Chapter One: Welcome Miss Leila
1452 Words
Sir Leonardo was seconds away from having her when a sharp knock came.
Three hits against the hotel room door that sliced straight through the thick silence of room 214.
He stopped.
Pulled back.
His jaw tightened with irritation.
"Ignore it."
His voice was flat, entitled—the voice of a man who paid for uninterrupted evenings.
"It's customer service. They'll go."
Leila lay still beneath him, staring at the ceiling.
Her mind was already somewhere far from her body.
That was how she did this.
How she endured it.
She sent herself somewhere else and left the shell behind.
A university bill and her whole life to support.
This was the price of survival in a city that charged for everything.
The knock came again.
Harder.
Not a request this time.
Leila moved.
She slid out from under him, grabbed the blue towel from the edge of the mattress, and wrapped it around herself in one motion.
"Where are you going?"
Sir Leonardo’s voice sharpened.
"Could be important."
"Just two seconds," she said.
She was already crossing the room, her bare feet cold against the tile.
She didn't check the peephole.
Her hand found the handle, and she pulled the door open.
The hallway came in fast.
A pair of arms grabbed her before she could process what she was seeing.
Before her brain could form the word danger, they yanked her forward out of the doorway with a force that lifted her feet off the ground.
Something dark came down over her eyes.
A blindfold.
She inhaled instinctively.
And the smell hit her.
Sweet.
Dense.
Chemical.
Wrong in a way her body understood before her mind did.
Chloroform.
She fought.
Clawed at the arms locked around her.
Her nails found skin, and she dragged them.
She heard a short, sharp sound, but the grip didn't break.
It tightened.
And she was already moving.
Already being carried through the corridor at a pace that told her these men had done this before.
And she wasn't the first.
Then the gunshot came from behind her.
One shot.
Clean.
Final.
Sir Leonardo didn't make a sound after it.
Leila's whole body seized.
She stopped fighting for exactly one second — the second it took her to understand what that sound meant.
What it meant for the man still in that room.
And in that one second, the chloroform rushed in.
Her legs started to go.
She fought that too.
Turned her face.
Tried to hold her breath.
But her lungs were already burning.
Her knees were already numb.
And the men just kept moving her.
Through a door.
And into cold night air that hit her bare legs like a slap.
"Camera feed's handled."
A voice beside her.
Calm and professional, like a man checking something off a list.
"All four floors. We're clean."
A door opened.
She was lowered into a leather cold seat.
Then the car engine.
Low and growling.
Vibrating through the seat and up through her spine.
She tried to hold her breath, but the pressure thickened in her chest and her thoughts began to dissolve one by one.
Her towel.
She was still in her towel.
The last coherent thing she felt, before the dark swallowed everything, was the certainty that had been building since the moment that door flew open.
Her life had just changed.
She didn't know what it had changed into.
But she knew, deep in whatever part of her that was still conscious, that nothing about what came next was going to be ordinary.
The car pulled away at speed.
And the dark Chicago streets swallowed them.
On the forty-second floor of a glass-walled building that overlooked the city like a throne,
A man named Hank was running out of time.
He was already on his knees.
Had been for the past hour.
His shirt was torn open, soaked dark with blood.
One sleeve hung off his shoulder.
His face was barely recognizable — both eyes swollen, bottom lip burst, a deep gash across his brow that had long since stopped bleeding and started crusting.
Zane's men had been efficient about it.
The way they were efficient about everything.
Zane himself sat in a chair directly across from him.
Without pacing.
Just sitting.
One leg crossed over the other.
Watching Hank with the patient, the cold attention of a man who had all the time in the world and had already made his decision inside it.
This was Zane Roger.
Controller of the four Mafia zones.
The man men answered to.
The man whose name opened doors that money couldn't and closed doors that power couldn't.
He had not inherited this.
He had built it.
Year by year.
Decision by decision.
With a discipline that other men in his world mistook for coldness.
And never understood was something far more dangerous than that.
He looked at Hank now.
And felt the weight of what he was looking at.
For three years, this man had worked inside his operation.
Three years sitting in rooms where things were said that could dismantle everything.
Trusted.
Relied upon.
Given access that was earned, not assigned.
And he had taken it straight to that parasite, Thomas Veil.
"Please."
Hank's voice was barely a voice anymore.
Ragged.
Wet.
Stripped raw.
"My children. Thomas took my children."
He was shaking.
Every word cost him something physical.
"He said he'd kill my wife if I didn't comply."
His breathing became uneven.
"I swear to God I didn't take a single dime from him. Not a cent. I had no choice. He had my babies."
Zane just watched him.
Didn't move.
Didn't blink.
"I would never..."
Hank’s voice broke.
"You have to know I would never willingly..."
His words fell apart.
Something cracked open in the middle of it.
What came out was raw.
Real fear.
Real desperation.
The kind that wasn't performed.
"Please. Please, I'm begging you. I will fix this. Whatever you need me to do, whatever it costs me, I'll spend the rest of my life—"
Zane stood up.
He reached into his jacket.
Slow.
Unhurried.
His fingers closed around the gun.
He drew it out and checked it.
Three bullets left in the chamber.
Something crossed his face then.
Just briefly.
Something that wasn't quite anger.
And wasn't quite grief.
Something entirely private.
Three bullets.
One for every man Thomas had taken from him, using what Hank handed over.
Hank saw the gun.
His words dissolved.
The begging stopped.
Replaced by something worse.
A silence that was pure terror.
The silence of a man who had finally understood that the conversation was over.
"Ro...ger, I beg you!"
He was emptying all three bullets into the man when the main door flew open.
The sound filled the room.
Then disappeared.
Hank dropped.
The silence that followed was immediate and absolute.
That specific, heavy silence of a room where something irreversible had just happened.
Zane lowered the gun.
Leila was already half awake.
She heard the sound before she saw anything.
The blindfold was swiped off her face as soon as she entered the room.
The light hit her eyes like a fist.
She gasped.
Blinking.
Her whole body lurching forward as awareness crashed back in all at once.
She saw the brutally murdered man on the floor first.
The room smelled of strong liquor.
And around the dead man was a pool of blood.
Then she saw the man sitting across from him.
Dark suit.
Gun in his hand.
A face that gave her absolutely nothing.
No panic.
no remorse.
No performance of any kind.
Just a man standing in a room where he had just shot someone three times, looking as composed as if he had simply closed a window.
Something left Leila's body all at once.
Her legs gave out.
She opened her mouth.
And what came out was a scream.
She didn't decide to scream.
It came out of her without permission.
Loud.
Broken.
Raw.
Her knees hit the floor.
The blue towel slipped from her body entirely, and she couldn't catch it.
Her hands wouldn't work.
She was on the floor in this deadly room in the middle of nowhere.
There was a dead man three feet from her face.
And the man who put him there was turning around.
Turning to look at her.
Zane Rogers turned at the sound.
He saw her.
On the floor.
Bare.
Shaking so violently that her teeth were clicking together.
Her eyes were wide and locked on the body.
Her chest heaved with sounds she couldn't stop making.
He looked at her for one long moment.
Then let out a loud scoff.
And said:
"Welcome, Miss Leila."
- Writer
