Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Elena
I stared at her small hand.
The scar on my hand was from a rusty iron cargo hook on Pier 42 back in 2010. It was a jagged, perfectly semicircular mark where the steel had gouged through skin and tendon before a dock physician stitched it closed with black thread.
The mark on Lily’s hand was smaller, but the geometry was unmistakable. The same curved arch. The same tiny notch near the index knuckle.
“Where did you get that?” my voice sounded hollow, stripped of its usual authority.
Lily looked down at her hand, touching the pale skin with her other thumb.
“My mom said I was born with it,” she said softly. “She said it was a mark from the moon so she could always find me if we got lost in a crowd.”
My heart slammed against my ribs with a force far greater than Paulie’s fists.
“What’s your mother’s name, Lily?”
“Elena,” she replied, watching my face intently. “Elena Vance. But she doesn't use Vance anymore. She uses Miller.”
The world seemed to tilt beneath the gravel.
Elena.
Eleven years ago, before I took over Moretti Logistics, before the turf wars with the Valenti family solidified into an uneasy truce, Elena Vance was the woman who lived in the second-floor apartment above the bakery on Court Street. She was a quiet, fiercely independent woman who painted landscapes and refused to let me bring my world into her kitchen. When the violence escalated in the winter of 2015, I had walked away—believing that separating myself completely was the only way to keep her alive.
Three months after I left, she disappeared from Brooklyn. I had sent men to look for her, but the street went cold. I assumed she had returned to her family in Ohio.
I had never known she was pregnant.
“Where is your mom now?” I asked, my fingers trembling slightly as I closed my wallet.
Lily’s eyes dropped to her wet sneakers. She kicked a small piece of blue gravel.
“She’s sick,” Lily whispered. “She’s been in the bed at Mrs. Gable’s house for two weeks. She coughs a lot. Uncle Tony takes her medicine money sometimes, so I look for copper before school so we can buy soup.”
A cold rage, cleaner and sharper than anything I had felt toward the men who tied me to that chair, settled deep into my chest.
“Where do you live, Lily?”
She hesitated, looking at me with those cautious blue eyes—Elena’s eyes, framed by the same subtle arch of eyebrow I saw in my own reflection every morning.
“On 9th Street,” she said. “Above the laundromat. But you can’t come up. Uncle Tony doesn't like visitors.”
May you like
I stood up, ignoring the agonizing spike of pain from my cracked ribs. I wiped the blood from my forehead with the back of my sleeve and reached down, holding out my uninjured hand to her.
“Uncle Tony isn't going to be a problem anymore,” I said quietly. “Let’s go home, Lily.”
