Chapter 4 - THE BASEMENT AT ST. JUDE’S
"He lied to us!" I gasped, holding up the airport printout as Dr. Russo pressed an oxygen mask over Marcus's gray face. "His wife got on a flight three hours ago!"
Marcus's eyes flew open above the clear plastic mask, raw panic spiking on the heart monitor beside him.
He grabbed Dominic's wrist with a grip that had nothing to do with a dying villain and everything to do with a terrified man.
"Martha wasn't supposed to fly out until midnight," Marcus choked out through the mask, pulling it aside. "Romano told me if I kept Emma inside the mansion during dinner so she couldn't call the police, he'd let Martha and the boy go to Phoenix."
"You traded my son to Tommy Romano?" I screamed, lunging forward before Daniel caught my shoulders.
"No!" Marcus coughed, blood flecking his lips. "I hid the boy at St. Jude's with Father Matteo! Romano doesn't know about the church—he thought Martha had him at our house in Oak Lawn! If Martha's on that plane early, it means Romano found out I double-crossed him!"
Dominic didn't waste another breath on Marcus.
"Daniel, bring the SUV around to the front steps," Dominic ordered, already stripping off his cufflinks and reaching into the wall safe behind his desk for a matte-black nine-millimeter pistol. "Dr. Russo, keep him alive. If that boy has a single scratch on him, I want Marcus healthy enough to answer for it."
"I'm coming," I said, limping toward the door.
"Your ankle has four stitches, Emma," Dominic said, holstering the gun under his arm and grabbing a heavy cashmere coat from the hall tree.
"And Leo has asthma and doesn't know you!" I shot back, my chin lifting even as tears burned my throat. "If strangers run into a dark church basement with guns, he'll hide and he'll stop breathing. You need me."
Dominic looked at me for one second—and in that second, I saw the same stubborn Bellini fire my mother used to have reflected in his eyes.
Instead of arguing, he wrapped the oversized cashmere coat around my shoulders, lifted me straight off my feet into his arms, and carried me down the marble front steps to the idling black Escalade.
Twelve minutes later, we tore through the wet streets near Midway Airport, the tires hissing against the asphalt as rain began to fall.
St. Jude's was an old red-brick church wedged between a row of brick bungalows and a train viaduct.
All the stained-glass windows were dark except for a faint amber glow coming from the storm cellar doors along the alley.
Before Daniel could even put the SUV in park, I saw a dark blue sedan sitting under the unlit streetlamp half a block away, its exhaust curling into the rain.
"Romano's car?" I whispered, my hand gripping the leather headrest in front of me.
"No," Daniel said, scanning the license plate through the rain. "That's a rental. Engine's cold."
Dominic stepped out into the alley, motioning for two of his guards from the trailing car to flank the side entrance while he kept me right behind his shoulder.
The heavy wooden door at the bottom of the concrete steps was slightly ajar.
Inside, the church basement smelled of damp concrete, old hymnals, and beeswax candles.
Folded metal chairs lined the walls of a small Sunday school room.
In the corner, beside an electric space heater, an elderly priest in a black cassock was sitting on the floor with his hands tied behind a radiator pipe.
A gag had been pulled down around his neck, and a bruise was purpling across his cheekbone.
"Father Matteo!" Dominic crossed the room in three strides, pulling a pocketknife to slice through the plastic zip-ties on the old man's wrists.
My eyes darted frantically around the empty room.
There was a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on a paper plate, a coloring book, and a small yellow raincoat draped over a chair.
My knees hit the cold linoleum.
"Leo?" My voice cracked against the low ceiling. "Leo, baby, it's Mommy!"
"He's not gone, child," Father Matteo rasped, rubbing his wrists and pointing a shaking finger toward the narrow double doors of the sacristy storage closet behind the altar supplies. "When the car pulled into the alley twenty minutes ago, I put him in the vestment chest and locked the outer latch."
I scrambled up, ignoring the warm blood soaking through my fresh bandage as I limped to the storage doors and threw back the iron bolt.
Inside, buried under a pile of purple Lenten altar cloths inside an open cedar box, two huge brown eyes blinked up at me.
"Mommy?"
Leo's lower lip trembled, and he held up his arms.
I reached in and pulled his warm, solid forty-pound body against my chest, burying my face in his messy curls and breathing in his familiar scent of baby shampoo and crayons.
"I'm here, baby. I'm right here," I sobbed, kissing his cheeks over and over. "Did anyone hurt you?"
"No," Leo whispered against my neck, his little fingers clutching the collar of Dominic's huge cashmere coat. "I was real quiet like Father Matteo said. Even when the lady was yelling."
I froze, pulling back just enough to look at his face.
"The lady?" I looked back at Father Matteo, whom Dominic was helping into a chair. "I thought Tommy Romano's men came here."
Father Matteo shook his head slowly, wiping a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief Dominic handed him.
"It wasn't Romano's men who hit me with a tire iron," the old priest said, looking at me with deep sorrow. "It was a young woman with blonde streaks in her hair. She kept screaming that Marcus had cheated her out of her share, and she searched the boy's raincoat pockets before she heard sirens on Archer Avenue and ran."
My blood turned to ice.
Blonde streaks in her hair.
My half-sister, Clara.
"Clara wasn't kidnapped by Romano," I whispered, the truth crashing over me like freezing lake water. "She wasn't being held hostage at all."
Dominic walked over and picked up Leo's yellow raincoat from the metal chair.
The right pocket had been ripped half off, the lining turned inside out.
"She wasn't looking for the boy," Dominic said quietly, his dark eyes meeting mine over the top of Leo's head. "She left the boy right where he was once she searched this coat."
I reached into the left inside lining of the raincoat—the hidden little Velcro pouch I had sewn in myself last winter to hold Leo's spare asthma inhaler.
May you like
The inhaler was still there.
Wrapped around the plastic canister with a rubber band was a brass safe-deposit key from First Midwest Bank—and a folded pawnshop receipt signed not by Clara, and not by Marcus Hale, but by Dr. Russo.
