Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Glass
At three o'clock on Friday morning, the Halcyon Grand was a monument of silent luxury. The rain had stopped, leaving the city beneath the clouds damp, black, and glittering like a field of crushed obsidian.
On the forty-fourth floor, Sloan Walsh couldn't sleep. She wore a pair of soft silk pajamas that had been left in the suite’s master wardrobe, the tags still attached. The bed was larger than her entire bedroom at the old apartment, but the sheets felt too smooth, too foreign against her skin. She kept thinking she would wake up to the sound of her alarm at 3:00 AM, her hands smelling of ammonia and the concrete stairs waiting for her knees.
She slipped out of bed and walked down the long, carpeted corridor toward the kitchen.
Posie was fast asleep in the smaller room down the hall, her arms wrapped around Buttons, her breathing steady and deep under a blue cashmere blanket.
Sloan stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass in the living room, looking out at the Chicago River. A single silhouette was reflected in the dark pane.
Cain Brennan was sitting in a low leather chair by the fireplace, a glass of dark amber scotch in his hand, his eyes fixed on the embers. He hadn't changed out of his suit trousers, though his black shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, revealing the edge of an old, jagged scar near his collarbone.
"You should be resting, Sloan," he said without turning around.
"I’m not used to the quiet," she said, stepping onto the rug near his chair. "In my old place, the L-train ran every twelve minutes. The windows rattled so hard you always knew what time it was."
Cain lifted his glass, the crystal catching the orange glow of the dying fire. "My brother used to say the same thing. He hated this building when we first bought it. He said it felt like living inside a diamond—too bright, too clean, nowhere to hide the dirt."
Sloan looked at the scar on his throat. "Your brother... Eli. What happened to him?"
Cain’s hand went entirely still around the glass. For a second, Sloan thought she had crossed a line that would get her thrown out into the rain. But then he took a slow, deep swallow of the scotch and leaned his head back against the leather.
"He thought the world had rules," Cain said, his voice dropping into a register that sounded like old wood sliding over stone. "He thought if you were fair with people, they would be fair with you. He went to a meeting with the Falcos to settle a border dispute at the railyards. He didn't bring a weapon because he had a signed treaty in his pocket."
He turned his head to look at her, his dark eyes entirely hollow in the firelight.
"They shot him three times in the back while he was reaching for his pen. Then they left his body in a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant on the South Side. I found his treaty in the mud next to his shoes."
Sloan felt a cold shudder move through her spine. She reached down, her fingers instinctively brushing against the raw, cracked skin of her thumb. "Is that why you’re so hard, Mr. Brennan?"
"I’m alive, Sloan," he said, standing up and stepping into her personal space. He looked down at her face, his gaze tracing the small lines of worry around her mouth. "In my world, you’re either hard or you’re grease on someone else’s wheel. Your husband... what did he leave you?"
"Debt," she said honestly, looking up into his dark eyes. "A mountain of medical bills from his accident at the foundry, a child who looks exactly like him when she laughs, and a funeral I’m still paying for on a three-year installment plan."
Cain reached out, his large, scarred hand moving slowly toward her face. His thumb brushed against her cheek, a gesture so faint, so unexpectedly tender that her breath caught in her throat.
Before he could say another word, the fire died.
Not just the fire—the entire suite went pitch-black. The golden sconces along the wall vanished. The faint hum of the building’s air filtration system died out into a terrifying, dead silence.
The emergency lights did not turn on.
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Cain’s hand dropped from her face, his body instantly going rigid as he pulled a heavy, matte-black semi-automatic pistol from his waistband with a sound that was smooth as silk.
"The freight elevator," Cain whispered, his voice cutting through the dark like a knife. "They’ve cut the secondary grid."
