THE MAFIA BOSS COULD MAKE CHICAGO'S MOST DANGEROUS MEN TREMBLE—BUT ONE INNOCENT CHRISTMAS PRESENT FROM A FOUR-YEAR-OLD GIRL LEFT HIM FACING A MYSTERY HE NEVER SAW COMING!

“Mr. Marchetti, please wait!”

Nora Hayes came through my study door so quickly that Caleb Stone reached for the weapon beneath his jacket. I held up a hand before he could draw it. She stopped beside my desk, breathing hard, one palm pressed against the frame as though the hallway had been tilting beneath her feet.

The red box lay between us. I had loosened only one loop of its gold ribbon.

“Why?” I asked.

Nora stared at the box rather than at me. “Because she took something that isn't hers to give.”

“Your daughter told me she made twenty presents.”

“She made nineteen.”

“Then I must be very special.”

The attempt at humor died in the silence. Nora had gone so pale that the freckles along her nose looked painted on. She wore a gray housekeeper's uniform and a cheap watch with a cracked face. There were dark circles beneath her eyes I hadn't noticed earlier. I knew she had worked here for six weeks, that Mrs. Porter praised her, and that her references checked out. Until tonight I could not have told anyone the color of her eyes.

Now I saw they were green. Terrified green.

“Tell me what is in this box,” I said.

“I can explain. Just don't open it with her here.”

“Maisie's downstairs with the other children.”

Nora swallowed. “Then please let me take it.”

My hand covered the lid. “No.”

Caleb moved toward the door and shut it. The sound made Nora flinch.

That was enough to remind me of the man I looked like from her side of the desk. A man with a reputation for making people disappear didn't need to threaten anyone. His office could do it for him.

“Caleb, outside,” I said.

“Boss—”

“Outside. Leave the door open.”

He obeyed reluctantly. I pushed the box toward Nora, an inch at a time.

“If this is yours, take it,” I told her. “But you are going to tell me why a piece of wrapping paper frightens you more than I do.”

She did not touch it. Instead she lowered herself into the chair opposite mine, as if standing had become impossible.

“Your wife,” she said quietly. “What was her name?”

The question struck so suddenly that I heard nothing else in the house. No Christmas music downstairs. No footsteps in the hall. Only those three words inside my head.

“Celeste.”

“Did she sing when she was nervous?”

My fingers tightened on the desk.

Celeste had sung badly. Not often, and never when anyone else could hear. When anxiety caught her, she would hum the first lines of an old lullaby her mother had taught her. During our last winter together I had joked that she was trying to frighten our unborn daughter into sleeping.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Nora's lower lip trembled. “I worked at Saint Agnes Medical Center. Four years ago. In the neonatal unit.”

Saint Agnes.

The name of the hospital where Celeste had died on Christmas Eve.

I stood so fast my chair hit the cabinet behind me. Nora recoiled, but I no longer knew how to remain still.

“I attended your wife's delivery,” she continued. “I wasn't her doctor. I was one of the nurses who received the baby afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“Mr. Marchetti—”

“Our baby died with Celeste.”

Nora looked down.

“My daughter was never born alive,” I said. “They told me there had been an emergency. A fire. The transfer ambulance crashed. I signed the documents. I buried them both.”

“I know what they told you.”

Outside, somebody laughed at a Christmas joke. The sound was obscene in that room.

“Open it,” Nora whispered.

I sat again, although I could not remember deciding to. I pulled the ribbon loose. Under red tissue paper lay a little silver hospital bracelet, the kind used on premature babies. The print was faded but still legible.

BABY GIRL MARCHETTI.

Beneath that was a folded yellow paper star, worn white at its corners. Celeste had made stars like that out of every scrap of paper she found. During our marriage I discovered them in coat pockets, in books, even inside the glove compartment of my car. She said you should always carry something small enough to remember hope by.

I unfolded the star. Inside, in her slanted handwriting, were six words.

For our girl. Come home, Gabriel.

My hands began shaking. I had not seen Celeste's handwriting in four years.

At the bottom of the box was a photograph I had never seen. Celeste lay in a hospital bed, exhausted but unmistakably smiling. Against her chest rested a newborn wrapped in a pale blanket. Beside them stood a young nurse with dark hair pulled into a bun.

Nora.

