Chapter 13 - The Midnight Caller
The victory at the Palmer House brought three weeks of absolute, undisturbed quiet to the estate. But in the underworld, quiet is rarely permanent—it is simply the sound of someone reloading in the dark.
On a rainy Tuesday night in May, Clara was alone in the master suite, reading a bedtime story to Leo while the wind howled against the lakefront windows. Roman was downstairs in the south vault with Silas, supervising the transfer of three crates of bearer bonds that had arrived from the Canadian border that afternoon.
The private phone on the bedside table—a secure, encrypted landline that only Roman, Silas, and the corporate office in Manhattan had the number to—began to ring with a shrill, urgent buzz that made Leo jump against her shoulder.
Clara frowned, setting the book down on the quilt. If Silas needed something from the house, he usually used the internal intercom system. She reached out and lifted the receiver, pressing it to her ear without saying a word, her training from her first weeks in the house kicking in.
"Clara?" a voice whispered over the static-laced line. It was thin, ragged, and accompanied by the distant, echoing sound of a cheap payphone dinging for more coins. "Clara, is that you? Please, God, tell me you're still there."
The blood drained completely from Clara’s face, leaving her skin freezing cold beneath her sweater. Her hand clamped around the plastic receiver so hard her knuckles turned white. She hadn't heard that voice in eight months, but she would have recognized its whining, desperate cadence if she lived to be a hundred years old.
It was Julian Vance.
"How did you get this number?" Clara breathed, her voice dropping to a harsh, barely audible whisper so Leo wouldn't hear the terror in her tone. "Julian, you're supposed to be in Gary. Silas said if you ever called this house—"
"I'm not in Gary, Clara! I'm at the Greyhound station on Harrison Street!" Julian sobbed into the phone, the sound wet and pathetic over the wires. "They're hunting me, Clara! The Milwaukee people—the ones who took over Russo’s old slots on the West Side! They think because I used to run numbers for Gatti, I know where the missing eighty thousand from the harbor account is buried! They took my brother yesterday! They broke his knees with a pipe! They're going to kill me before the bus leaves for Detroit at midnight!"
"That isn't my problem, Julian," Clara said coldly, her eyes locking onto Leo, who was watching her with wide, worried hazel eyes from his pirate ship bed. "You traded your son and me to Roman Thorne to clear your gambling tab in October. We don't owe you our names, we don't owe you our memory, and we certainly don't owe you our protection."
"Please!" Julian screamed, his voice rising in a hysterical crescendo of panic that made the receiver crackle. "I have something Roman wants, Clara! Tell him I have the names! I know which captain on the North Side is selling the harbor transit schedules to the Milwaukee crew! If Moretti’s people get those schedules, they can hijack the Canadian grain shipments before they even reach the Chicago locks! Tell Roman if he sends Silas to get me out of this bus station tonight, I'll give him the mole's name on a silver platter! If he doesn't... I’m a dead man, and his shipments are going to the bottom of the river by Friday!"
The line went dead with a sharp, mechanical click as his coin ran out.
Clara sat frozen on the edge of the bed for nearly a minute, the dial tone buzzing in her ear like a warning wasp. Her ex-fiancé—the man who had left her with a duffel bag and a two-hundred-thousand-dollar death sentence—was three miles away, begging for his life with a piece of information that could save Roman’s entire northern shipping operation from an ambush.
May you like
She set the receiver down carefully, turned to Leo, and kissed the top of his forehead with lips that were cold as ice.
"Stay here with Barnaby, sweetie," she whispered, tucking the blankets around his shoulders. "Mommy has to go tell Mr. Roman that an old dog is barking at the gate."
