Chapter 1 - The Two Empty Bassinets
The scent of another woman’s cheap vanilla perfume was still clinging to Gabriel’s collar when he pushed open the heavy oak doors of his home.
He expected the usual stifling silence and the familiar weight of guilt.
He did not expect to see drying blood smeared across the marble floor of the foyer.
The nursery door stood wide open.
The bassinets were empty.
While Gabriel had been tangled in motel sheets, ignoring his vibrating phone, his wife had brought his children into the world.
Then she had erased herself from it.
The drive back to the compound had been a blur of freezing rain and gray morning light. Gabriel Costa had gripped the leather steering wheel of his SUV while the heater blasted, trying unsuccessfully to drive the chill from his bones.
Chicago in November was unforgiving, but the cold inside him had nothing to do with the weather.
It was 5:15 a.m.
Gabriel had spent the night at a high-rise hotel downtown with Bianca.
It was not love.
It was not even passion.
It was a cynical, ugly escape from the suffocating reality of his life.
Gabriel was the head of the Costa family, a man who dealt in fear, narcotics, and political leverage. At home, however, he was simply a man failing his pregnant wife.
Norah had grown distant. Her belly was swollen, her eyes hollow, and for months she had seemed to look directly through his lies.
So Gabriel had run.
At midnight, he had turned off his phone and disappeared into another woman’s bed because he did not want to face the disappointment in his wife’s eyes.
When the iron gates of the estate opened that morning, Gabriel drove onto the circular driveway and immediately sensed that something was wrong.
The house was completely dark.
Normally, perimeter guards were visible. Normally, lights glowed from the kitchen while the morning staff prepared coffee.
Today there was nothing.
The sprawling stone mansion sat lifeless beneath the gray sky.
Gabriel unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
“Norah?”
Silence.
He removed his coat.
The faint vanilla scent reached him again and turned his stomach.
He passed the sweeping staircase and glanced toward the kitchen.
Empty.
No guards.
No staff.
Gabriel pulled his phone from his pocket and powered it on.
The device began vibrating continuously as notifications flooded the screen.
74 missed calls.
30 text messages.
Most were from Luca, his head of security. Several came from the estate’s landline.
None were from Norah.
Something dropped heavily inside Gabriel’s chest.
He took the stairs 2 at a time.
At the top landing, he pushed open the master bedroom door.
The bed was unmade. The sheets had been stripped from the mattress and lay in a damp, tangled heap on the floor.
“Norah!”
His voice cracked.
He entered the en suite bathroom.
Every light was on.
The large soaking tub was half-filled with lukewarm water stained a pale, rusty pink. Bloody towels had been piled in a corner. Medical gauze wrappers covered the expensive tile.
The metallic smell of blood mixed with rubbing alcohol in the humid air.
Gabriel backed into the hallway, breathing rapidly.
Only then did he notice the rust-colored smears along the floor.
He followed them.
They ended at the nursery.
Gabriel pushed open the door.
The room was perfect.
Soft gray walls.
White wooden furniture.
He had paid a designer an obscene amount of money to make it that way.
2 identical bassinets stood in the center.
Gabriel approached them.
Both were empty.
Their blankets were slightly rumpled, but there were no children.
No crying.
No exhausted mother asleep in the rocking chair.
Nothing.
Gabriel stood between the bassinets as the silence pressed against him.
He had left his pregnant wife alone in this house.
He had turned off his phone.
She had bled here.
She had delivered their children here.
Now all 3 of them were gone.
Within 20 minutes, the silent estate became a war zone.
Gabriel called Luca.
3 black SUVs soon tore up the driveway, their tires cutting through frost-covered grass. Armed men flooded the mansion, tracking mud across pristine carpets.
Their weapons and muscle were useless.
There was no enemy waiting for them.
Only the absence of a woman who had quietly escaped.
Gabriel sat on the edge of the stripped mattress in the master bedroom and stared at his trembling hands.
He clenched them into fists.
Luca entered.
He was broad-shouldered, with a scarred jaw and little tolerance for incompetence.
“The perimeter guards were drugged, boss. Coffee thermos in the guardhouse. Laced with something heavy. They’re out cold. The indoor staff was dismissed yesterday afternoon. Norah told them you wanted the house empty for a private evening.”
Gabriel looked up.
“She planned it.”
“Looks like it.”
“Where is Dr. Harris?”
“In the kitchen. We dragged him out of bed.”
Gabriel stood.
The numbness was disappearing beneath a violent rage directed at the doctor, the guards, and most of all himself.
He went downstairs.
Dr. Harris was seated at the granite kitchen island, surrounded by 3 of Gabriel’s men.
The doctor was in his 50s. For 2 decades, he had treated gunshot wounds and delivered children for members of the organization.
Now he was sweating through his pajamas.
Gabriel leaned across the counter.
“Tell me exactly what happened in my house last night.”
“Gabriel, I tried to call you. I tried for 3 hours.”
