Chapter 1 - THE GIRL IN THE FIRE
“My little girl was inside.”
Teresa Bellandi's words seemed to stop every clock in the ballroom.
Norah stood beneath the chandeliers, clutching her torn uniform against her chest. Across the room, fifty guests watched the matriarch of Chicago's most feared crime family stare at a housemaid as though she had seen a ghost.
Roman moved first.
He removed his overcoat, crossed the marble floor, and draped it gently over Norah's shoulders.
Then he turned toward his fiancée.
“Vanessa. Explain yourself.”
Vanessa folded her arms.
“She was flirting with you. I taught her a lesson.”
Roman looked at the ruined uniform.
“You humiliated an employee in my mother's home because I thanked her for doing her job?”
“She knows exactly what she's doing!”
“Enough.”
The single word silenced her.
Teresa barely seemed to hear them.
She approached Norah slowly, her eyes fixed on the burn scar beneath the coat.
“West Addison Street,” Teresa whispered. “December twenty-second. Thirteen years ago.”
Norah's breath caught.
She remembered that night in fragments.
Smoke beneath a bedroom door.
A woman screaming.
Someone pulling her through a hallway.
And a little girl crying behind a wall.
“I was nineteen,” Norah said quietly. “I worked as a live-in babysitter for a family in that building.”
Teresa pressed a shaking hand against her mouth.
“My daughter was six.”
Roman turned sharply.
“Mother, Sofia died when she was six. That fire happened twenty-three years ago.”
“No,” Teresa whispered. “That's what they told us about the first fire.”
Norah stared at her.
Teresa reached into her evening purse and removed a small silver locket.
Inside was a photograph of a little girl with dark curls and bright gray eyes.
Norah recognized the child immediately.
Not from a newspaper.
Not from an old photograph.
From the girl she had tried to carry out of the burning apartment thirteen years earlier.
“I knew her,” Norah whispered.
Teresa began to cry.
Roman took the photograph.
And then Norah said something that made his blood run cold.
“Her name wasn't Sofia when I knew her.”
Teresa looked up.
Norah swallowed.
“They called her Lily.”
From the far end of the ballroom, Vanessa's father, Vincent Caruso, quietly reached for his phone.
May you like
Because he knew exactly who Lily was.
And he had spent thirteen years making sure she stayed dead.
