territorial charter, we won't be fighting four hitmen in the foyer. We'll be fighting fifty men with automatic rifles burning down every warehouse from here to Gary."
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
The door to the study opened with a soft click.
Emma walked in, carrying a porcelain tray with a bowl of hot chicken soup, two slices of toasted sourdough, and a small glass of fresh apple juice. She had changed into a simple cream-colored knit sweater and dark trousers that Mrs. Gable had purchased for her from the downtown boutiques that morning.
Without the oversized cleaning scrubs, she looked stunning. Her hair was brushed and fell in soft, dark waves around her shoulders. Her face, though still pale, had lost that gray, hollow look of chronic starvation.
"Lunch," she announced, setting the tray down directly on top of the financial reports I was reviewing.
Luke's jaw dropped slightly. Nobody put soup on Daniel Vance's ledgers.
I looked at the soup, then up at her face. "I'm in a meeting, Emma."
"Your meeting doesn't provide twenty-two hundred calories a day," she replied smoothly, pulling the amber medication bottle from her pocket and setting it next to the juice. "Eat the soup while it's hot. The antibiotic needs food, or you'll be vomiting by three o'clock."
Luke looked between the two of us, a slow, dangerous grin spreading across his battered face.
"I'll leave you to your supervisor," Luke muttered, rising from the chair and winking at me. "Tomorrow night, Danny. Eight o'clock. The Grand Regal. I'll have the armored Suburban ready."
He slipped out, closing the door behind him.
I glared at the soup bowl, then picked up the silver spoon. "You're getting entirely too comfortable in this house, Carter."
"I have a contract to protect," she said, leaning against the edge of the desk, crossing her arms over her chest. "My mother has physical therapy at two o'clock today. I called the facility an hour ago. The nurse said she was sitting in a sunny courtyard listening to Mozart."
She looked at me, her eyes shining with an emotion so deep and profound it knocked the breath out of my lungs.
"You gave her back her dignity," Emma said softly. "The least I can do is make sure you don't starve yourself to death out of stubbornness."
I ate the soup in silence. For the first time in months, the food didn't taste like cardboard.
That evening, the temperature plummeted. A bitter gale whipped off Lake Michigan, coating the heavy plate-glass windows of the master bedroom in intricate webs of frost.
I sat near the glass, looking out over the churning black water.
Emma walked in around nine o'clock, carrying a heavy leather-bound volume of history from the library. Without asking, she sat on the velvet ottoman near my chair, opened the book, and began to read aloud in that low, melodic voice that seemed to soothe the frayed edges of my nervous system.
For two hours, the room was filled only with the sound of her voice and the distant roar of the lake.
The tension in my neck began to uncoil. My paralyzed legs, usually racked with sharp spasms by late evening, remained quiet, soothed by the sheer calm radiating from her presence.
"Emma," I interrupted softly.
She paused, looking up from the page, her finger marking her place. "Yes?"
"They want me to go downtown tomorrow night. To a public dinner."
She closed the book slowly, sensing the shift in the air. "Are you going?"
"I haven't been seen in public since the shooting," I confessed, the words tasting like lead on my tongue. "The city thinks of me as a myth. Or a corpse. If I go in that chair, they'll look at me with pity. Or contempt."
Emma set the book on the small table and turned her body toward mine. She reached out, resting her hand on the arm of my wheelchair, right next to my fingers.
"Let them look," she said firmly.
"You don't understand the world I live in—"
"I understand bullies, Daniel," she cut in, her brown eyes fierce and unwavering. "I grew up on the South Side. I've seen men with guns, and I've seen men with money. The men who look at you with contempt are only doing it because they're terrified of what you can do without even standing up."
She leaned closer, her breath warm against my cheek.
"You're not broken," she whispered, her voice fierce and full of conviction. "Your legs don't work. That's a physical fact. But the man inside that skull is the most terrifying, brilliant, and protective force I have ever met in my life. You go down there. You sit at the head of that table. And you make them remember who owns this city."
I stared at her, my heart hammering against my ribs with a ferocity that had nothing to do with fear.
In that single, crystalline moment, looking into the eyes of a girl who had scrubbed floors forty-eight hours ago to save her dying mother, I realized I was falling in love with her. It was sudden, violent, and absolute.
I raised my hand, my thumb gently tracing the high curve of her cheekbone. Her skin was warm, soft as silk.
Emma didn't pull away. Her breath hitched, her lips parting slightly as her eyes searched mine.
"Daniel..." she breathed.
*CRACK!*
The four-pane, ballistic-rated glass of the master bedroom window shattered with the deafening roar of a thunderclap.
A high-powered sniper round punched a fist-sized hole through the reinforced laminate, sending deadly shards of heavy glass spraying across the bedroom like shrapnel.
The bullet whistled through the exact space where my head had been half a second earlier, burying itself deep into the mahogany wainscoting behind us with a muffled *thump*.
"Get down!" I roared.
May you like
I lunged out of the wheelchair with my upper body, wrapping my arms around Emma's waist, dragging her off the ottoman and slamming her beneath me onto the thick Persian rug as a second round tore through the shattered window, showering our backs in falling glass.
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