Chapter 10

We eventually moved to the North Side.

On my final night at the diner, Lou didn't give me a retirement speech or a gold watch. He waited until 4:00 AM, when the neon sign was the only thing flickering in the dark, and slid a thick white envelope across the counter. Inside was eight hundred dollars in cash, a "bonus" he claimed came from an old tax rebate, though the handwritten note on the back in his messy script simply read: Keep your head up, Olson.

I didn't cry until I reached the train station.

Our new home was a small, third floor studio apartment located directly above a bakery on North Avenue. The air constantly smelled of yeast, burnt sugar, and industrial flour, a scent that finally replaced the pervasive grease trap odor that had defined my early twenties.

It was tiny, the kitchen sink was three steps from our mattress but the windows faced an interior alleyway where nobody could look in. We were anonymous. We were invisible.

By the time late June arrived, the Chicago humidity had settled over the city like a hot, wet wool blanket.

I sat on the edge of our twin bed, my back propped against three pillows, my breath coming in short gasps. My belly was huge now, an impossible weight that made even the simple act of standing a problem.

"Kat," I called out, my voice sounding thin in the heavy air.

The bathroom door opened, and Katherine stepped out, her hair tied back, a damp washcloth in her hand. At sixteen, she had spent her entire summer vacation transforming into a makeshift nurse. She didn't complain about the lack of air conditioning or the fact that her wardrobe was currently stored in cardboard boxes along the wall.

She just moved around the small space with a quiet, fierce dedication that made me realize she wasn't the little girl I’d rescued from the accident anymore. She was my partner.

"The contractions are five minutes apart," she said, her eyes dropping to the small notebook where she’d been meticulously tracking the time. "We need to call the county transport, Lyra. Now."

"I can wait another hour," I gasped, my fingers digging into the worn mattress fabric as another wave of tight, hot pressure rolled across my lower abdomen. The pain wasn't a sharp sting; it was a massive, crushing force that felt like the concrete walls of the city were closing in around my hips.

"You're not waiting an hour," Katherine said, her tone matching the exact, unyielding register I’d used with Dean Vance months ago. "The doctor at the clinic said twins don't line up for a slow entrance. Put your shoes on. I’m calling the desk down below."

Cook County Hospital’s delivery ward at 2:00 AM was a chaotic symphony of screaming sirens and bright lights. It felt exactly like the diner during a Sunday morning rush, but the stakes were infinitely higher.

I was rolled through the double doors on a squeaking gurney, my eyes fixed entirely on the stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling.

"Push, Lyra! You’re right there!" Katherine’s voice was right at my ear, her small hand gripping mine with a strength I didn't know she possessed.

I didn't think about the debt. I didn't think about the lack of a future. I didn't think about the man in the suit who was currently sleeping in a penthouse six miles south of this delivery room. I just gave everything I had left to the dark.

The first sound that broke through the roaring in my ears was a sharp wail.

"A boy," the nurse murmured, her hands moving quickly to clear his airway before laying him against my bare, sweating chest. He was tiny, his skin slippery and red, but his jaw, even now, covered in vernix had that unmistakable squareness that made my breath catch in my throat.

"Lyra, the second one is coming right behind him!" the resident called out, his gloved hands moving into position.

Ten minutes later, the room was filled with a second, higher pitch. A girl.

As the nurses bundled them into identical white blankets with small blue and pink stripes, the crushing weight of my new reality settled over me. They were here. They were real.

We named them Leo and Maya Olson.

When the medical staff finally left the small, curtained room, leaving only the steady, rhythmic hum of the infant monitors, Katherine sat in the plastic chair beside my bed, holding the small bundle containing her niece. I held Leo against my chest, his tiny, perfectly formed fingers opening and closing against the fabric of my hospital gown.

"He looks exactly like him, Lyra," Katherine whispered, her voice carrying a trace of awe as she stared down at Maya's small, delicate features. "Even the nose. It's... it's a copy."

"It doesn't matter," I said, my voice barely a breath against Leo's soft, dark hair. "They are ours. They don't have a father, Kat. They have us."

I looked out the small, narrow window of the ward. The sun was just beginning to peak over the Lake Michigan.

Somewhere out there, the Kane Plaza was catching the first rays of the morning light, its black glass reflecting the sky like a massive, blind mirror.

Gabriel Kane had his empire of stone and steel. But as I looked down at the two tiny lives breathing against my skin, I knew I had something infinitely more powerful. I had his future, hidden away in the shadows of the city he thought he owned, and I would protect it with my life.

THREE YEARS later......

The smell of burnt sugar and fresh dough never truly leaves your skin when you live above a bakery. After thirty-six months, Leo and Maya smelled permanently of sweet vanilla and warm yeast, a sweet, comforting scent.

"Mama! Look! Massive truck!"

Three year old Leo Olson pressed his small face entirely against the glass of our low-set living room window, his little fingers leaving a row of smudge marks on the pane.

He was a small, wire framed dynamo of energy, possessed of his aunt’s athletic build and a thick mop of dark, wavy hair that refused to stay flat no matter how much water I combed through it.

But it was his eyes that made my heart stutter every single morning. They weren't brown like mine, or soft blue like Katherine’s. They were a piercing, crystalline, icy blue ones.

"Don't lick the glass, Leo," I called out from the small corner desk that served as my home office.

My headset was settled over my ears, the green light on my terminal blinking to signal an incoming logistics dispatch route.

Over the last three years, I had successfully transitioned into a remote nighttime coordinator for a local medical transport company. The pay was twelve dollars an hour. Precisely what I had earned behind the counter but it allowed me to stay inside our small perimeter, managing the twins' schedules while Katherine completed her high-school diploma online and transitioned into her freshman year at UIC.

We were surviving. The ledger sheets balanced every month, even if the margin for error was less than fifty dollars.

"Maya, leave the flour alone, sweetie," I warned, watching Leo’s twin sister crawl beneath the small kitchen table.

Maya was entirely different, a quiet, watchful observer who spent hours organizing her plastic blocks by color. She had my dark eyes, but she possessed the same refined nose that I had seen on the local television whenever the Kane Plaza completed another public acquisition.

The kids were my world, my joy and my shield. The memory of Gabriel Kane had been successfully reduced to history or so I thought.