Chapter 4 - The Confession in the Dark
Forty-eight minutes later, the restaurant had been entirely cleared by local authorities on Dominic’s payroll. The flashing red and blue lights of police cruisers painted the rainy Chicago streets outside, but inside Aurelia, the atmosphere was dead silent.
Julian Sterling, bound tightly to a steel chair in the private wine cellar downstairs, stared up at Dominic with bleeding, defiant eyes.
I stood near the cellar door, holding Audrey’s small, trembling hand. The little girl refused to let go of me, as if letting go meant the nightmare would return.
Dominic stood over Julian, wiping a smear of blood off his knuckle with a silk handkerchief.
"The federal accounts," Dominic said quietly. "The missing offshore funds from the shipping lanes. You didn't lose them in a bad market, did you?"
Julian coughed, spitting a glob of blood onto the vintage wine racks. "Go to hell, Dominic."
"You burned my house," Dominic continued, his voice dropping into a register so cold it felt inhuman. "You murdered the mother of my child. And you framed the North Side to start a war that cost two hundred men their lives."
"They deserved to die!" Julian laughed maniacally. "You were weak! You gave me no choice!"
Dominic didn't yell. He didn't lose his temper. He simply nodded to his head of security.
"Take him to the harbor facility," Dominic ordered. "Let the fishes audit his accounts."
As the guards dragged Julian screaming into the service elevator, the heavy steel door closed, sealing his fate.
Dominic turned around slowly. The rage in his eyes was gone, replaced by something heavier, something deeply fractured and vulnerable. He walked across the wine cellar floor and stopped a foot away from us.
He looked down at his daughter, then up at me.
"You're Kenneth Mercer's daughter," Dominic said, not as an accusation, but as a realization.
My breath caught. I braced myself for him to order his men to turn their weapons on me next. The Mercer family had been bitter rivals to the Vales for a generation.
"My father was Kenneth Mercer," I admitted, my voice steady despite my racing heart. "He died three years ago, broke and forgotten, after breaking away from the syndicate. I'm just a waitress trying to pay rent in Indiana, Mr. Vale. I didn't ask to be pulled into this."
Dominic stared at me for a long, agonizing moment. Then, slowly, he knelt down until he was eye-level with Audrey.
Are you okay, little bird? Dominic signed clumsily with his large, unaccustomed hands, his expression softening into a look of pure paternal devotion.
Audrey nodded. She looked at me, then back at her father, and her fingers moved with a hesitant grace.
May you like
She speaks my words, Daddy. She saved us.
Dominic looked up at me, the harsh, unforgiving king of Chicago’s underworld looking like a man who had just been granted a second chance at life.
