Around 1:30 AM, the heavy brass lock on the chapel's side door clicked softly.
Footsteps—light, irregular, and hesitant—scuffled across the polished marble floor. Someone was crying. Not the performance-art weeping Renata had produced for the news cameras earlier that afternoon, but the raw, silent, suffocating grief of someone whose entire world had been ripped away.
The soft rustle of a maid’s cotton uniform approached the casket.
Luna Hartley stood beside the velvet drapery, clutching a small, worn leather notebook to her chest. She was twenty-six, small-framed, with pale skin and large, dark eyes shadowed by days of sleeplessness.
She looked down at the icy, motionless face of the man who had ruled the city.
"You didn't listen to him, Mr. Falcone," Luna whispered, her voice cracking in the empty chapel. She reached out with a hand that shook uncontrollably, resting her thin fingers on the edge of the polished walnut frame. "Tommy came to you. He trusted you. He said you were the only man in Chicago powerful enough to stop what Carmine was doing."
Inside his skull, Liam’s mind roared. Tommy? The accountant?
"Tommy found the Belcrest accounts," Luna sobbed, wiping a tear with her apron. "He found out Carmine was stealing millions from the docks and paying off the South Side to start a war. Carmine killed him for it... he staged that crash on the highway. And then he paid off the coroner."
She pressed her left hand flat against her low abdomen, where a faint, barely noticeable curve rested beneath her gray uniform apron.
"I’m three months pregnant with Tommy's child, Mr. Falcone," she whispered, her chin trembling. "Carmine thinks I don't know. He thinks I'm just a stupid maid who cleans his office. But I found Tommy's notes. And now Tommy's gone... you're gone... and there is no one left to protect my baby."