Chapter 3 - The Broken Saint
The baby shifted in Dominic’s arms, her small fingers reaching down to retrieve the cream-colored stuffed rabbit that had fallen into his lap. As she leaned forward, twisting her torso against the black wool of his vest, the tiered ruffles along the rounded neckline of her pink floral dress pulled slightly to the left.
A dull, metallic gleam caught the sharp beam of the brass lamp.
Dominic’s dark eyes tracked the motion instantly.
Resting against the soft, pale hollow of the infant’s collarbone was a piece of jewelry. It hung from a thin silver chain that had been shortened with crude, uneven knots near the clasp to keep it from dangling past her waist.
Dominic’s fingers, trembling with a sudden, violent tremor that he could not suppress, reached out toward the child’s throat.
He hooked the tip of his forefinger beneath the cold metal, lifting it gently into the palm of his hand.
It was an antique silver Saint Christopher medal.
The medallion was roughly the size of a fifty-cent piece, its silver darkened by decades of sweat, ocean salt, and handling. The relief of the saint carrying the Christ child across the raging river was worn almost flat in the center, polished smooth by a human thumb that had rubbed the metal in moments of acute terror or desperate prayer.
Dominic turned the medal over in his calloused palm.
On the reverse side, running diagonally across the engraved inscription Protect Us In All Ways, was a deep, jagged dent—the permanent scar of an impact where the medal had absorbed the kinetic force of a motorcycle handlebar during a high-speed slide on the Amalfi Coast twelve years ago.
And near the top loop, two links of the original Italian chain were missing, replaced by a rough, soldered loop of common stainless-steel wire.
Dominic had twisted that wire himself with a pair of needle-nose pliers on a private yacht off Capri, cursing his younger brother for breaking their mother’s heirloom while diving into the Mediterranean.
The office seemed to plunge into an absolute, soundless vacuum.
The white gardenias on the console, the leather-bound ledgers, the rain lashing the towering windows—all of it dissolved into a blinding, suffocating roar.
Dominic stared at the silver dent. He stared at the mismatched wire.
This medal had not been buried in an empty casket. Julian had been wearing this medal around his neck on the night the warehouse in Gary had burned to the ground. The police reports, signed by corrupt medical examiners and confirmed by federal dental records, had sworn that every piece of personal property on Julian Caruso’s person had been incinerated in the thermite fire that consumed the loading dock.
Yet here it was. Resting warm against the chest of a nine-month-old child sitting on Dominic’s lap.
May you like
A sound tore out of Dominic’s chest—a low, broken, ragged rasp that sounded like iron scraping over granite. His fingers tightened around the worn silver until the edges bit deep into his flesh.
“Julian?” Dominic breathed, the name tasting like ash, blood, and resurrection all at once.
