Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the Alley
The train ride back to Rogers Park was long and cold.
Claire sat in the corner of the rattling train car, her head pressed against the frost-patterned glass. The city flew past in a blur of concrete and yellow streetlights.
Bad man. Fire. Mother.
Three words. A child’s rudimentary sign language, stripped of grammar, raw with trauma.
Claire’s mind raced back to five years ago, to the night her own life had exploded. Her father, Marcus Mercer, had been a chief accountant for a high-level logistics firm in Indiana—a firm that secretly laundered capital for Midwest syndicates. When Marcus discovered evidence of systematic embezzlement tied to a planned hit on a union boss, he had tried to blow the whistle.
They burned his house down with him inside it.
Claire had escaped through the basement window, carrying nothing but her father’s pocket watch and his final instruction: Trust no one in a suit.
For five years, she had lived like a ghost. She worked cash jobs, used prepaid phones, and kept her head down. She knew how men like Dominic Vale operated. They lived in castles surrounded by wolves, totally unaware that the hungriest wolf was usually sitting at their own dining table.
The train screeched to a halt at her station.
Claire walked three blocks through the biting Chicago wind to her tiny, third-floor walk-up apartment above a laundromat. The staircase smelled of bleach and old wood. She unlocked her door, slipped inside, and turned on the single floor lamp in her living room.
The apartment was sparse: a thrift-store couch, a narrow bed, a table piled with books, and a small kettle.
She made a cup of black tea and sat at her kitchen table, staring out the window at the distant skyline of downtown Chicago. She should let it go. She was out of a job. She needed to find work by Monday or she wouldn't make rent. Involving herself with Dominic Vale was suicide.
A quiet knock sounded at her front door.
Claire froze.
Her cup remained suspended halfway to her lips. She didn't move. She didn't breathe. It was 11:30 PM. Nobody knocked on her door. Ever.
The knock came again. Three slow, measured raps of metal on wood.
Claire set her tea down without making a sound. She reached into the drawer beneath the table and pulled out a heavy steel butter knife—the only weapon she possessed. She crept across the linoleum floor, standing beside the door, her ear pressed against the cold wood.
“Miss Monroe,” a deep, graveled voice called through the door. “Open the door. If I wanted to break it down, my men would have done it two minutes ago.”
Dominic Vale.
Claire’s heart slammed against her ribs. She took a slow, steadying breath, unlatched the deadbolt, and opened the door two inches, keeping the safety chain engaged.
Dominic stood in the dim, flickering light of the hallway corridor. He had removed his overcoat, wearing only his black suit jacket and white shirt, his collar slightly unbuttoned. Behind him, standing at the top of the stairs, was a massive, scarred man named Knox—Dominic’s personal bodyguard and driver.
Victor Vance was nowhere to be seen.
“Mr. Vale,” Claire said, her voice remarkable in its composure. “I don't believe I gave you my address.”
“Your restaurant manager was remarkably eager to share your employee file when I offered him five thousand dollars,” Dominic said flatly. His dark eyes swept over her face, noting the steel knife held low against her thigh. “Put the knife away, Claire. I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Then why are you here?”
Dominic reached into his jacket pocket. Claire braced herself, but he pulled out a small, plush object.
It was the white stuffed rabbit.
“Audrey left this in the car,” Dominic said softly, his voice dropping into a tone that was entirely human, stripped of his crime-lord armor. “She hasn't slept without it since the day her mother died. When I tried to give it back to her, she pushed it away. She signed something at me. Something I didn't understand.”
Dominic stepped closer to the door, his eyes locking onto Claire’s blue gaze with a desperate, terrifying intensity.
“She spelled your name,” Dominic whispered. “C-L-A-I-R-E. She refuses to sleep until you tell her what the rabbit said.”
Claire stared at the powerful man standing in her decaying hallway. The lakefront king, the feared crime boss of Chicago, was standing in front of a thirty-dollar-a-night apartment because his deaf daughter wanted a waitress.
“She didn't care about the rabbit,” Claire said quietly through the door crack.
May you like
Dominic’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“She wasn't crying because of the water, Mr. Vale,” Claire said, unhooking the safety chain and pulling the door open. “She was crying because she’s terrified of the man who stands at your right hand.”
