Chapter 2 - The Ghost of the North End
"Things change," I repeated, the words tasting like copper in my mouth. I stepped away from Leo, pushing past Gideon toward the work counter where my pruning shears lay. My fingers closed over the cold steel handles not to threaten him, but to steady the sudden, violent hammering of my ribs. "What kind of change requires the Saint Jude of Boston’s underworld to fly three thousand miles into a rainstorm?"
Gideon didn't flinch at the weapon in my hand. He had watched men pull automatic pistols on Raphael Santoro in narrow alleys and didn't blink; a florist with shears was merely a landscape feature.
"The commission is breaking apart," Gideon said, his voice barely carrying over the drip of the condensation from the greenhouse glass. "When you left, Raphael let the eastern docks go. He pulled back from the real estate syndicates in Chicago. He spent four years turning every legitimate asset into liquid cash, and then he stopped expanding altogether. The old guard thought he was getting soft. They thought the ghost of a girl he threw into the rain had broken his teeth."
"He didn't break," I said bitterly. "Men like Raphael Santoro don't break. They just calculate new ways to own the room."
"He bought an island off Nova Scotia two years ago," Gideon continued, ignoring my interruption. "He lives there alone now. No guards inside the perimeter. No ledger books. Just a stone house, a boat, and a bottle of rye. The men who run the North End now—men younger and far more dangerous than Raphael ever was—they think he's abdicated. They're moving on his old terminals. They think they can take Boston."
I stared at him, the shears trembling slightly in my grip. "Why are you telling me this, Gideon? If Raphael wanted me found, he wouldn't have sent his right-hand man to give me a historical update. He would have kicked the front door off its hinges."
"He didn't send me," Gideon repeated, stepping closer until the clean, sharp smell of cedar and rain was replaced by the old, familiar scent of gun oil and wool that followed every man out of the Santoro house. "I came because I'm tired of watching a dead man pretend he's breathing."
"He's alive," I snapped. "He's breathing sea air and drinking expensive whiskey on an island he bought with money he stole from my brother's life."
"He hasn't slept a full night since November fourteenth, seven years ago," Gideon said quietly.
The date hit me like a physical blow. November fourteenth. The night of the rain. The night he told me to take nothing of his.
"He thinks you died on that bus, Marin," Gideon said. "He thinks you went into the river. Every month, when I hand him the photograph—the one I take of you walking to the grocery store or sitting on this porch—he burns it in his fireplace. Because seeing your face reminds him of the night he had to kill his own soul to keep you alive."
The shears slipped from my hand, clattering against the concrete floor with a sharp, metallic ring.
Leo ducked behind a rack of hanging ferns at the sudden noise, his eyes wide and watchful.
"To keep me alive?" I laughed, a harsh, humorless sound that lacked any amusement. "He threw me out into a freezing rain with eleven dollars in my pocket! He didn't even let me take my coat! He accused me of leaking his shipping routes to the feds!"
"Your brother leaked the routes, Marin," Gideon said, his voice dropping to a gravelly register that brooked no argument. "Beckett took forty thousand dollars from the Vanguard syndicate to pay off his bookie. The feds had the wiretaps before Raphael ever saw the manifest."
"Then why did Raphael treat me like the traitor?" I demanded, stepping into Gideon’s space, my chest heaving. "Why did he make me beg? Why did he humiliate me in front of twelve armed men?"
Gideon looked down at me, his slate-gray eyes filled with a heavy, agonizing fatigue.
"Because the anonymous phone call Raphael received forty minutes before he called you upstairs wasn't from a rival," Gideon said. "It was from the commission. They told him they knew about you. They told him that if he didn't publicly cast you out—if he didn't make the entire city believe you meant less than dirt to him—they would send a clean-up crew to your hospital bed while you were sleeping."
The world tilted.
The rows of ferns, the wet gravel floor, the sound of the Puget Sound tides—everything dissolved into a hollow, roaring vacuum.
"The hospital..." I whispered, my knees suddenly feeling like water. "How... how did they know about the hospital?"
"Beckett talked while he was high," Gideon said simply. "He bragged to a Vanguard runner that his sister was carrying the Santoro heir. He thought it made him bulletproof."
I staggered back, my hand catching the edge of a potting table to keep from collapsing. I looked toward the fern rack where Leo was peeking out, his small fingers clutching a frond.
An heir.
Raphael hadn't thrown me out because he thought I sold him out. He had thrown me out because the commission was going to kill me and our unborn child, and the only way to save us was to convince every assassin in Boston that I was an enemy he had discarded with contempt.
"He... he didn't know about the baby?" I whispered, my voice breaking. "When he sent me away... did he know?"
"He didn't know," Gideon said. "He found out three days later when I cleared out your dressing room and found the pregnancy test wrapper in the wastebasket."
Gideon reached into his overcoat pocket. He didn't pull a weapon. He pulled out a worn, leather-bound notebook with water-damaged edges—the exact notebook I had carried every day in Boston, the one Raphael had ordered me to leave behind on his desk.
May you like
He laid it gently on the potting bench between us.
"He hasn't opened it once in seven years," Gideon said. "He keeps it in the top drawer of his desk in Nova Scotia. He touches the spine every night before he turns off the lamp."
