The air in the bedroom smelled of cheap eucalyptus vapor and old iron, heavy enough to choke a man. Sarah shifted against the flattened pillow, her breath rattling like dry leaves inside a tin box.

The hospital room smelled of sterile bleach and sharp lemon floor wax, a clean mask stretched over the rotting foundations of what had once been a human life. Sarah lay propped up against three pillows, her breathing regulated by a humming plastic console beside the bed that clicked every four seconds like a dying clock. The federal detail stationed outside the heavy oak door had already confiscated her civilian clothes, replacing them with a standard-issue flannel gown that made her look even smaller, a fragile bundle of twigs bound together by skin and stubborn defiance.

I pulled a molded plastic chair close to the mattress, resting my forearms on my knees. My knuckles were still swollen and dark purple from where I’d put them through the jaw of Sterling’s enforcer in the basement on Racine.

"The feds are tearing the old house apart brick by brick," I said, my voice barely audible over the hum of the oxygen pump. "Vance found three more safety deposit boxes under the floorboards of the laundry. All registered to dummy corporations your father set up back in the eighties."

Sarah didn't open her eyes right away. Her eyelids fluttered, thin as onion skin, before lifting to reveal those dark, hunted pupils that had haunted my memories for three decades.

"They won't find the real one, Nate," she whispered, her voice dry as parchment. "Your father wasn't stupid. He knew the Outfit would come looking for the books the minute he had his first stroke. That’s why he didn't put the core accounts in the bank or the basement."

"Then where?" I leaned closer, the smell of her sickness washing over me, cold and metallic. "Sterling was ready to tear the city apart to get his hands on that flash drive. He thought it contained the routing numbers for every offshore account the syndicate used to launder money through the docks."

"Sterling is a lawyer, Nate. He thinks in contracts and bank ledgers," Sarah murmured, a faint, ghost-like smile touching the corner of her cracked lips. "He doesn't understand the old ways. Your father didn't launder money through accounts. He laundered it through people."

Before I could ask what she meant, the door clicked open. Lily walked in carrying a small paper cup of lukewarm water for her mother, her movements quiet and deliberate, entirely devoid of the frantic energy most seven-year-olds carry like static electricity. She handed the cup to Sarah, smoothed down the corner of the scratchy blanket, and then turned her steady, unblinking gaze onto me.

"Mr. Moretti," Lily said, her voice dropping into that strange, formal cadence she used whenever she wanted to talk about something important. "There’s a man downstairs in the lobby. He wouldn't give his name to the guard, but he left a card on the desk with your initials on it."

She reached into her coat pocket—the oversized one she’d worn in the tenement—and pulled out a heavy, cream-colored business card. There was no company name, no phone number, and no address. Just three letters embossed in dull, matte black ink: N.M.