Chapter 2
Only then did I look down and realize Clara’s blood covered my palms.
Behind me, Serena appeared in her hospital gown.
“Who was that?”
Something inside me turned cold.
For a year, I had been addicted to Serena’s attention, her jealousy, her chaos.
Now I could only see myself.
While I held my mistress’s hand over dehydration, my wife had been trapped inside twisted metal.
I pulled out my phone.
“Mateo. Get to Northwestern.”
My voice was shaking.
“Find out who put my wife in this hospital.”
Two hours later, armed men filled the floor while Clara remained in surgery.
Mateo finally approached me.
“Tommy’s dead.”
I stopped breathing.
“He was driving Clara. An armored SUV hit them at nearly seventy miles an hour and fled.”
“Where?”
“The South Side.”
My jaw locked.
Moretti territory.
Lorenzo Moretti controlled that part of Chicago, and he had been looking for a reason to hurt me for years.
But something made no sense.
Clara hated city traffic.
She had no business on the South Side.
I stared at Mateo.
“Why was she there?”
He hesitated.
Then he handed me Clara’s cracked phone.
“There’s something you need to see.”
Mateo did not hand me the phone right away.
That was the first thing I noticed.
For fifteen years, Mateo Ruiz had stood beside me through negotiations, funerals, business expansions, family crises, and more sleepless nights than either of us would ever admit. He was not a man who hesitated.
Yet now he stood beneath the fluorescent lights of Northwestern Memorial Hospital with Clara’s cracked phone resting in his palm as though it weighed twenty pounds.
“What is it?” I asked.
His eyes moved toward the surgery doors.
“Dom, you should probably sit down.”
“I’ve been sitting down for two hours.”
“Then sit down again.”
I stared at him.
He knew better than to speak to me like that.
Normally.
But nothing about that night was normal.
I followed him to a quiet corner near the family waiting area. Serena had returned to her room after finally understanding that I was not going back with her. Two of my men stood at the far end of the corridor. For once, I wished they would leave.
I did not want witnesses to whatever Mateo was about to show me.
He unlocked Clara’s phone.
“Tommy’s sister gave us the passcode,” he said. “Clara had apparently told Tommy to give it to her if there was ever an emergency.”