Miriam stepped away from the table, pulled an old flip phone from her pocket, and dialed a number saved under one letter.
L.
The person on the other end did not speak first.
Miriam swallowed. “The woman you told me to watch,” she said softly. “She delivered tonight. They pronounced her dead.”
Silence.
“She isn’t dead,” Miriam said. “Not all the way.”
When the man finally answered, his voice was low and calm enough to make calm feel dangerous.
“Don’t let anyone touch her. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He arrived in nineteen.
The car that slipped into the service entrance lot was black, silent, and expensive in the way only old power or criminal money could make something look. The man who stepped out of it wore a charcoal overcoat and the expression of someone for whom locked doors had always been suggestions.
Lucian Kane never used the front entrance for anything.
Chicago had a hundred stories about him and maybe ten true ones. That he controlled freight routes down by the river. That he had ended men for less than public disrespect. That judges never mentioned his name aloud unless they had the lights on and company in the room. That he had survived two shootings, one betrayal, and an entire childhood built like a furnace.
What was known for certain was simpler. Lucian Kane inspired in other people the kind of caution normally reserved for live electrical wires.
Miriam met him beneath a red EXIT sign in the basement corridor and led him through service hallways, past broken cameras and locked utility doors, until she pushed open the prep room.
He stepped inside and stopped.
Celeste lay motionless on the stainless steel table, a white sheet pulled to her chest, dark hair spread against the pillow paper, skin almost blue under the fluorescent light.
For a second, Lucian’s face revealed nothing.
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