Chapter 3 - The Blood on the Velvet
The service tunnels beneath Boston’s North End were cold, wet, and smelled of ozone, stagnant water, and rotting timber.
High above us, the low, rhythmic vibration of early morning maintenance trains rattled the iron support beams, sending cascades of rust down onto our shoulders. We had been walking for nearly an hour through the dark labyrinth, illuminated only by the faint screen of my cracked iPhone 11.
Daniel was deteriorating fast.
Every ten paces, his heavy boots would drag against the gravel floor of the drainage trench. His skin had gone from gray to an unnatural, translucent white, and a deep, rattling cough tore through his chest every time he took a step. Yet, despite the agonizing pain, his arms never loosened their grip on his children.
The twins had finally fallen asleep, lulled by the rhythmic sway of his gait and the warm, dark enclosure of his coat, which he had wrapped entirely around them.
"Stop," I whispered, reaching out to catch his arm as he veered dangerously close to an exposed high-voltage cable running along the damp brick wall. "You need to sit down. You're bleeding through your waist now."
He didn't argue this time. He sank back against the cold brick wall, sliding down inch by agonizing inch until he was sitting on a wooden supply crate left behind by transit workers.
I knelt before him in the dark tunnel, my white apron now completely ruined, stained with blood, flour, coal dust, and alley mud.
"Let me see it," I said, reaching for his shirt buttons.
His hand shot out, catching my wrist. "Anna... if you stay with me past sunrise, you won't be able to go back. You understand that, don't you? Your diner, your apartment, your life... Vane will burn it all to the ground by breakfast."
I looked down at his blood-stained fingers on my wrist, then at the two tiny sleeping faces tucked against his chest.
"I don't have a life, Daniel," I said softly, meeting his gaze. "I have a forty-hour-a-week job that pays eight dollars an hour plus tips, a studio apartment with a broken radiator, and no family to miss me if I disappear. I’m a ghost in this city."
A strange, unreadable emotion flickered across his sharp features. "No one is a ghost to me."
"Hold still," I commanded, pulling his hands away and unbuttoning his blood-drenched linen shirt.
Under the faint light of my phone screen, the wound looked horrifying.
A heavy-caliber bullet had struck him in the left side of his abdomen, just below the ribcage. It was a clean entry, but the exit wound near his back was ragged and actively pooling dark red blood onto his suit trousers. He had lost an immense amount of blood, and the tissue around the wound was swollen and hot to the touch.
"The bullet went through," I muttered, trying to recall every basic first-aid video I had ever watched on YouTube during late-night shifts. "That's... that's good, right? No bullet to dig out?"
"It means I won't die of lead poisoning," Daniel rasped, a faint, dry humor in his voice. "It just means I'll bleed to death faster if you don't compress it."
I took off my apron—the clean cotton back layer—and tore it into long, thick strips using my teeth and fingers. I folded the largest piece into a dense pad, pressing it directly against the exit wound on his back.
Daniel gritted his teeth so hard I heard his molars grind, his head snapping back against the brick wall as a low groan escaped his throat.
"I know," I whispered, tears pricking my eyes at the sheer agony on his face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have to tie it tight."
I wrapped the remaining cotton strips around his waist, pulling them taut and securing them with a double knot over his hip. My hands were covered in his blood, warm and metallic, but I didn't care anymore.
When I finished, I sat back on my heels, breathing hard.
Daniel looked down at his chest, where the pad was already beginning to show a faint bloom of red, then up at me.
"You're not a waitress," he said softly.
"I am a waitress," I corrected him, wiping my sweaty forehead with the back of my arm. "I've been a waitress since I was seventeen. Before that, I was a state ward in four different homes in South Boston."
"Then you know how to fight," he said.
"I know how to survive," I replied. "There's a difference."
"Not in my world," Daniel murmured. He reached up, his thick fingers carefully resting atop the girl twin's head. "This is Victoria. The boy is Julian. They were born six months ago in a private clinic in Zurich. Their mother... died in childbirth."
The vulnerability in his voice was like a crack in a dam. The feared crime lord of Boston, the man whose name made syndicate bosses tremble, was looking at two tiny infants with a terror so profound it made my heart ache.
"Why is Vane trying to kill them?" I asked softly.
"Because my father left sixty percent of the Vance Shipping Lines in a private trust for these two," Daniel explained, his eyes darkening. "Vane is my uncle. He’s been running the illegitimate side of the business for twenty years. If the twins die, the entire estate defaults to him under the 1921 family charter. He bought BPD Tactical six months ago. He waited until my father’s funeral tonight to strike."
He reached into his inner suit pocket—a section that had miraculously remained dry—and pulled out a heavy, silver key attached to an iron tag stamped with the number 402.
He pressed it into my blood-stained palm.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Safe house," Daniel said, his voice growing dangerously weak, his head lolling back against the brickwork. "Beacon Hill. 402 Louisburg Square. Private entrance through the carriage house. The security codes... are... 0-9-1-2..."
His eyes rolled back, his lids fluttering shut.
"Daniel!" I grabbed his shoulders, shaking him softly. "Daniel, stay with me! You can't pass out here!"
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His body went entirely limp, his head resting against my chest.
I sat in the pitch-black subway conduit beneath the city, surrounded by rust and stagnant water, holding a unconscious mafia boss and his two orphaned babies, while the sun began to rise over a city that wanted us all dead.
