Chapter 1 - The Weight of One Hundred and Sixty Dollars
The pharmacist looked from the brown paper bag to Marco’s face, taking in the expensive wool coat, the dark, unblinking eyes, and the quiet, absolute authority that radiated from him like heat off asphalt.
“You’re not family,” the pharmacist said, though it wasn't a question.
“I’m the man paying for it,” Marco replied, sliding a black, unembossed card across the glass. “Charge the medication. Charge the consultation. Charge whatever else is on the shelf that keeps an eight-year-old boy from suffocating in his bed tonight.”
The transaction cleared in silence.
Marco took the bag, stepped back out into the sharp autumn air, and got back into his black sedan. The cracked iPhone sat on the passenger seat, its blue frayed case catching the gray light of the dashboard. He picked it up, turned it over in his hand, and stared at the home screen wallpaper that flickered briefly before going dark: a smiling little boy with a gap-toothed grin and messy brown hair sitting on a swing.
Leo, the name tag on the pawn shop slip had read. Leo Reeves.
Marco checked the address again. Callaway Street. A tired, rusted tenement block four districts over, where the paint peeled from the clapboards and the landlords squeezed every last drop of blood from tenants who couldn't fight back.
He drove slowly, letting the city blur past him.
For eleven years, Marco Vitelli had built his reputation on precision. He didn't do charity. He didn't do mercy. In the syndicate, mercy was a crack in the foundation—a weakness that rivals could wedge an iron crowbar into. A man who handed out favors became a target; a man who bled for strangers invited the wolves.
So why was he driving toward Callaway Street with three medical-grade inhalers and a pawned iPhone?
Because he remembered a freezing night in Chicago twenty-two years ago. He remembered a kitchen that smelled of stale cabbage and bleach. He remembered his mother kneeling over his older brother, pressing a rolled-up towel to his chest while she wept because they couldn't afford the nebulizer the doctor had prescribed.
His brother had survived. His mother hadn't.
And Marco had sworn an oath on a blood-slicked floor that no matter how high he climbed, no matter how many men feared his name, he would never forget the suffocating sound of a child struggling for air.
He parked three doors down from Jenny Reeves’s building.
The front door of the tenement hung crooked on a broken hinge. A thin wedge of light cut across the cracked concrete steps. As Marco stepped out of the car, clutching the brown paper bag and the phone, a raised, angry voice cut through the damp evening air from the second-floor landing.
“I don't give a damn about your kid’s asthma, Mrs. Reeves!”
Marco stopped dead in his tracks.
“You’ve missed three weeks,” a harsh, gravelly voice echoed down the stairwell. “Rent was due on the first. Today is the fifteenth. If the four hundred dollars isn't in my hand in ten minutes, your boxes go on the curb, and I change the locks. Do you hear me? On the curb!”
May you like
Marco’s grip on the paper bag tightened. The leather of his gloves creaked.
He looked up toward the stairwell, his eyes turning as cold and dark as a winter midnight.
