Chapter 1 — Time of Death: 11:42

“Time of death: eleven forty-two.”

Dr. Mitchell said it with one hand still on the medical wing door.

Carmine Rossi looked at his watch.

“Who has the keys to his study?”

I was holding a stack of clean towels. The top one slipped from my arms and landed at the doctor’s feet.

Neither man looked down.

For more than two hours, men had run through that hallway carrying blood, equipment, and orders. Now the doors stood open behind Dr. Mitchell, and I could see the edge of a white sheet.

There should have been another sound. Someone crying. Someone asking whether the doctor was certain.

Instead, Carmine pulled out his phone.

“Get everyone in the dining room. Nobody leaves the grounds.”

“Mr. Rossi,” I said.

He glanced at me with the irritation he usually reserved for a stain on his shoe.

“What?”

“Is he still in there?”

The doctor’s eyes moved toward the towels in my arms.

“Yes.”

“Could someone stay with him?”

Carmine lowered his phone.

“What would be the point?”

I tried to answer. My mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t come.

Behind him, two men who had carried Gabriel Falcone into the house less than three hours earlier were already arguing over who should call the harbor crews.

Gabriel’s blood had dried on one of their cuffs.

“Take those to the laundry,” Carmine told me. “Then make coffee. We’re going to have a long night.”

He stepped over the fallen towel.

I bent to pick it up.

That was how the most feared man in Chicago died: with someone stepping over a clean towel while deciding which parts of his life to steal first.

I had seen him come home.

At nine-thirty, three black SUVs had torn across the front lawn. I’d been in the pantry counting table linens when the first man shouted for the east wing to be opened.

Gabriel’s white shirt had been almost entirely red.

His head hung against Lorenzo’s shoulder, and his hand dragged along the side of the stretcher. I remembered that hand reaching past me once to lift a box I couldn’t quite balance.

Tonight, its fingers didn’t move.

Lorenzo had tried to follow him through the medical doors.

Carmine stopped him.

“Mitchell needs room.”

“Then get out of his way.”

“Take your men back to the warehouse. Find out who’s missing.”

For a moment, I thought Lorenzo would hit him. Then Gabriel made a low, awful sound, and everyone moved.

Lorenzo left with his jaw clenched.

Carmine stayed.

Now Gabriel was dead, and Carmine was giving orders in his house.

In the kitchen, the coffee machine hissed while I stood beside it with an empty pitcher.

“Matilda.”

Mrs. Bell, the housekeeper, took the pitcher from me.

“You’re flooding the counter.”

Water had spread around my shoes. I hadn’t noticed.

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing and get the cups.”

Across the room, Vanessa and Elise whispered over a tray of whiskey glasses.

Vanessa had cried when the SUVs arrived. She wasn’t crying now.

“Do you think Rossi will keep the whole staff?”

“He’ll keep the useful ones,” Elise said.

They both glanced at me.

I opened the cupboard.

At twenty-six, I had learned to recognize that glance without turning toward it. I was short, considerably heavier than either of them, and usually assigned the work nobody wanted.

They liked my face well enough when they needed something.

“You have such pretty eyes, Matilda. Could you do my staircases?”

“Your skin is lovely. I’d kill for it. Can you finish the brass before dinner?”

The compliments always arrived carrying a bucket.

I had soft brown eyes, a mouth my mother used to call a rosebud, and a body that never seemed to fit anyone’s idea of what a young woman should be.

The uniform made that worse. Gray, shapeless, and stiff across my shoulders, it turned every curve into something I was supposed to conceal.

I stacked the cups carefully.

“His funeral will probably be enormous,” Vanessa said.

“Carmine won’t wait that long to move into the study.”

The cup in my hand struck the shelf.

Both women went quiet.

Mrs. Bell came over.

“Go serve the dining room.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Her face changed. Not softened, exactly, but something close.

“We all have to keep working.”

I looked toward the hallway.

She followed my gaze.

“Don’t go near the east wing. Mr. Rossi gave instructions.”

I picked up the tray.

The dining room was already full. Men leaned over Gabriel’s table with maps, phones, and open bottles. Someone had pulled his chair away from the head of it.

Carmine sat there instead.

I nearly stopped walking.

Three months earlier, Carmine had put his foot in my path in the foyer.

I’d been carrying six crystal glasses. One moment, I was thinking about whether the windows had been latched before the rain; the next, I was on my knees in broken glass.

A shard sliced my palm.

Carmine laughed.

“Jesus, Higgins. Did the floor crack?”

His men joined him.

I tried to gather the pieces before anyone stepped on them. My hand shook so badly that I dropped the same stem twice.

Then Gabriel walked in.

He didn’t ask why I was on the floor. He looked at Carmine’s foot, still extended across the tiles, and understood.

“Pick her up.”

Carmine smiled uncertainly.

“We were joking.”

“Then apologize. She doesn’t appear to find you funny.”

The foyer went silent.

Carmine helped me stand with a grip that hurt.

Gabriel noticed that, too.

“Carefully.”

Carmine’s fingers loosened.

I waited for Gabriel to leave. Instead, he took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to me.

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m sorry about the glasses.”

“I didn’t ask about the glasses.”

That was all.

He hadn’t called me beautiful. He hadn’t promised to change my life. He had simply refused to let a roomful of men treat me as something less than human.

I had kept the handkerchief after washing it.

Now Carmine sat in his chair.

“Coffee,” he snapped.

I served him first because my hands knew the order even when the rest of me hated it.

As I moved around the table, I heard fragments.

The armory.

The offshore accounts.

A captain in the south who would need persuading.

Then Carmine asked, “Who’s outside the medical wing?”

“Nicky and Paul.”

“Bring them here. We need them on the phones.”

I lowered a cup onto its saucer.

“And the body?” one man asked.

“It’s not going anywhere.”

Carmine laughed.

Nobody else did, but nobody objected.

I finished serving and carried the empty tray out.

At the service corridor, I turned toward the kitchen, then stopped.

A supply closet stood beside the laundry stairs. I took a bucket, two folded cloths, and a bottle of disinfectant.

Useful things.

Things people expected to see in my hands.

I crossed the foyer, keeping my eyes lowered as two armed men hurried past.

Nobody questioned a maid carrying cleaning supplies.

At the east wing, both guard chairs were empty.

I waited, listening.

Voices drifted from the dining room. A chair scraped. Somewhere upstairs, a phone rang until somebody answered it.

I set down the bucket.

The medical door opened beneath my hand.

Cold air moved over my face.

Gabriel lay alone under fluorescent lights, one bare foot visible beneath the sheet.

I closed the door behind me.

For the first time that night, nobody was telling me what to do.

I went to him and folded back the white cloth.