Chapter 15 - Shadows in Cicero
While the corporate war raged across the financial district, miles away in the gritty, industrial neighborhood of Cicero, a different kind of storm was quietly brewing.
A rusted, dented Ford sedan pulled up alongside a row of dilapidated brick warehouses, parking right outside the loading docks where Hannah had collapsed just two days earlier. A man stepped out of the vehicle—tall, heavily built, wearing a worn leather jacket and a dark baseball cap pulled low over his face.
His name was Leo Vance—no relation to the corporate lawyer, but a man intimately tied to Hannah’s past.
Leo had spent the last three years as the floor manager of the packaging facility, acting as Hannah’s silent protector when local loan sharks and predatory landlords tried to take advantage of the exhausted, pregnant young woman working double shifts to survive. When Hannah vanished from the warehouse floor after collapsing into the ambulance, Leo had found her personal locker sealed by management.
Curiosity—and a lingering, protective affection—had driven him to clean out her locker. Inside a rusted tin box beneath a stack of old textbooks, he had discovered something that didn't belong in a cheap Cicero warehouse: a heavy, gold-embossed medical journal bearing the private crest of the Caldwell family, along with a stack of unopened letters addressed to Hannah from a private P.O. box in downtown Chicago, postmarked five years ago.
Leo flipped through the letters, his eyes narrowing as he read the return address and the desperate pleas written by someone trying to find Hannah right after she disappeared.
She never got these, Leo muttered to himself, pocketing the letters. And someone needs to know that she didn't just walk away on her own five years ago.
He pulled out his phone and dialed a number scrawled on the back of the medical journal—a direct emergency line to the Caldwell estate guest wing that he had managed to copy from an old billing receipt left in Hannah’s bag.
May you like
The phone rang three times before a crisp, professional voice answered. "Caldwell Estate, private medical suite. State your business."
"I need to speak to Ethan Caldwell," Leo said gruffly. "It’s about Hannah Miller. And I think someone needs to know why she was hiding out in Cicero for the last five years."
