Chapter 4 - Blood on the Limestone
The illusion of safety in the Thorne estate was shattered on a Tuesday morning by the sound of three rapid gunshots echoing from the main gate. Clara was in the laundry room on the ground floor, folding hot towels, when the heavy oak doors of the foyer slammed open above her with a force that shook the ceiling fixtures. Boots—dozens of them—scrambled across the marble, accompanied by the wet, ragged sound of a man trying to draw air through a crushed windpipe.
"Get him to the table in the library! Now!" Silas’s voice roared, stripped of its usual deadpan calm. "Briggs, get the doctor on the radio! Tell him we took two rounds from a long rifle on the 94 off-ramp!"
Clara didn't think; she reacted with the muscle memory of a woman who had spent four years dressing wounds her ex-fiancé brought home from back-alley dice games. She grabbed a stack of clean, boiled linen towels from the basket and ran up the service stairs, bursting into the main hallway just as three guards were hauling a heavy figure across the threshold of the library.
It wasn't Roman. It was a young enforcer named Marcus—barely twenty-two, with a face full of freckles and a bullet hole leaking bright, arterial blood through the shoulder of his cheap gray suit. He was screaming, a high, thin sound that sounded like a dying rabbit.
"Out of the way!" Silas barked, shoving a junior guard aside to press his bare hand against the entry wound. "Where the hell is the medical kit?"
"It's locked in the south vault!" someone shouted.
Clara pushed her way through the circle of armed men without asking permission. She hit the floor on her knees beside the leather sofa where they had dropped the boy, her hands moving before her brain could warn her that she was touching syndicate blood. "Lift his shoulder," she ordered Silas, her voice ringing with a sharp, domestic clarity that cut through the panic. "You're pressing on the bone, not the artery. Lift him four inches and let me get the linen under the scapula."
Silas didn't hesitate. He grabbed Marcus by the belt and collar, heaving him up while Clara jammed three folded towels directly into the exit wound on the boy’s back, her small hands leaning all her eighty-hundred-and-twenty pounds into the pressure point until Marcus’s screams turned into a dry, gasping sob.
"Who told you to come up here?" a cold voice asked from the doorway.
Roman Thorne stood there, his long coat damp from the rain, a submachine gun hanging from a tactical sling across his chest. He wasn't bleeding, but his eyes were the color of lead, his face spattered with fine gray grit from a shattered windshield. He looked down at Clara—her knees soaked in Marcus’s blood, her white apron stained crimson from the collar down—and his jaw tightened until the skin turned translucent.
"He's bleeding out from the subclavian, Mr. Thorne," Clara said, not looking up from her work, her fingers locked into the linen. "If you wait for the doctor from the North Side, he'll be dead before the tea gets cold. Tell someone to get me a bottle of high-proof alcohol and a pair of clean pliers from the kitchen."
For three seconds, nobody moved. The guards looked at Roman, waiting for the nod that would either send Clara back to the basement or put a bullet in her for overstepping. Roman’s gaze lingered on her blood-stained hands—hands that were steady, unshrinking, and entirely devoid of the trembling that usually seized civilians when they saw what his business actually looked like.
"Do what she says," Roman ordered, slinging the weapon over his shoulder as he walked toward the bar to grab a bottle of twelve-year-old rye. "Silas, get the perimeter locked down. If the Vance family thinks they can take a shot at my car in broad daylight, I want every warehouse they own on the Riverwalk burning by midnight."
An hour later, when the underground surgeon finally arrived with his bags of suture and plasma, Marcus was breathing steadily on the sofa, the bleeding stopped by four layers of kitchen linen and a woman who hadn't asked for a single penny of credit. Clara stood up, her legs shaking so violently she had to lean against the edge of Roman’s desk to keep from collapsing. She looked down at her hands—sticky, red, and smelling of iron.
Roman walked over to her, holding a clean white handkerchief and a glass of neat scotch. He didn't hand her the drink; he held it to her lips until she took a long, burning swallow that made her eyes water and her throat close up.
"Go upstairs," he said, his voice dropping into that low, private register he had used in the library three weeks ago. He took her hands in his—his skin was freezing from the rain, his callouses rough against her palms—and began to gently wipe the dried blood from her fingers with the linen cloth. "Wash your face. Check on the boy. If he asks why you smell like copper, tell him you were cleaning the meat in the cellar."
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"Who shot at you?" she whispered, looking at the top of his head as he cleaned her knuckles with meticulous, almost reverent care.
Roman stopped moving his hands. He looked up, his lead-colored eyes locking onto hers with a weight that made her breath catch. "People who think I’ve gotten soft because I stopped hanging bodies from the bridges. Go to your boy, Clara. The house isn't safe tonight."
