The rain in Chicago doesn't wash things clean. It makes everything darker.

Valerie Chen sat in the back booth of the Blue Note on State Street and watched the men she called brothers drink bourbon and talk about nothing of consequence. To anyone passing by, they were just a family having dinner on a Tuesday night—seven men around a long table, the youngest with his arm around the girl who wasn't really their sister but was, in every way that mattered, the only sibling any of them had ever loved.

Valerie was twenty-two. She was also, as of last Friday, the designated fall woman for every crime the Moretti family had ever committed.

She had discovered it the way women discover these things—not through investigation or deduction but through a single sentence spoken without caution in a room where the walls were thin and the door was unlocked. She had been passing the Moretti headquarters on LaSalle Street on her way home from the library, where she spent her evenings studying accounting, when she heard Tony Moretti's voice through the floorboards above: "The girl takes the heat. We give her to the Feds as a gesture of good faith, she pleads cooperation, and in return she gets five years instead of life."

"Five years is still life," Sal had replied.

"Not for someone like her," Vinnie had said. And Val, standing in the rain on the sidewalk outside her family's headquarters, had understood that the word someone in that context did not refer to a person but to a category of asset.

She walked home in the rain and did not cry. Crying was for people who still believed the people who hurt them had loved them at some point. Val had never had that luxury.

Author Note & Copyright: