Chapter 2
“Sadi.”
Her throat felt tight.
“Just Sadi.”
“Just Sadi.”
Carmine glanced at Gabriel, who was falling into the 1st natural healing sleep he had experienced since the shooting.
“Where did you learn about upholstery thread? You a seamstress?”
“My mother was.”
Sadi kept the explanation short.
“She worked in a garment factory. They bought cheap uncertified threads from overseas to cut costs. The dyes were full of heavy metals. Lead, arsenic, cadmium. It soaked into the workers’ skin. She came home smelling like bitter almonds every night. Her hands blistered so badly she lost her fingerprints. I know what chemical rot looks like.”
Carmine listened.
Then he looked at Sadi’s unprotected hands.
“And the stitches?”
“I fixed her mistakes. When her hands hurt too much to hold a needle, I did the piecework at night. I know how to pull a thread without tearing the fabric.”
Carmine nodded.
He reached into his jacket and removed a thick roll of $100 bills held together with a rubber band.
He tossed it onto a nearby table.
The money landed heavily.
It was more than Sadi earned in a year cleaning the estate.
“Go clean yourself up. Take the money. Go to the kitchen and eat something.”
Then his expression hardened.
“But don’t leave the estate. You belong to the boss now.”
Sadi stared at the cash.
She did not want it.
She wanted to use the servants’ entrance, walk to the nearest bus stop, and disappear into the city.
Accepting money from the Falcone family meant entering their ledger.
It created obligation.
“I just want to go home,” she said.
Her voice shook.
She remained stubborn.
Carmine gave her a grim smile.
“You saved Gabriel Falcone’s life. Whoever paid that first doctor to put poison in his chest is going to find out he survived. When they do, they’re going to look for the person who pulled those stitches.”
He glanced toward the doors.
“You walk out of this house, you’re dead by morning. This estate is the only thing keeping you breathing.”
Carmine turned away.
Sadi looked from the cash to Gabriel sleeping in the bed.
She had cut the thread that was killing him.
Standing behind the locked doors of the Falcone estate, she understood that she had attached herself to something far more dangerous.
3 days later, the smell of bleach had disappeared from the library.
Black coffee and roasted garlic had replaced it.
Gabriel Falcone sat against a mound of down pillows. His left arm was secured inside a black sling, and his shoulder was covered in clean white dressings.
The fever had taken 15 lb from him.
His face looked leaner and hollowed out.
The predatory focus had returned to his eyes.
He held ice water in his right hand while Carmine stood near the window giving his report.
“Dr. Philip Croft,” Carmine said. “The 1st surgeon who closed the wound. He put the braided thread in you.”
“Where is he?”
Gabriel’s voice remained rough from days of fever and delirium.
“Gone. Cleared out his office, emptied the bank accounts, caught a private charter out of Teterboro the night after your surgery. We’re tracking the tail number. Looks like he passed through the Caymans. Somebody paid him heavily to make sure you died slowly. They wanted it to look like a postoperative infection. Clean. No bullets. No obvious assassination.”
Gabriel drank slowly.
“Find him. I don’t care what it costs. I want him alive.”
He lowered the glass.
“And I want the name of whoever wrote the check.”
“Already on it, boss.”
Gabriel placed the glass beside the bed.
“Bring the girl in.”
Carmine left.
A moment later, Sadi entered the library.
Her gray maid’s uniform was gone. Carmine had instructed the housekeeper to burn it.
Sadi now wore dark jeans and a black long-sleeved sweater taken from the stack of clothing that had appeared inside her new room.
She had also been moved from the basement staff quarters into a guest suite on the 2nd floor.
The mattress was softer than anything she remembered sleeping on.
She had barely slept.
Sadi stopped at the foot of Gabriel’s bed and folded her arms.
Gabriel studied her.
His gaze had the unsettling quality of an X-ray.
He noticed the inexpensive sneakers, the defensive posture, the shadows beneath her eyes, and the quiet resistance set into her jaw.
“You’re the seamstress.”
“I’m a maid,” Sadi corrected him. “I was cleaning baseboards when they pulled me into this room to hold a trash bag.”
“You pulled poisoned thread out of my fascia while a man held a gun on you. That makes you a little more than a maid.”
“It makes me somebody who didn’t want to watch a man rot to death when I could stop it. I don’t care who you are. I know what heavy-metal necrosis looks like. I fixed the seam.”
Gabriel gave a short, raspy laugh.
The movement hurt his shoulder.
His hand went automatically toward the bandage.
“You fixed the seam.”
He looked at her.
“18 of the highest-paid trauma surgeons on the East Coast stared at that wound for 2 weeks and told me they needed to remove my arm. You looked for 5 minutes and found what they missed.”
“They were looking at charts. They weren’t looking at you.”
Sadi’s answer was matter-of-fact.
“Rich people rely on machines to tell them what’s broken. Poor people look at the crack in the wall.”
Gabriel held her gaze.
In an existence built on deception, he found her bluntness unexpectedly direct.
“Carmine offered you money. You didn’t take it.”
“Money from this house comes with strings. I don’t like being tied up.”
“You’re already tied up, Sadi.”
Gabriel’s voice softened.
“The people who paid Croft to kill me are going to learn that I’m awake, drinking water, and preparing a war. They’ll ask questions. Eventually, they’ll learn that a 22-year-old woman derailed a multimillion-dollar assassination.”
He paused.
“You’re a loose end. In my world, loose ends get burned.”
Fear broke briefly through Sadi’s composure.
“I didn’t ask for this. I needed an hourly wage to pay a hospital bill.”
“I know.”
Gabriel leaned forward.
“Carmine ran your background. Your mother’s medical debt. The apartment above the factory. You have no family, no protection, no leverage. You are completely exposed.”
Sadi remained silent.
“But you have me.”
The statement carried absolute authority.
“You saved my life. In my family, a blood debt is absolute. You gave me my life back. I protect yours.”
Gabriel’s eyes did not leave her.
“You are no longer a maid in this house. You are a guest of the Falcone family. Anyone who wants to put a hand on you has to come through me first. And I promise you, Sadi, they will die trying.”
She stood frozen.
She did not want to be a guest of the mafia.
She wanted the invisible life she had lived before the library.
But that life had disappeared when she picked up the scissors.
“What do I have to do?”
Her voice was quiet.
“Survive.”
Gabriel settled against the pillows.
“And help me find the bastard who sewed me up.”
Later, Gabriel was already out of bed despite the objections of his private nurses.
Sweat fell from his chin onto the hardwood floor.
His left arm remained strapped tightly across his body inside the sling, while his right hand held a heavy iron kettlebell.
His bare torso carried the evidence of an entire violent history: bullet grazes, knife scars, and the jagged new injury at his shoulder.
He lifted the weight again.
His jaw clenched.
His breathing was harsh.
He was not training for muscle.
He appeared to be proving to his own body that he still controlled it.
Sadi stood in the doorway holding a tray containing ice water and plain toast.
“You’re going to tear the internal tissue.”
Gabriel stopped.
He slowly lowered the kettlebell and wiped his face with a white towel.
“Muscle heals stronger when it tears. If I baby the shoulder, the scar tissue will knot up. I’ll lose range of motion.”
“There’s a difference between stretching a scar and ripping a seam.”
Sadi set the tray on the desk.
“You push too hard, you bleed internally, and I don’t have any more sterile scissors.”
A faint smile changed Gabriel’s expression.
For a moment, he looked less like a syndicate boss and more like a tired man with a dangerous occupation.
“Fair point. I prefer you keeping your hands out of my chest cavity.”
He took the glass of water and drank it in 1 continuous pull.
Then he studied her over the rim.
“You haven’t been sleeping.”
“Your house is too quiet. I’m used to industrial sewing machines downstairs and sirens outside. Silence makes me think something is sneaking up on me.”
“In this business, if it’s quiet, something usually is.”
Gabriel leaned against the mahogany desk.
“Carmine tracked your mother’s hospital debt. A collection agency bought it a year ago. They’ve been garnishing your wages.”
Sadi stiffened.
“That’s my business. You don’t need to dig through my life.”
“I do when your life is tied to mine.”
Gabriel’s tone remained smooth.
“The debt is gone. Paid in full this morning. You don’t owe them anything.”
Anger moved instantly across Sadi’s face.
“I didn’t ask you to do that. I told you I don’t take money with strings.”
“It isn’t a string. It’s a severing.”
His voice lowered into the register he used to command his organization.
“You saved my life. I clear your ledger. That is how a transaction works. I don’t like owing people, Sadi, especially people outside the game. Now we’re even.”
Before Sadi could answer, the library doors opened.
Carmine entered carrying a manila folder.
He noticed the tension between them and ignored it.
“The lab results came back on the thread.”
He dropped the folder onto the desk.
