Chapter 5 - The Prescription
Grace walked out of the Massachusetts General Hospital outpatient pharmacy with a white paper bag clutched so tightly in her fingers that the cardboard was damp with sweat.
Inside was a single orange bottle of anti-rejection pills for Leo—thirty small white tablets that cost more than her mother’s monthly rent. The pharmacist had looked at her with that particular brand of professional pity reserved for people who wore shoes with holes in the soles while holding three-thousand-dollar prescriptions.
"Your insurance doesn't cover this tier," the man behind the counter had said, his voice dropping into a register of practiced sympathy. "There’s a patient assistance program, but it takes six weeks to process."
"My brother doesn't have six weeks," Grace had said, her voice shaking with a cold, metallic fury. "He has until Thursday."
She had paid for it with the advance Michael Cain had left on the kitchen table in a plain white envelope—ten crisp hundred-dollar bills held together with a paperclip. No note. No signature. Just the money, still smelling faintly of the bank vault on State Street.
As she turned the corner onto Cambridge Street, heading toward the red-brick tenement where Leo was coughing his lungs out into a sagging plaid sofa, she noticed the man across the street.
He was wearing a grey trench coat and a dark wool cap pulled low over his eyes. He wasn't looking at her, but every time she stopped to tie her shoelace near a bakery window, he stopped to check his watch. Every time she crossed the street against the light, he crossed three car lengths behind her.
Frank’s man.
Grace’s stomach tightened into a hard, cold knot. She realized then, with terrifying clarity, that she wasn't just a maid cleaning up after a monster; she was a hostage who hadn't yet been told where the cell was.
She hurried her pace, her canvas bag bumping against her hip, and ducked into the dark, narrow mouth of an alleyway that led behind the old fish market on Hanover Street—a shortcut she’d used since she was ten years old.
The alley was narrow, smelling of rotting cod and damp brick. She rounded the corner near the green dumpster, her breath pluming in the cold November air, and stopped dead.
A man was standing in the middle of the narrow brick corridor, blocking the exit toward the North Square. It wasn't the guy in the trench coat. It was someone older, with a thick neck and a nose that had been broken twice in different directions.
"Grace Bennett?" the man asked. His voice sounded like gravel being ground under a truck tire.
"I don't have any money," Grace said, backing up until her shoulder hit the damp brick wall. "Take the bag. Take the pills. Just leave me alone."
The man didn't move. He reached into his coat pocket, his fingers curling around something heavy and metallic. "Mr. Doyle wants to know what you talked to Michael about in the music room last night."
Grace’s heart stopped. They know.
"I—I was cleaning the piano," she stammered, her voice cracking. "I didn't see anything. I didn't touch anything."
"Mr. Doyle doesn't like people who touch things that don't belong to them," the man said, taking a slow step forward, his boots squelching in the greasy mud between the cobblestones. "And he especially doesn't like people who make the boss start... remembering things."
The man raised his hand. It wasn't a fist; it was a leather-gloved palm, coming down toward her shoulder with the casual cruelty of a dock boss putting a recalcitrant stevedore in his place.
Grace closed her eyes, bracing for the impact, her fingers digging into the paper bag with the orange pill bottle.
Crack.
The sound wasn't flesh hitting bone. It was the sharp, unmistakable pop of a heavy-caliber silencer echoing off the brick walls of the narrow alley.
The man in front of her froze, his eyes widening in sudden, stupid disbelief. A dark, wet circle appeared on the shoulder of his wool coat, spreading outward like spilled coffee. He didn't scream. He simply folded at the waist, sliding down the damp brick wall until he sat in the mud like a pile of discarded laundry.
Grace opened her eyes.
Ten feet away, standing in the shadow of the fire escape with a smoking Sig Sauer P226 still leveled at the ground, was Michael Cain.
He wasn't wearing his overcoat. He was wearing his black shirtsleeves, his vest open, his tie slightly loosened at the collar. His face was completely expressionless, the grey eyes as cold and empty as the winter sea.
"Pick up your bag, Grace," Michael said, his voice level and quiet in the echoing alley.
May you like
"You... you shot him," she whispered, her teeth chattering so hard she could barely form the syllables.
"No," Michael said, walking past the twitching body in the mud without even glancing down. He reached out and took her arm, his grip firm, warm, and entirely unyielding, pulling her toward the brighter lights of Hanover Street. "Frank’s man had a heart attack while trying to mug you in an alley. It happens all the time in this neighborhood. Come on. Leo’s soup is getting cold."
