He's her enemy. Her obsession. And the only man who has the power to destroy her.
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My name is Frank Monroe, and I am the most dangerous woman in Chicago. Not because I kill, but because I make it legal. I'm the lawyer the Irish mob calls when...
"Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?"
- Mark Lawrence
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The silence in the hospital room was a living thing.
It was the hush between heartbeats, the held breath before a fall. It was thick with the scent of antiseptic and a hope that felt desperately thin. It coated the back of my throat, a cheap perfume for the dying.
And the beeping... that relentless, monotonous beep-beep-beep from the machine keeping time with his heart. It was the soundtrack to a nightmare, a digital metronome counting down the seconds until either a miracle or a coffin.
Salvatore Lombardi lay on the white bed, his face pale as marble. A statue of a saint in a place with no miracles. His hand in mine was cool, not yet cold, but holding the memory of warmth like a fading echo.
My own mind was a riot of quiet noise. A single question echoing on a loop, each repetition carving a deeper groove: Why? Why did he step into the path of the bullet? He saw the attacker level his weapon on me, and chose to shield me with his own body. A beautiful, terrible, selfless equation I could never solve.
I couldn't breathe in here. The guilt was a physical weight, a fat man sitting on my chest, laughing at each of Salvatore's weak breaths. I had to leave. I gently laid his hand back on the sheet, left a piece of my soul in that chair by his bed, and walked out into the fluorescent buzz of the hallway.
And there she was. Serafina. Curled into a chair like a discarded doll. Her whole world had been blown apart, and the shrapnel was still settling. I was the bomb. I knew it. She knew it. The whole damned hospital probably knew it.
I dropped into the seat next to her. The vinyl sighed under my weight. My throat was a desert. Every word I tried to form just turned to dust.
A lifetime passed. Maybe two.
"I'm sorry," I croaked. It was a pathetic sound. "He's in there because of me."
Her head whipped up, her eyes, red-raw from crying, weren't just filled with grief. They were a furnace of pure, focused fury.
"You," she hissed, the word dripping with a venom I had earned a thousand times over. "I never understood it. Not for a single second. Why my father gave a solitary damn about you. Why he talked about you like you were some long-lost daughter. And now... now I get it. He saw a project. A broken thing to fix. And that need to fix broken things... that's what put him in that room. If you had never come into our lives, he would be home. He would be safe. He would be alive."
Each word was a nail, and she was hammering them right into the center of my chest. She wasn't wrong. She was so profoundly right it was a physical ache.
"I'm sorry," I whispered again. A useless, empty prayer. I couldn't sit there another second. I stood and walked away, the hot, shameful tears I had been choking back finally erupting.
