Chapter 3 - The Fragrance of Old Betrayals
The brownstone on Belden Avenue in Lincoln Park was dark when Callum’s car cut its headlights fifty yards down the block.
Sleet tapped against the windshield like nervous fingers.
Callum stepped out into the freezing night alone, leaving Frank with instructions to block both ends of the alleyway behind the building.
He climbed the slick sandstone steps, his fingers curled around the heavy brass key he had kept on his ring for three years—a key Hazel had given him during her first winter at the firm, when his father was dying of pancreatic cancer and the safe in her apartment held the family’s emergency offshore codes.
He had never used it.
Until tonight.
He slid the key into the lock; the brass tumbler turned without resistance.
Callum opened the heavy oak door and entered the small, immaculate foyer of Hazel’s third-floor apartment.
The apartment did not smell of lavender or cooking spices.
It smelled of wet overcoats, aged cedarwood, and the cloying, unmistakable stench of the blue hydrangeas sitting in a glass vase upon her dining room table.
The living room was illuminated only by the streetlamp outside the rain-streaked window.
Sitting on the edge of the velvet sofa, still dressed in her charcoal pencil skirt and silk blouse, Hazel was sipping black tea from a white porcelain cup.
She did not turn around when the floorboards creaked beneath his weight.
“You took the expressway from the West Loop,” she said calmly, setting her teacup onto its saucer with a sharp clink.
“The traffic on Fullerton is always backed up when it freezes. You arrived seven minutes faster than I calculated.”
Callum pulled the linen business card from his pocket and threw it across the table.
It landed squarely next to the vase of hydrangeas.
“Explain it to me, Hazel.”
She looked down at the card bearing Julian Vance’s name.
Her face was an unreadable mask of ivory and shadow.
“Explain what, Callum? That you beat Thomas Finch until he told you about Pier 14?”
“You fed our shipping coordinates to a syndicate hitman masquerading as a city planner,” Callum said, his voice dropping into a register that made the windowpanes vibrate.
“You gave him the ledger from 2021. The ledger my father sealed before his heart stopped.”
Hazel stood up, smoothing the front of her skirt.
She looked smaller in the dim light of her home, stripped of the corporate armor of the 42nd floor, yet her posture possessed a terrifying, coiled strength.
“Julian Vance is not a hitman, Callum. And he is not working for the Bertinelli family.”
“Then who is he, Hazel? Why are his flowers sitting in your living room while my docks are crawling with armed men looking to butcher my crew?”
Hazel walked to the fireplace, where an old iron mantle was covered in framed photographs of Chicago’s old south neighborhoods.
She reached behind a picture of the old municipal docks and retrieved a small, yellowed newspaper clipping from twenty years ago.
She turned and held it out to him.
Callum snatched the paper from her fingers.
The headline was dated October 14, 2004:
Tragic Fire at South Side Lumber Yard Claims Life of City Inspector Daniel Reed; Arson Ruled Out Due to Faulty Wiring.
Callum’s breath caught in his throat.
Daniel Reed.
“My father didn’t die from faulty wiring, Callum,” Hazel whispered, her voice cracking for the first time since Callum had met her.
“He died because your father, Arthur Sullivan, padlocked the warehouse doors from the outside when my father refused to approve the counterfeit lumber shipments arriving from Canada.”
Callum looked up from the yellowed print, his mind racing through childhood memories of his ruthless father.
He remembered the night his father returned home smelling of gasoline and soot, his hands raw and blistered, telling eight-year-old Callum that business in Chicago required men to make difficult sacrifices.
“You knew,” Callum breathed, the horror settling deep into his gut.
“You applied for the internship at Sullivan Maritime three years ago knowing exactly whose empire it was.”
“I didn’t just apply, Callum. I spent five years earning two degrees in corporate finance and maritime law specifically to become the only person you could never afford to fire.”
She took three deliberate steps toward him until her chin was tilted upward, her eyes ablaze with twenty years of buried grief.
“Every account I audited for you, every offshore shell company I set up in the Cayman Islands, every ledger I balanced—I did it so that when the day came, I could pull the single brick that would bring your father’s legacy crashing down on your head.”
Callum looked at the blue hydrangeas on the table.
Hydrangeas.
The traditional flower of mourning and apologies that never came.
“And Julian Vance?” Callum asked, his voice raw. “Who is he to you?”
A cold smile touched Hazel’s lips, sharper than the razor edge of an executioner’s axe.
“Julian’s real name is Julian Vance Reed. He is my older brother, Callum. And tonight, he isn’t at Pier 14 to steal your weapons.”
Callum’s phone began to vibrate violently in his coat pocket.
He pulled it out.
Frank’s name flashed across the screen in red letters.
Callum answered, his eyes locked onto Hazel’s unblinking stare.
May you like
“Boss!” Frank’s voice screamed over the sound of blaring sirens and automatic gunfire.
“It’s an ambush! But it’s not the Bertinellis! Federal agents and state police have cordoned off the entire peninsula! They have your father’s handwritten journals, Callum! They have the original murder warrants!”
