Chapter 2 - The Name Everyone Feared
Claire stared at the photograph.
Then at the man standing beside her.
Then back at the photograph.
“No.”
Dorian Ferrante said nothing.
Claire reached up and removed the frame from the wall.
She had seen the picture thousands of times.
Her parents stood outside the café twenty-five years younger. Her father had one arm around her mother. Her mother held a white towel stained dark near one corner.
Between them stood the injured teenager.
Claire looked closer.
The jaw was thinner.
The shoulders narrower.
The hair longer.
But the eyes were the same.
“You?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Dorian’s men had become silent.
Even Toby.
Claire lowered the picture.
“My parents never said your name.”
“They probably had a reason.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
“Then answer me.”
Petra stepped forward.
“Claire—”
Dorian lifted one hand.
Petra stopped.
Claire noticed that, too.
The obedience.
The caution.
The strange way the entire room seemed built around one man’s decisions.
Claire’s throat tightened.
“Who are you?”
Toby looked down.
Bull leaned the mop against the wall.
Dorian studied her.
“My name is Dorian Ferrante.”
Claire waited.
Nothing.
“That’s supposed to mean something?”
Toby actually laughed.
It escaped before he could stop it.
Dorian glanced at him.
“Sorry.”
Claire folded her arms.
“Apparently I missed orientation.”
Petra stepped closer.
“Ferrante Logistics.”
Claire knew that name.
Everyone in Chicago knew that name.
Freight terminals.
Warehouses.
Trucking contracts.
Commercial property.
Then another memory surfaced.
A headline.
A federal investigation that went nowhere.
Rumors about the Ferrante family having existed long before the trucking company became respectable.
Stories Claire had dismissed because she had a child, payroll, coffee orders and enough actual problems without borrowing imaginary ones.
Her face changed.
Dorian noticed.
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh.”
“That reaction is more common.”
Claire looked at the fifteen people in her café.
“Are you criminals?”
Toby suddenly became fascinated with his empty bowl.
Petra closed her eyes.
Bull muttered something that sounded like a prayer.
Dorian looked almost amused.
“That’s complicated.”
“No, taxes are complicated.”
“Fair.”
Claire stepped backward.
She suddenly saw everything differently.
The window positions.
The way Bull checked the lock.
The guns.
The deference.
She thought of Maddie sleeping twenty feet away.
Dorian saw that thought arrive.
“Your daughter is safe.”
“You don’t get to tell me that.”
“No.”
His agreement disarmed her more than denial would have.
He continued quietly.
“But she is.”
Claire looked at Petra.
The woman met her gaze without flinching.
“You have my word.”
Claire didn’t know why, but she believed Petra before she believed Dorian.
“Explain the photograph.”
Dorian pulled out a chair.
Claire remained standing.
He sat anyway.
“In 2001, my brother and I were attacked three blocks from here.”
Claire’s fingers tightened around the frame.
“Why?”
“My family had enemies.”
“That sounds dramatically understated.”
“It is.”
“What happened?”
“My brother got away. I didn’t.”
Claire looked at the boy in the picture.
Blood soaked his side.
“My father found you?”
“Your mother.”
Claire blinked.
Dorian looked toward the kitchen.
“She was taking trash out behind the café. She found me behind a dumpster.”
Claire could picture it.
Pearl Whitaker had been five feet three inches tall and entirely incapable of minding her own business when somebody needed help.
“She brought you inside.”
“Yes.”
“My dad knew?”
“He helped.”
“What did they do?”
“Your mother stitched a wound she had no business stitching.”
Claire laughed despite herself.
“That sounds like Mom.”
“She yelled at me for bleeding on the floor.”
“That definitely sounds like Mom.”
Something warm passed through Dorian’s expression.
Gone almost immediately.
“She refused to call an ambulance because I begged her not to.”
“Why?”
“If the wrong people knew where I was, I wouldn’t have survived the night.”
Claire’s smile disappeared.
“My parents hid you?”
“For eleven hours.”
“Here?”
“In the basement.”
Claire looked toward the floor.
The café basement contained old shelving, a broken freezer and thirty years of things nobody had ever thrown away.
“When my people came looking,” Dorian said, “your father refused to give me up until he knew they were actually mine.”
Claire smiled faintly.
“That also sounds like Dad.”
“He stood at the back door holding a cast-iron skillet.”
Bull chuckled.
Dorian looked at him.
“It was not funny at the time.”
“It’s a little funny now.”
Dorian ignored him.
Claire looked down at the picture again.
“Why didn’t they tell me?”
“Probably because they wanted you nowhere near my family.”
“Smart people.”
“Yes.”
She set the picture on the counter.
“Then what does this have to do with Orsini?”
Dorian’s face hardened.
“Everything.”
The storm rattled the windows.
One of his men approached.