Gabriel’s expression changed immediately.
The wounded man disappeared.
The boss returned.
“Read it.”
Carmine opened the report.
“Braided synthetic polymer, mostly nylon. The dark substance leaking from it was a custom chemical mixture. High levels of cadmium combined with a synthetic necrotizing agent. A flesh-eating toxin. The friction from your muscle movement squeezed poison out of the braid in a slow drip.”
He looked at Gabriel.
“Whoever designed it knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Can we trace the thread?”
“That’s the problem. The lab classified it as industrial upholstery or heavy canvas thread. There are a million suppliers. We could spend a year going through textile warehouses.”
Sadi stepped closer.
A magnified photograph of the recovered thread had been clipped to the laboratory report.
She leaned over the desk and examined the weave.
“It isn’t upholstery.”
Both men turned toward her.
Sadi pointed at the image.
“Upholstery thread is usually a 4-ply twist because it has to handle furniture tension. This is a 12-ply diamond braid. Look at the crisscross pattern. It’s designed for extreme weather and heavy load-bearing.”
Gabriel watched her.
Whenever Sadi spoke about textiles, her fear disappeared.
“So what is it used for?”
“Awnings. Heavy-duty tarps. Maritime sails.”
She studied the photograph again.
“And look at the dye. The report says it contains heavy cadmium concentrations. Modern American mills stopped using dyes like that years ago. This is cheap imported material, probably smuggled.”
Sadi put down the picture.
“There’s only 1 place in the city I know that handles uncertified heavy-ply maritime thread.”
Carmine looked at her.
“Where?”
“The old dockyards. Pier 42. Miller and Sons. They sell black-market textiles to sweatshops producing counterfeit boat covers and industrial tents. If somebody wanted toxic industrial thread that couldn’t be traced easily, that’s where they would go.”
Gabriel closed the folder.
He became completely still.
“Carmine.”
“Boss?”
“Get the cars ready.”
Gabriel reached for his jacket.
“We’re going to the docks.”
Rain turned the cobblestones of the warehouse district into an oily black mirror.
The air carried diesel exhaust, rotting fish, and salt.
Gabriel’s black SUV idled beneath the shadow of a rusting crane.
2 sedans waited behind it.
Inside the lead vehicle, Gabriel adjusted his suit jacket around the sling.
His face remained pale, and his shoulder burned steadily, but his eyes were alert.
Sadi sat in the rear with her hands tightly folded.
When she identified Miller and Sons, she had not expected Gabriel to bring her.
He insisted that she was the only person in his group capable of identifying the correct spool among thousands of industrial materials and locating the relevant entry in whatever chaotic records Miller maintained.
“Stay close to Carmine,” Gabriel told her. “If something goes wrong, you don’t run. You get on the floor and wait. Understand?”
Sadi nodded.
“I know how to make myself small.”
“Good.”
Gabriel stepped into the rain.
Carmine and 4 men in dark coats surrounded him as they approached the steel doors of Miller and Sons Wholesale.
It was almost midnight.
A yellow light still shone through frosted windows above the warehouse floor.
Illegal sweatshops and their suppliers did not operate on normal business hours.
Carmine did not knock.
He kicked the side entrance beside the deadbolt.
The frame split and the door crashed inward.
The men entered in formation.
The warehouse was enormous.
Towering shelves held fabric bolts and industrial spools nearly the size of automobile tires. Machine grease and chemical dyes saturated the air.
Sadi stayed close behind Carmine.
The smell returned her instantly to childhood.
Toxic colorants.
Factory air.
A man shouted from the catwalk overhead.
“What the hell is this?”
A heavyset figure appeared at the railing in a stained dress shirt.
He carried a shotgun.
He did not have time to use it.
3 of Gabriel’s men drew their weapons.
Red laser points settled across his chest.
“Put it down, Miller,” Gabriel said.
His voice carried effortlessly through the warehouse.
“Or you’re dead before it hits the floor.”
Miller stared down.
Recognition removed the color from his face.
Slowly, he placed the shotgun on the metal catwalk and raised both hands.
Then he descended the stairs.
“Mr. Falcone. I didn’t know it was you. We pay our tax to your captains every month. Everything is current.”
“I’m not here for your money.”
Gabriel moved closer.
“I’m here for your ledger.”
“Ledger?”
Miller swallowed.
“I don’t know what you mean. We sell fabric.”
May you like
Gabriel gestured toward Sadi.
She stepped forward.
