Chapter 2: The Lion’s Den
Chapter 2: The Lion’s Den
By 3:00 AM, the rain had turned into a torrential downpour, lashing against the windows of an abandoned meatpacking plant on the edges of the Union Stock Yards. This was Callaway territory—a place where the concrete floors were sloped toward drains for reasons that had nothing to do with cattle.
Victor Callaway sat on a metal folding chair in the center of the cavernous room, his long legs crossed, his coat slung over his shoulders. Before him, bound to heavy iron pillars with industrial zip-ties, were the two night guards who had helped Marcus Reed wire the bomb beneath his vehicle. Their faces were already swollen, their breath rattling in their chests after twenty minutes alone with Dominic.
"I’m going to ask you once," Victor said, his voice cutting through the steady drip of rainwater from the leaking roof. "And your answer will dictate whether your families receive a pension or a police notification. Where is Marcus meeting the North Side captains?"
The younger guard, a kid named Leo whom Victor had personally authorized a loan for when his mother was sick, sobbed openly. "Mr. Callaway, please! We didn't have a choice! Marcus said you were going to replace us all with a tech firm. He said the Outfit was shifting, that we were obsolete. He promised us half a million each from the North Side brokers!"
"Where is he, Leo?" Victor repeated, his face completely motionless, like an icon carved from dark wood.
"The Starlight Lounge," Leo choked out, the words spilling over his lips in a desperate rush. "In Rosemont. The basement beneath the kitchen. The old illegal casino. He’s meeting Anthony Moretti there at dawn. Moretti promised him an extraction team to get him to Canada if he hands over the encrypted ledgers for the shipping ports."
Victor stood up. He walked over to Leo, looking down at the young man with a cold, detached pity. "I paid for your mother’s chemotherapy, Leo. I remembered your name. I remembered her name. And you let a rat wire my car."
"Mr. Callaway—"
"Dominic," Victor said, turning his back on them. "Keep them alive until the police arrive. Give the anonymous tip to the feds. Let them spend the next thirty years in a maximum-security cell thinking about the price of a bribe."
As Victor stepped out into the pouring rain, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He snatched it out, his heart leaping into his throat. It was Martha, the ICU nurse.
"Mr. Callaway," she said, her voice stripped of its previous hostility, replaced by a tense professionalism. "The surgery is over. She survived the internal repair, but she’s not waking up. She’s slipped into a deep comatose state. The neurological team says the swelling on her brain is increasing. If she doesn't respond to the therapeutic hypothermia within the next twelve hours, the damage may be irreversible."
Victor gripped the steering wheel of his replacement sedan so hard the leather groaned. "I'm on my way back."
"Sir, there’s something else," Martha added, hesitating. "Before she went under the anesthesia, when she was delirious from the pain... she kept repeating a sequence of numbers. Over and over. We wrote them down on her chart because she wouldn't stop screaming them."
"What numbers?"
"Four-eight-two-nine-nine," Martha read from the pad. "Does that mean anything to you?"
Victor’s breath hitched. Four-eight-two-nine-nine. It wasn't a phone number or an address. It was the original manual combination to the old floor safe in his personal study—the one he hadn't opened in five years, the one where he kept the handwritten journals of his father, the founder of the Callaway Syndicate.
May you like
Emily had been dusting that room for three years. She had never asked questions, never looked at him twice. But she had seen the numbers. She had memorized them. Not to steal from him, but because a woman who takes two buses every morning learns that in a house full of wolves, secrets are the only currency that can buy your life back.
"Keep her breathing, Martha," Victor said, his eyes darkening as he stared through the swishing windshield wipers. "I’m going to finish this tonight. Then I’m coming to wake her up."
