Chapter 1 - The Phantom of Suite 4227
The service elevator seemed to drop at a sickening velocity, the grease-stained cables groaning inside the concrete shaft. Clare stood rigid, her back pressed hard against the stainless-steel interior wall. Her knuckles were bloodless where she gripped the edges of her plastic inventory tablet.
Every breath tasted like copper and dust. The image of the black gun resting on the marble vanity, positioned precisely beside a bottle of expensive cologne and an unbandaged surgical incision, would not leave her eyes.
Dead men do not step out of luxury hotel showers.
The words looped through her mind, violent and unyielding. Three years ago, when the warehouse fire on the South Side had made international headlines, Clare had still been living in Ohio, working as an administrative clerk at a regional trucking terminal. She remembered the black-and-white face plastered across every television screen in the breakroom: Nicholas Duca, twenty-eight years old, the ruthless second son of the Duca syndicate, believed to have orchestrated the purge of fourteen rival captains before his armored sedan was hit by an anti-tank rocket on Interstate 55.
The dental records had supposedly matched the charred remains pulled from the wreckage. The city had sighed with relief. The Outfit had fractured into warring factions, each claiming a slice of the docks, the numbers, and the municipal unions.
And yet, five minutes ago, Nicholas Duca had held her wrist with fingers as solid and cold as an iron vice.
The elevator chimed, a cheerful, two-tone bell that sounded like a mockery, and the heavy doors slid open onto the basement laundry depot.
The subterranean heat hit her like a wet towel. Steam billowed from the eight-hundred-pound commercial washers, carrying the sharp, chemical stench of industrial bleach and starch. Dozens of women in identical powder-blue smocks moved between canvas laundry hampers, shouting above the mechanical roar in Spanish, Polish, and Cantonese.
"Clare! Where have you been?"
Mrs. Chen appeared from behind a towering rack of freshly pressed Egyptian cotton duvets. The floor supervisor was fifty-two, had ankles that were permanently swollen from standing fourteen hours a day, and possessed an innate sixth sense for employee hesitation. Her narrow eyes swept over Clare’s face, immediately zeroing in on the damp bangs sticking to her forehead and the slight tremble in her breathing.
"You look like you saw a ghost on forty-two," Mrs. Chen barked, checking off a line on her clipboard with a red ballpoint pen. "Did 4217 complain? If that oil executive from Calgary found a hair in the whirlpool tub, so help me God, Bennett—"
"No, ma'am," Clare forced her throat to open, the words scraping out dry and small. "4217 was clean. Fresh towels, fruit bowl replenished, minibar restocked."
"Then why are you thirty minutes behind schedule?"
"The... the freight elevator got stuck on thirty-eight," Clare lied, the words tasting like poison on her tongue. "The doors wouldn't cycle. I had to wait for the maintenance override."
Mrs. Chen squinted, her pen tapping an aggressive rhythm against the aluminum clipboard. For three agonizing seconds, Clare was certain the supervisor was going to check the electronic keycard logs on the terminal. If she saw that the master key had unlocked Suite 4227—a suite that, according to the morning morning manifest, was supposed to be completely unbooked, offline for HVAC repairs—everything would unravel.
"Don't stand there shivering like a stray dog," Mrs. Chen finally snapped, turning away toward the folding stations. "Take cart six up to the thirty-fifth floor. Rooms 3502 through 3518 need turn-down before four o'clock. And wash your face. You look half-dead."
"Yes, Mrs. Chen. Right away."
Clare grabbed the handle of cart six. Her hands were still sweating so heavily that the rubber grips slipped under her palms.
She worked. She worked with the mechanical, frantic desperation of someone running from a brushfire. She stripped beds, tucked hospital corners until her cuticles bled, scrubbed porcelain until it squeaked, and aligned toiletries with mathematical precision. But with every room she entered, every lock she keyed, she kept expecting the elevator doors to open and reveal a man in an unbuttoned white shirt with a gun at the small of his back.
There are people who would kill you just for having been in this room.
The warning wasn't a movie line. It was an empirical assessment from someone who knew exactly how much an ordinary life cost in this city: nothing. Less than nothing. A line in an obituary that nobody read.
By six o'clock, the evening shift had rotated in. Clare stripped off her blue smock in the locker room, stuffed her master key into the magnetic charging cradle by the time clock, and walked out of the employee exit into the alley behind the hotel.
The Chicago autumn air was brutal. A freezing wind off Lake Michigan whipped down the narrow canyon of brick and fire escapes, tearing through her thin wool coat.
She hurried toward the red line subway station at Grand Avenue, keeping her head down, her hands buried deep in her pockets. Every black SUV that slowed down at the crosswalk made her heart jump into her throat. Every man with dark hair and a heavy coat looked like an executioner.
Her apartment on North Avenue was on the third floor of a converted brownstone that leaned slightly to the left. The hallway smelled of stale cabbage, cat litter, and the weed her upstairs neighbor smoked continuously through the baseboards.
She unlocked her door, slipped inside, and threw both deadbolts.
She didn't turn on the lamp. In the gray twilight filtering through the water-stained blinds, her studio looked exactly as small and pitiful as it was: a single mattress on a metal frame, a second-hand folding table, an electric kettle, and two suitcases she hadn't fully unpacked because she couldn't shake the feeling that she would have to run again.
She set her purse on the table, walked to the sink, and filled a glass with cloudy tap water.
She drank it down, her eyes closed, listening to the radiator clank against the floorboards.
Then, from the shadows near the radiator, came the sound of a match striking.
Fzzzt.
The sulfur flare lit up the small room in a violent, yellow flash.
Clare dropped the glass. It shattered against the cracked linoleum, spraying cold water across her boots.
Sitting in the single thrift-store armchair in the corner of her apartment, his long legs stretched out before him, his overcoat unbuttoned to reveal the dark holster beneath, was Nicholas Duca.
May you like
The flame of the wooden match reflected in his dark, unblinking eyes as he held it to the tip of an unfiltered cigarette.
"You didn't check the hall before you opened your door, Clare," Nicholas murmured, blowing a thin stream of gray smoke toward the water-damaged ceiling. "That was your second mistake today."
