Chapter 1 - The Ghost at Lombardi’s
Porcelain shattering against hardwood sounded exactly like a car crash if you were standing close enough.
Sadie had not dropped a single glass in 3 years.
She kept her head down, served overpriced food, and faded into the wallpaper. But when he walked through the heavy brass doors—the man she had spent 36 months running from, the man who owned half the city’s underground—her fingers simply went numb.
He did not yell.
He only looked at the manager and gave a quiet order.
The entire restaurant froze.
Friday nights at Lombardi’s were an exercise in controlled chaos. The restaurant catered to a particular class of clientele: old money that wanted to feel traditional and new money that wanted to purchase class. The air was permanently thick with roasted garlic, seared bone marrow, and expensive musky perfumes.
Sadie balanced a cork-lined tray on her left shoulder. It carried 3 plates of osso buco, a heavily modified order of Dover sole, and a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino worth more than her monthly rent.
Her sensible black shoes felt as though they had been filled with wet cement.
She was 8 hours into a 10-hour double shift. Her lower back carried its familiar dull ache, and a loose strand of brown hair clung to the perspiration on her forehead.
She moved through the crowded dining room with the precision of a ghost.
That was always the objective.
To be entirely unremarkable.
To become nothing more than a pair of hands that delivered food and removed empty plates.
In a city of 3 million people, anonymity was her only defense.
She turned near the front vestibule, watching the narrow opening between table 4 and the maître d’ stand. A string quartet played a subdued classical piece in the corner while wealthy patrons discussed stock options, offshore accounts, and complicated divorces.
Then the heavy brass doors opened.
Freezing November air entered the lobby, disturbing the velvet curtains and drawing complaints from nearby diners.
Sadie did not immediately look up. She was adjusting the tray, making certain the wine bottle remained secure.
Then the room changed.
The hostess stepped backward and dropped her leather-bound reservation book.
2 waiters near the entrance stopped speaking.
Conversation began disappearing table by table.
Sadie felt the silence before she understood it.
It was the kind of silence that seemed to remove oxygen from a room.
She looked toward the entrance.
Roman stood in the foyer.
His tailored charcoal overcoat was darkened at the shoulders by melted snow. There was no excessive jewelry and no army of men surrounding him.
Only Tommy stood behind him, broad-shouldered and silent, examining the patrons with the detached attention of a butcher studying livestock.
Roman brushed a drop of water from his lapel.
His dark hair was meticulously styled, his jaw fixed in its familiar expression of calculation.
He possessed a terrifying gravity.
He traded in favors, fear, and human lives, yet he looked as though he belonged on the cover of a financial magazine.
Sadie stopped breathing.
36 months.
1,095 days.
She had moved 3 times, changed her Social Security number, dyed her hair, and lived almost entirely with cash in an attempt to erase his fingerprints from her life.
Roman’s gaze moved across the restaurant.
He was not searching for a table.
He was searching for a ghost.
Then his eyes found hers across approximately 50 ft of mahogany and white tablecloths.
Roman stopped too.
For only a fraction of a second, the mask slipped.
His posture stiffened.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
Anyone else might have missed it.
Sadie knew him better than anyone alive.
It was recognition.
Her fingers lost all sensation.
The tray fell.
The Brunello bottle went first, tumbling over the edge. Heavy ceramic plates followed in a disastrous avalanche.
Glass exploded across the hardwood.
Deep red wine spread between the fragments, splattering the baseboards and pooling around the ruined osso buco like blood.
The restaurant jumped.
The string quartet stopped with the harsh scrape of a bow against a cello string.
Sadie remained standing.
Roman had not reacted to the crash.
He was watching her.
Arthur, the restaurant manager, burst through the kitchen doors with his face flushed red.
He saw the wine, broken dishes, and staring customers.
He did not see Roman.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
Arthur seized Sadie by the arm and jerked her backward.
“Are you blind? Do you know what that bottle costs? Get on the floor and clean this up now.”
Sadie barely heard him.
The roar inside her ears drowned out everything except the man at the entrance.
Arthur shook her.
“I said move, you incompetent—”
“Take your hand off her.”
Roman had barely raised his voice.
He did not need to.
Arthur froze.
He turned.
The anger drained from his face, replaced by a sickly gray.
He released Sadie immediately.
Roman unbuttoned his overcoat and walked into the dining room without taking his eyes from her.
“If you ever touch her again, I will ensure you spend the rest of your short life eating through a straw. Do you understand me?”
Arthur nodded rapidly.
“Yes. Apologies. Deepest apologies, sir.”
Roman finally looked at the broken bottle and wine surrounding Sadie’s feet.
“Give us your best corner booth.”
He handed his coat to the frightened hostess.
“And she serves it.”
Sadie’s knees struck the hardwood.
She had not chosen to kneel. Her legs simply stopped supporting her.
She reached for the broken neck of the wine bottle.
A green shard sliced through the pad of her index finger.
Blood appeared and dripped into the spilled wine and gravy.
She felt nothing.
A pair of hand-stitched Italian leather shoes stopped inches from her fingers.
Sadie stared at them.
She remembered those exact shoes pacing across the hardwood floors of a penthouse while Roman decided who would live and who would lose everything.
“Don’t cut yourself, Nora.”
The name struck harder than anything else could have.
Nora.
Her real name.
For 3 years, she had been Sadie.
Sadie was quiet.
Sadie was safe.
Norah was the woman who had loved a monster and barely escaped with her soul intact.
May you like
Arthur hurried forward.
“I’ll handle this, sir. Please, right this way.”