On the photograph's back someone had written a time: 11:46 p.m., December 24.

I knew that night. I knew exactly where I had been. In a warehouse on the South Side, answering an urgent summons from my uncle Dominic about a supposed attack on our shipping business. My phone had lost service. Caleb had not yet worked for me. By the time a driver found me, Celeste had been declared dead and the hospital wing was sealed.

“You're telling me this photograph was taken after my wife was supposed to have died?”

“Yes.”

“Then the records are wrong.”

“Yes.”

“Why am I only seeing it now?”

Nora pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Because I have been a coward, and because people were ready to kill a little girl to keep you from seeing it.”

I looked at the bracelet again. It was small enough to circle two of my fingers. I could not make myself look at the little girl who had appeared in my study without picturing the empty white coffin beside Celeste's at the cemetery.

“Nora. Whose daughter is Maisie?”

She began to cry silently. That frightened me more than any answer.

“Please,” I said. “Not another lie.”

“Celeste made me promise,” Nora said. “If anything happened, I was to take the baby somewhere safe. At first I believed she'd come for us herself. Then she was gone. They told me you had ordered the transfer. They showed me a paper with your signature. And afterward a man came to my apartment and said if I told you the baby was alive, you'd make sure she didn't stay that way.”

“Who?”

“He wore a ring with a black stone. He said he spoke for the Marchetti family.”

Dominic wore a black onyx ring. My father's ring, claimed after the funeral and never returned.

“Say it,” I told her.

“I think Maisie is your daughter.”

The phrase reached me from a great distance. My daughter. A child with dark curls and fearless eyes who had just marched through armed guards because she thought a lonely man needed a gift.

I stood again and walked to the window. Snow drifted past the glass, settling on the stone lions flanking the front drive. I remembered Celeste buying a tiny green coat while pregnant, even though I insisted the baby would outgrow it in weeks. She had said a father should have at least one completely unreasonable thing to be excited about.

I had kept that coat in a locked nursery for four years.

“Does Maisie know?” I asked.

“She knows her first mama loved her. She knows I am her mama now. She doesn't know you're her father. I taught her to call you Uncle Gabriel because she kept asking why everyone in the house said your name like you were somebody from a fairy tale.”

“And why take a job here?”

Nora's face hardened with a courage that had been buried under fear. “Because three months ago, someone photographed Maisie outside her preschool. The picture was left under our door with a note: The birthday is coming. The old agreement expires. I ran out of places to hide.”

“An agreement?”

“I never agreed to anything. But they apparently believed the silence was permanent.”

I turned toward the open doorway. “Caleb.”

He appeared instantly.

“Clear the Christmas party from the west wing without alarming anyone. Quietly identify every visitor. Nobody leaves without a name and plate number. Find the security footage of Maisie entering the house tonight, and put guards outside the family rooms.”

Nora pushed herself up. “Don't lock us in here.”

“I won't. And nobody touches your daughter without your permission.” I caught myself. “Our daughter, perhaps. We will establish that properly. Tonight, I'm not asking her to call me anything.”

Caleb glanced from the bracelet to my face. He was smart enough not to ask questions in front of Nora.

Then a guard's voice crackled through his earpiece. Caleb listened, expression changing.

“What?” I demanded.

“South gate camera went dark for ninety seconds. The backup is gone too.”

“Technical problem?”

“No. Someone pulled the recording drive.”

Nora moved to the doorway. “Where is Maisie?”

We left my study together. Christmas music spilled up the staircase, cheerful and terribly ordinary. Mrs. Porter stood beneath the tree with a tray of cookies, telling a small group of servants' children not to touch the glass ornaments. I scanned every red dress and Santa hat in sight.

Maisie wasn't among them.

Nora called her name once. Then again.

A little boy near the fireplace looked up. “The lady said she'd take Maisie to see the real reindeer.”

“What lady?” Nora asked.

“The one in the white coat.”

I heard Caleb draw a sharp breath.

Our grounds had no reindeer. And no woman in a white coat had been authorized anywhere near the children.

I looked down at the bracelet still caught around my fingers and understood the cruelty of the evening. Four years ago, someone had taken my daughter without letting me know she was alive.

Tonight, they intended to take her again.

I put the bracelet carefully into my pocket.

“Close the gates,” I said. “And find that little girl.”