Chapter 2 Confronting the Past

The walls of Eve's office felt suffocating as she stared at the evidence board in front of her. It was a chaotic mosaic of crime scene photos, surveillance images, and reports, all tied together by red string mapping out connections between Luis Ortega and El Reino Oscuro. The more she uncovered the less it became an evidence board and more of abstract art.

She had spent the entire night digging through the gang's operations, piecing together their criminal empire. The deeper she went, the more tangled it became. El Reino Oscuro wasn't just a street gang, it was a well-oiled crime organization straight out of the movies. At the center of it all was a name that sent ice through the veins of those who knew him:

Antonio Costa aka El Gusano which meant The Worm in Spanish. Few had seen him, fewer still had survived encounters with him. His reach was extensive, his ruthlessness unmatched. Witnesses vanished. Informants turned up dead. Every lead the police had on him was a dead end. If El Reino Oscuro was the body, El Gusano was the disease eating away at the city.

She clenched her fists. This wasn't just some case anymore, it was war, and she had just walked into the battlefield.

---

A sharp knock on the door pulled her from her thoughts. She turned to see Detective Sam Rivera, one of the few people in the CPD she trusted. He stepped inside, his leather jacket damp from the drizzle outside. "Well, you look like hell," he muttered, tossing a file onto her desk.

"Nice to see you too, Sam," she retorted.

She opened the file and froze. Crime scene photos. A body lying in a South Side alley, throat slit, hands bound. The markings were unmistakable.

"El Reino Oscuro?" she asked, almost rhetorically. Sam nodded. "Happened last night. