💐 The Flowers She Received Made the Mafia Boss Lose Control

Chapter 04 - The Fire at St. Bartholomew's

The first shot shattered the bulb above the storage unit, plunging everything into black except for the red pulse of the alarm lights. Hazel felt a hand close around her waist and pull her down behind a stack of metal filing cabinets.

Callum's mouth was near her ear. 'Stay low.'

'I was planning to stand and introduce myself.'

Even in the dark, she felt his pause. 'You argue during ambushes?'

'Only when men give obvious instructions.'

Gunfire cracked down the corridor. Milo answered twice. The sound was controlled, professional, almost bored. Whoever had come for them was less interested in theatrical violence than in efficiency. That frightened Hazel more.

Adrian crawled toward them, bleeding from a shallow cut across his cheek. 'They followed me.'

'Who?' Hazel demanded.

'People who don't want the ledger found.'

Callum's hand tightened at her waist. 'Which ledger?'

'The one your father used to buy judges, silence widows, and erase children.'

Another bullet punched through the storage unit wall. Hazel flinched despite herself. Callum shifted, placing his body between her and the thin metal as if flesh could argue with lead.

'Move,' he ordered.

Milo kicked open the rear service door, and they ran through rain-slick concrete corridors smelling of dust and gasoline. Hazel's shoes slid twice. Each time Callum caught her without looking back, his grip firm enough to bruise, careful enough not to hurt.

They reached the underground loading bay where two black SUVs waited with engines running. Callum shoved Adrian into the first and pulled Hazel into the second. The driver accelerated before her door fully closed.

Chicago blurred past the tinted windows, wet neon bleeding into the dark. Hazel pressed a hand to her ribs and forced herself to breathe evenly.

Callum sat beside her, watching the mirrors. 'Tell me everything.'

'That is not a question.'

'Hazel.'

She heard the warning in his voice and the plea beneath it. That second thing weakened her more than the first.

'My father was an accountant for your father,' she said. 'Not a soldier. Not a thief. An accountant. One night, a church burned on the West Side. Officially it was an electrical fire. Unofficially, a meeting was happening in the basement.'

Callum looked out the window. 'St. Bartholomew's.'

'My father came home with burns on his hands and a boy's blood on his coat. He told my mother he had done the right thing for the wrong family.'

Callum's jaw worked once. 'I was twelve.'

The rain blurred his reflection until his face looked unfinished.

'I remember smoke,' he said. 'Sirens. Someone carrying me out. My father told me it was one of his men. He never said a name.'

'Three weeks later, my father disappeared. They found his car in the river. No body.'

Callum turned sharply. 'No body?'

Hazel shook her head. 'My mother accepted the death certificate because she had a mortgage and a daughter who needed braces. I accepted nothing.'

'So you came to work for me.'

'I came to find out whether you killed him.'

There it was. The clean, ugly truth. It filled the SUV more completely than the smell of gunpowder still clinging to Callum's coat.

'And?' he asked.

Hazel looked at his ink-stained fingers. No, not ink now. A smear of blood from where glass had cut his knuckle. 'I haven't decided.'

The driver took a hard turn. Hazel reached for the door handle. Callum caught her wrist, then immediately released it as if he remembered her words from that morning.

You don't have me.

'We're not going to my penthouse,' he said. 'Too obvious.'

'Where are we going?'

'A house nobody knows about.'

'Everyone in your world knows everything eventually.'

Callum gave a humorless smile. 'Not this.'

The SUV climbed north along the lake until the city's teeth softened into old money and iron gates. At last they turned into the drive of a stone house hidden behind winter-black trees.

Hazel saw one light burning in an upstairs window.

The safe house road ran along the lake, where expensive homes hid behind stone walls and bare branches. Hazel watched rain chase itself across the window and tried to assemble what she knew into something stable. Her father had saved Callum. Her father had vanished. Callum had not known. Or claimed not to know.

Trust, she thought, was not a feeling. It was a risk dressed up as a virtue.

Callum kept his eyes on the road ahead though he was not driving. Every so often, his gaze shifted to the side mirror, then the rear window, then the reflection of Hazel's face in the glass. He did not ask if she was hurt again. She suspected asking once had already cost him.

'Stop watching me like I'm going to shatter,' she said.

'You were shot at.'

'People are shot at in your world before breakfast.'

'Not you.'

The words came too quickly, too honestly. Both of them looked away.

Hazel knew many kinds of danger. Men with guns. Ledgers with signatures. Women who smiled too sweetly. But this was a quieter danger: the possibility that Callum Sullivan, beneath all that power and violence, had made a private rule about her survival.

Rules could become cages. They could also become promises. Hazel was not yet ready to know which one he meant.

When the house appeared behind the trees, she felt a foolish flicker of relief. Then she saw the upstairs light, and Callum's face told her relief had arrived too early.

Callum saw it too, and every muscle in his body went rigid.