“Road crews say another hour, minimum.”
Dorian nodded.
Claire looked between them.
“You know whoever is trying to buy my café.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Vincent Orsini’s father was one of the men looking for me the night your parents found me.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Claire gripped the counter.
“That was twenty-five years ago.”
“Men like Vincent inherit grudges the way other people inherit watches.”
“You think he’s doing this because my parents helped you?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“I don’t reassure people when I don’t have facts.”
Claire looked at him.
For the first time, that cold precision felt less threatening.
Almost.
“You’re going to investigate?”
“I already am.”
“When?”
Dorian checked his watch.
“Three minutes ago.”
Claire looked toward the group.
One man was already on his phone.
Another had opened a laptop.
“You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn my café into a command center.”
“It has Wi-Fi.”
“That does not make it headquarters.”
Dorian looked toward Toby.
“Is the Wi-Fi good?”
Toby shook his head.
“No.”
Claire pointed at him.
“Traitor.”
For ten minutes, people made calls while Claire tried to pretend she hadn’t accidentally provided shelter to a criminal logistics dynasty.
Maddie appeared again.
This time carrying her stuffed rabbit.
She stopped when she saw everyone serious.
“What happened?”
Claire crossed the room.
“Nothing.”
“That’s your lying voice.”
Dorian looked away to hide a smile.
Claire crouched.
“I do not have a lying voice.”
“You do.”
“What does it sound like?”
“Like that.”
Claire sighed.
Maddie peered around her.
“Is he famous?”
Dorian answered before Claire could stop him.
“Unfortunately.”
“What for?”
Dorian considered this.
“Trucks.”
Maddie nodded.
“That’s boring.”
Bull laughed.
“He owns a lot of trucks.”
“Still boring.”
Dorian accepted the judgment.
Claire sent her to sit with Petra.
An hour passed.
The café felt warmer.
The storm softened slightly.
One of Dorian’s men, Mason, brought information from the back table.
“Orsini Development bought three properties on this block in the last eighteen months.”
Claire knew that.
“They want the whole corner.”
“They already have agreements pending on two more.”
Dorian looked at Claire.
“Yours is the holdout.”
“My parents built this place.”
“That matters to you.”
“Yes.”
“To them, it’s square footage.”
Claire hated how accurately he said it.
Mason continued.
“Orsini filed code complaints through third parties.”
Claire’s face went still.
“What?”
“Eleven complaints. Different names. Same originating office.”
“How do you know?”
Mason hesitated.
Claire looked at Dorian.
“I’m not asking how.”
“Wise.”
“They’re harassing me.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody cared.”
Dorian’s jaw hardened.
“Someone will.”
Claire immediately straightened.
“I don’t want anyone hurt.”
His eyes met hers.
“I didn’t say hurt.”
“What did you mean?”
“Accountable.”
She didn’t entirely trust the distinction.
Near two in the morning, the roads reopened.
Dorian’s people began preparing to leave.
Claire felt relief.
And something else she refused to name.
Petra hugged Maddie.
Bull left twenty dollars beneath his bowl.
Claire found it and shoved it back into his hand.
“No.”
“It’s a tip.”
“You mopped.”
“I also ate.”
“You mopped more than you ate.”
They argued for a minute.
Bull finally surrendered.
Toby left a drawing of a terrible rectangle-shaped dog beside the register.
Maddie declared it “better than expected.”
Dorian was the last to put on his coat.
Claire stood by the door.
“So that’s it?”
“No.”
She frowned.
“No?”
“I’m coming back tomorrow.”
“This is a café. People usually do.”
“I’m not coming for coffee.”
“That sounds ominous.”
He looked at the photograph still resting on the counter.
“I need to know exactly what happened here in 2001.”
“You were there.”
“Not all of it.”
Claire followed his gaze.
“What don’t you know?”
Dorian hesitated.
“My brother always told me your parents saved me once.”
Claire waited.
His expression had become unreadable.
“Tonight I saw your father’s name.”
“So?”
Dorian reached inside his coat.
He removed an old metal lighter.
Scratched silver.
Dented corner.
On one side were two letters.
D.W.
Claire stared.
“My dad’s initials.”
“Yes.”
“Why do you have that?”
“Because six years after the night in that photograph, somebody dragged me out of a burning car.”
Claire stopped breathing.
Dorian placed the lighter in her palm.
“I never saw his face.”
Claire turned it over.
On the bottom, barely visible beneath years of scratches, was an engraving she knew.
Pearl + Daniel.
Forever.
Her mother had given it to her father on their tenth anniversary.
Claire’s voice broke.
“My father died in 2007.”
Dorian nodded.
“The same night someone saved my life.”
And suddenly the stranger standing in her café was no longer looking at Claire.
May you like
He was looking twenty years into the past.
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