Chapter 6
PART 6
Nora stayed thirty minutes.
When she came downstairs, Dominic was waiting in the foyer with the silver ring still warm from Ava’s hand. Nora looked tired, but the hard line around her mouth had softened.
“She’s not fine,” Nora said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You know danger. You know control. You know revenge. She needs grief. She needs air. She needs someone to sit in the room without turning pain into strategy.”
Dominic looked toward the staircase. “Is that what I do?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly to be anything but true.
Nora stepped toward the door.
“About Cal,” Dominic said. “I made it worse.”
“You did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nora’s hand paused on the handle.
Dominic Hale had apologized to judges, priests, and federal agents, but always as performance. This one cost him something. He could feel it leaving his chest.
Nora turned slowly.
“Do you even know what to do with sorry?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then start by not confusing protection with possession.”
She left before he could answer.
That night, Dominic did not sleep.
At 11:40 p.m., Leo entered the study with blood on one cuff.
“We found the dealer.”
Dominic looked up from the untouched glass of bourbon on his desk.
“Name?”
“Tyler Cross. Twenty-one. Northwestern dropout. Rich parents in San Diego. Playing middleman for an East Coast supplier. He brought the batch to the Lincoln Park party.”
Dominic’s expression emptied. “Where is he?”
“Warehouse on Ashland.”
The old answer rose inside Dominic with familiar ease.
Break him.
Bleed him.
Bury him.
Ava had been blue on a bathroom floor. His daughter had whispered for her dead mother. The boy responsible still had breath in his lungs. In Dominic’s world, that imbalance required correction.
Leo seemed to know what he was thinking.
“The men are ready,” he said.
Dominic stood and walked to the window. Chicago spread beneath him, glittering and cruel. Somewhere in that city, Nora Quinn was probably locking the diner, checking over her shoulder because he had frightened the wrong man in the wrong way. Somewhere upstairs, Ava was lying awake with fractured ribs and a heart split open by grief.
Dominic closed his eyes.
Nora’s voice returned.
Men like Cal don’t learn lessons. They wait until the scary man is gone.
Then Ava’s.
You’d rather build a prison than ask why I wanted to leave.
Violence had always felt clean to Dominic because he never stayed to watch the stains spread. Now he saw them everywhere.
“No,” he said.
Leo blinked. “Boss?”
“No killing.”
“The kid almost killed Ava.”
“I know.”
“If we let him walk, the city talks.”
“Let it.”
Leo shifted, uneasy. “What do you want done?”
Dominic turned from the window. “Get every name above him. Supplier, driver, stash house, account numbers. Then send him back to his parents in California with enough fear in him to keep him honest for the rest of his life.”
“And the supply chain?”
“Burn it.”
Leo nodded slowly. “That will start a war.”
“Then we end a war. Not a boy.”
Leo stared at him like he was seeing a stranger wearing his boss’s face.
Dominic sat back down. “Also find out who manages Nora Quinn’s building. Quietly.”
Leo almost smiled. “Quietly?”
“Legally.”
Now Leo truly looked disturbed.
By morning, Dominic had purchased the debt attached to Nora’s apartment building through three shell companies, fired Cal’s management firm for documented harassment, and installed a new superintendent who believed in working locks, hallway lights, and not touching tenants.
He did not tell Nora.
Not at first.
He went to the Blue Lantern at 2:30 p.m. and sat in his usual booth.
Nora approached with coffee. “You look like a man who either killed someone or decided not to.”
Dominic accepted the mug. “The second one.”
Her hand stilled.
“The dealer?” she asked.
“Alive.”
“And are you telling me because you want applause?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Dominic looked down at the black coffee. “Because I wanted someone to know it mattered.”
For once, Nora did not answer immediately.
She slid into the booth across from him, even though she was on shift.
“You can’t become good by sparing one idiot,” she said.
“I know.”
“You can’t undo what you’ve done.”
“I know that too.”
“What do you want, Dominic?”
The question was simple.
He had no simple answer.
He wanted his daughter to stop looking at him like a loaded gun. He wanted his dead wife’s voice to fade without disappearing. He wanted the waitress across from him to stop expecting him to ruin everything he touched.
“I want to be less poisonous to the people standing near me,” he said.
Nora looked at him for a long time.
Then the cook shouted from the back, “Nora! Table six!”
She stood. “That’s a start.”
For the next month, Dominic changed in ways the city did not understand.
He cut narcotics out of three neighborhoods. He shut down two crews that sold near schools. He turned certain territories over to men who dealt in gambling, stolen cargo, and political blackmail instead of powder that killed teenagers on bathroom floors.
It did not make him innocent.
But it made him different.
Ava noticed before she admitted it.
One night, she came downstairs and found him in the kitchen making tea badly. He had burned the kettle somehow. She watched him struggle, then took the mug from his hand.
“You’re terrible at normal things,” she said.
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “Nora said you didn’t kill the dealer.”
Dominic looked at her. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought revenge would make you safer. I was wrong.”
Ava stared into the tea.
Then she whispered, “Mom would’ve liked Nora.”
May you like
Dominic’s chest tightened.
“Yes,” he said. “She would have.”
