Chapter 2 - The Invisible Hand of the Underworld
By noon that day, I was sitting in my custom wheelchair behind the massive mahogany desk in my study. Luke, my second-in-command, stood across from me, looking deeply confused by the task I had just handed him.
“You want a full background check on the night maid?” Luke asked, crossing his arms. “Did she steal something, Danny? Because if she did, I can handle it quietly.”
“She didn't steal anything, Luke,” I growled, shuffling a stack of shipping manifests to hide my unease. “I just want to know why a twenty-six-year-old girl is working herself into a coma. Find out everything. Her debts, her family, her living situation. I want the file on my desk in two hours.”
Luke gave me that long, calculating stare. He had been by my side since we were running illegal poker games in the back of butcher shops. He knew me better than I knew myself. “You haven't yelled at anyone all morning,” he noted cautiously. “And you actually ate the breakfast the chef sent up. This girl… she’s getting under your skin, isn't she?”
“Just get the file, Luke,” I snapped, though there was no real heat behind the threat.
Two hours later, Luke dropped a manila folder onto my desk. The contents painted a picture of a tragedy so common, yet so deeply unfair, that it made my blood boil. Emma Carter was drowning. Her mother, diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, was living in a specialized memory-care facility on the south side of the city. The facility cost six thousand dollars a month. Emma’s father had abandoned them years ago, leaving Emma to shoulder a massive mountain of medical debt alone. She was working three jobs just to keep her mother from being evicted onto the streets.
I looked at the photos of her cramped, rundown apartment in a dangerous neighborhood. I looked at the finalized eviction notices stacked in her file.
“Who holds the medical debt?” I asked, my voice deadly quiet.
“A collection agency owned by the Rossi family,” Luke replied, his expression darkening. The Rossis were our biggest rivals in Chicago. They were vultures who fed on the desperate. “They’ve been harassing her, adding illegal interest rates, threatening to pull her mother's care.”
“Not anymore,” I said, rolling my wheelchair away from the desk. I pulled out my secure phone. “Call our accountants. Wire the full amount of her mother’s care facility for the next five years, paid in advance, anonymously. Then, send a crew to the Rossi collection agency. Tell them the Carter debt belongs to me now, and if they ever contact her again, I’ll burn their entire operation to the ground.”
“Danny,” Luke smiled, a genuine, vicious grin spreading across his scarred face. “Are we finally waking up?”
“We’re wide awake, Luke,” I replied, feeling the familiar, thrilling rush of adrenaline returning to my veins. “Get it done.”
That night, Emma arrived for her shift looking completely shell-shocked. She walked straight into my study, bypassing the cleaning supplies, clutching her cheap cell phone in her trembling hands.
“Mr. Romano,” she breathed, tears brimming in her eyes. “The care facility… someone just paid for five years of my mother's room and board. And the collection agency called and said my debt was entirely forgiven. They were terrified on the phone. Did you… did you do this?”
I sat in the shadows of my study, refusing to look at her tears. “I don't know what you’re talking about, Emma. I run a logistics company.”
She walked around the desk, falling to her knees right beside my wheelchair. She didn't care about my paralyzed legs. She didn't care about my reputation as a monster. She grabbed my hand, pressing it against her tear-stained cheek.
May you like
“You saved my life,” she sobbed, looking up at me with a fierce, unwavering gratitude that shattered the cold, dead walls I had built around my heart. “No one has ever protected me before. Thank you.”
I looked down at the beautiful, exhausted girl kneeling beside my chair, and for the first time in two years, I didn't feel like a broken man. I felt like a king who had finally found a queen worth fighting for.
