Chapter 1 - The Woman Beneath the Underpass
Roman Moretti had ordered men killed for less than theft.
So when he saw Clara Bennett slipping food into a cracked plastic container inside his mansion kitchen, he did not feel sympathy.
He felt insulted.
“She has been doing it for weeks,” Lorenzo said beside him in the security room. “Small amounts. Enough to think no one notices.”
Roman studied the monitor.
Clara moved carefully through the kitchen after midnight. Her dark hair had fallen loose around her exhausted face. Her gray maid uniform was wrinkled from a fourteen hour shift.
She ignored a diamond bracelet abandoned beside the sink.
She passed bottles of wine worth more than her yearly salary.
Instead, she packed roast beef, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and bread that the chef had ordered thrown away.
Then she placed a plastic spoon and a bottle of water inside a paper bag.
Lorenzo gave a humorless laugh.
“People like her begin with leftovers. Next month, it will be cash.”
Roman glanced at him.
“People like her?”
“Desperate.”
“Desperate people steal what can save them.”
Lorenzo nodded toward the screen.
“Exactly.”
Roman watched Clara wipe her eyes before closing the container.
There was fear in her movements.
Not the nervous greed of an employee taking what did not belong to her.
The fear of someone who knew arriving too late would have consequences.
“Do not confront her,” Roman said.
Lorenzo frowned.
“You want me to follow her?”
“No.”
Roman reached for his coat.
“I will.”
An hour later, Clara left through the servants’ entrance wearing a coat too thin for Chicago’s winter rain.
She took two buses west.
Roman followed in his black sport utility vehicle, keeping several cars between them. Lorenzo drove while rain battered the windshield and the skyline disappeared behind gray mist.
Clara exited beneath an old railway underpass where concrete pillars divided the street into pools of darkness.
Roman expected her to enter one of the nearby apartment buildings.
Instead, she walked toward a makeshift shelter assembled beside the curb.
A dark blanket hung between two shopping carts.
Flattened cardboard covered the wet pavement.
Beneath the shelter sat an elderly woman in a broken wheelchair.
Clara dropped to her knees.
“Mom, I brought food.”
The woman’s legs remained motionless beneath a dark blanket. Gray hair clung to her face. Scars disappeared beneath the collar of her coat.
Clara opened the container and lifted a spoonful of potatoes toward her.
“You need to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I was not hungry yesterday either.”
“You nearly fainted this morning.”
The woman smiled weakly.
“You sound like a mother.”
“I sound like someone who is tired of being terrified you will die.”
Roman stood several yards away beneath the rain.
His anger dissolved.
Clara had not been stealing for herself.
She had risked her job to feed a disabled woman living beneath a bridge.
Lorenzo watched from the vehicle.
“You were right,” he admitted. “She is desperate.”
Roman did not answer.
The older woman raised her trembling hand to push the spoon away.
A faded silver bracelet slipped from beneath her sleeve.
Roman stopped breathing.
The bracelet had once carried three small stars and a crescent moon. Time had worn the design nearly smooth.
Fifteen years earlier, Roman had seen that bracelet through smoke and fire.
He had been twenty three when gunmen forced his vehicle from a road near Cicero. The car struck a concrete barrier, overturned, and caught fire.
His driver died instantly.
Roman awoke trapped beneath twisted metal while flames spread toward the fuel tank.
A woman crawled through broken glass.
She cut his seat belt with a piece of metal and dragged him through the window while bullets struck the pavement around them.
He remembered her bracelet pressed against his face.
He remembered her voice.
Do not close your eyes, sweetheart. Keep looking at me.
When Roman woke in the hospital, the woman had disappeared.
He spent fifteen years searching for her.
No police report named her.
No hospital record described her injuries.
Witnesses remembered only a gray sedan leaving before emergency crews arrived.
Roman stepped from the shadows.
“You stole from my house for this?”
Clara spun around.
The spoon dropped.
She rose halfway and placed herself between Roman and the wheelchair.
“Mr. Moretti.”
Rain streamed down her hair.
“She hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”
Roman took another step.
Evelyn lifted her trembling hand.
The bracelet caught the distant streetlight.
Roman stared at it.
“That bracelet.”
Evelyn looked at his face.
Her exhaustion vanished beneath sudden recognition.
“You were the boy in the fire.”
Clara looked between them.
“What is she talking about?”
Roman’s voice became almost inaudible.
“I have been looking for you for fifteen years.”
Fear entered Evelyn’s eyes.
She gripped Clara’s sleeve and pushed the food away.
“Then you need to leave.”
Roman crouched beside her.
“Who are you afraid of?”
“Not for me.”
Evelyn looked at Clara.
“They will kill her if they know who I am.”
Tires screamed behind them.
A second black vehicle entered the underpass and stopped across the road, blocking Roman’s SUV.
Lorenzo stepped out and reached beneath his coat.
Four men emerged from the arriving vehicle.
The rear passenger door opened.
A silver haired man remained seated inside.
Evelyn saw him and began shaking violently.
Lorenzo looked toward Roman.
“Boss, they found her.”
The silver haired man smiled from the darkness.
May you like
Then he raised a phone displaying a photograph of Clara asleep inside Roman’s mansion.
Continue to the next part: Roman must protect Clara and Evelyn while discovering why his own security system has been sending information to the men who tried to kill him fifteen years earlier.