“I asked you what happened, not what you tried to do.”
“Norah called me at 10:00 last night. Her water broke. She was in early labor. I rushed over. The guards were already asleep. I let myself in with the keypad code she gave me.”
The doctor’s hands trembled.
“She was in the bathtub. The contractions were coming fast. It was too late to move her to the private clinic. We had to do it here.”
Gabriel closed his eyes.
Norah had endured childbirth in a bathtub while he was with Bianca.
“She was so quiet,” Harris continued. “She didn’t scream, Gabriel. She just bit down on a towel. By 2:00 in the morning, the boy came. 10 minutes later, the girl.”
“A boy and a girl.”
“Twins.”
A son.
A daughter.
Gabriel had not been there.
“Are they healthy?”
“Small, but perfect. Lungs like sirens.”
“Then what?”
His restraint broke.
“How does a bleeding woman with 2 premature newborns walk out of my house without you stopping them?”
“I couldn’t. After I cleaned them up and checked her vitals, I went downstairs to my car for my secondary medical bag. I was gone for 5 minutes. When I came back, the bedroom was empty. The babies were gone.”
Gabriel seized Harris by his pajama collar and dragged him halfway across the granite island.
“You expect me to believe a woman who just gave birth carried 2 infants out of here in 5 minutes?”
“She had help!”
The doctor struggled for breath.
“There were tire tracks at the back entrance. An SUV. Someone was waiting for her. Gabriel, I swear to God, I didn’t know.”
Gabriel shoved him back.
Norah had help.
Someone had helped his wife take their children and disappear.
He had always regarded Norah as separate from his criminal world.
She was an art restorer, soft-spoken and elegant.
He had mistaken that for fragility.
“Luca.”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Lock down the city. Every airport, train station, bus depot, and private airstrip. Check the tollway cameras. Bribe the traffic cops. I want every security camera within a 5-mile radius pulled and reviewed.”
“What are the parameters?”
“She has 2 newborns. She can’t fly commercial without birth certificates. She can’t drive far without those babies needing medical attention. She’s within state lines.”
Gabriel faced his men.
“Find my wife. Find my children. Whoever helped her, bring them to me alive. I want to take them apart piece by piece.”
The Costa Syndicate responded with terrifying efficiency.
By noon, Gabriel’s people had saturated Chicago.
Informants were pressured. Harbor masters and air traffic controllers were bribed. Street-level dealers were dragged into alleys and beaten for information they did not possess.
Chicago’s underworld understood that Gabriel Costa had become a wounded animal tearing through his own territory.
Gabriel remained at the estate.
He needed to understand the woman he had married.
For 3 years, they had shared a bed, meals, and what Gabriel had assumed was a life.
As he tore through her closet, he began to understand how little he knew.
Her dresses remained.
Silk.
Cashmere.
The clothes were neatly arranged, including the pale blue maternity sweater he had bought without asking whether she liked it. Her passport lay in the jewelry drawer. Her wedding ring rested in its velvet box. But her battered leather restoration satchel was gone, along with the small framed painting of two rowboats she had repaired in their first year of marriage.
On the closet floor he found a pair of baby socks, one blue and one yellow, still connected by a plastic tag. A receipt was tucked beneath them. It came from a neighborhood art-supply store, not a baby boutique: two sheets of conservation tissue, a roll of linen tape, and a tiny bottle of reversible varnish. Bought yesterday, paid in cash.
Why would a woman preparing to give birth need varnish?
His phone rang. Luca.
“We have the back-gate camera. Somebody looped it between one fifty-eight and two thirty-four. Looks like an inside job.”
“Who had access?”
“Me. The system administrator. You.”
Gabriel looked at the receipt. Norah had restored paintings professionally before he insisted she take fewer commissions. He used to say he wanted her safe. He had never noticed that her studio had become the only room in the house she locked from the inside.
“Check her studio,” he said.
“Already did. Empty.”
“Not the walls. The work.”
He went down the hall and discovered the studio door hanging open. On her easel stood a blank canvas, its surface newly painted white. Across the bottom edge, in Norah’s unmistakable handwriting, were seven words: IF YOU LOVE THEM, CALL OFF THE HUNT.
Gabriel stared until the letters stopped looking like letters. Beyond the window, his men were racing down the driveway to obey the order he had given them. The first call he made was to Luca. The second, after a long and terrible pause, was to the lawyer he had spent ten years paying to keep prosecutors away.
“I need to tell you what my organization has done,” Gabriel said. “And I need advice about how to stop it.”
Then he noticed the white paint was still wet. Norah had left the warning after the twins were born. She had believed he might choose to read it before choosing what to do next.
May you like
At the bottom of the easel, his phone lit up with a photograph from an unknown number: two tiny hands resting against a hospital blanket. No faces. No location. The message beneath it was not from Norah.
YOU HAVE SIX HOURS TO FIND THE LEDGER. OR THEY WILL FIND HER FIRST.
