“Leah did her job. Now I do mine. You go inside. You stay with Rosa. You do not leave that room until I come back for you. Understand?”
Sophie shook her head wildly. “She’s bleeding—”
“I know.”
“You promised nobody bad would come here.”
That hit him harder than the gunfire had. Everybody in the driveway saw it.
He lowered his forehead to hers for one brief second. “I know.”
Then he stood, got into the SUV, and ordered the driver to move.
The city expected bodies by midnight.
That was how Nico Vitali had always answered betrayal. Not loudly. Not theatrically. But permanently. Men who crossed him tended to disappear from meetings, from neighborhoods, from lease agreements, from church pews their mothers had sat in for forty years. Nico never enjoyed cruelty. That made him worse. He practiced it with the cold efficiency of a businessman correcting an error in a ledger.
By sunset, word of the shooting had spread from the North Shore to Little Italy, Bridgeport, Cicero, and every courthouse hallway in Cook County. Federal agents repositioned surveillance units. Reporters camped outside St. Catherine Medical Center. Rival crews moved their wives and cash to undisclosed locations. Even aldermen with no official relationship to Nico Vitali quietly canceled dinner plans.
Because everybody knew what came next.
Except it did not.
At St. Catherine’s, surgeons worked on Leah for six hours.
One bullet had shredded muscle in her left shoulder. Another had collapsed a lung. One had torn through her arm, narrowly missing the artery. The worst had entered her right side, ricocheted, and left damage that made two trauma surgeons exchange looks they would later remember with professional unease. Twice, her blood pressure crashed. Once, a nurse heard the lead surgeon mutter, “No civilian takes this much and comes back.”
But Leah Hart had been stubborn since birth, according to her father, and had no intention of becoming easier in an operating room.
Frank Hart arrived at the hospital still wearing his old Chicago Fire Department jacket over a T-shirt and jeans. He had been repairing a sink in his apartment when the call came. He looked like many retired American fathers did after a life of practical disappointments: broad shoulders gone slightly soft, hands scarred by work, eyes permanently prepared for bad news.
He was told only that his daughter had been shot.
When he reached the surgical floor and saw Nico Vitali standing outside the operating room in a blood-stained suit, something like pure animal hatred crossed his face.
“You,” Frank said.
