Chapter 3 - The Sanctuary on Division Street
The Division Street brownstone looked like an abandoned brick relic from the outside, windowless on the ground floor and fortified with reinforced steel doors hidden behind ivy-covered trellises. Inside, however, it was a high-tech fortress operating under the guise of an eccentric antiques collector’s workshop.
Marcus unlatched the heavy deadbolts while Callum guided Sadie inside, steering her toward a leather armchair near a limestone fireplace. The room radiated dry, immediate heat. “Sit down and roll up your left pantleg,” Callum instructed, tossing his damp wool overcoat onto a coat rack without breaking stride. He walked straight toward a mahogany liquor cabinet, bypassing the scotch entirely to pull out a pristine white medical kit.
Sadie hesitated, her cheeks flushing with a mixture of cold and humiliation. “Mr. Russo, please. I am fine. I just need to get back to my own—” “Sadie,” Callum interrupted, turning around with a bottle of antiseptic and sterile gauze in hand. His voice dropped an octave, carrying the weight of absolute authority. “Do not test the limits of my patience tonight. You are bleeding on an $8,005 Turkish rug. Fix the leg, or I will have Marcus do it with medical shears.”
Realizing arguing was futile, Sadie let out a shaky breath and carefully peeled back the shredded fabric of her black tights. The reality of the injury was worse than Callum had initially guessed. A deep, jagged laceration ran three inches down her shin, surrounded by a swelling, purple-black discoloration that indicated severe blunt-force trauma. Worse still, a crude, amateurish brand had been burned into the skin just above her ankle—a small, crisp letter V seared into the flesh with a hot iron.
Callum froze. The medical bottle in his hand stopped mid-air. The V. It wasn't a random mugging. It was a signature.
“Vane,” Callum whispered, the name tasting like ash in his mouth. “You know who did this?” Sadie breathed, her eyes widening in horror as she watched the color drain from the mafia boss's face. “Vane is a rogue fixer who used to run contracts for the Chicago Outfit before they exiled him for excessive brutality,” Callum said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, lethal cadence. He knelt on one knee directly before her chair, unconcerned with the dust or the blood staining his custom trousers. Without a word of warning, he gently took her ankle in his large, steady hand, lifting her leg to inspect the burn.
Sadie gasped, not from pain, but from the sudden, jarring intimacy of the gesture. A man like Callum Russo did not touch people—not unless he was signing a death warrant or pulling a trigger. “This isn't about the Caravaggio sketch,” Callum muttered, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. “Vane doesn't care about art. He works for Viktor Sterling.”
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The name Viktor Sterling was enough to make even the bravest mob enforcers check their locks twice at night. Sterling was a ruthless, syndicate-adjacent financier from Eastern Europe who was trying to break the Russo family's monopoly on the Great Lakes shipping ports and high-end black-market auctions. “Sterling wants the auction manifests,” Sadie whispered, clutching her chest. “He thinks... he thinks I’m the key to tracking your offshore accounts.”
Callum looked up, his stormy eyes locking onto hers with terrifying intensity. “He’s right,” Callum said softly. “You are.”
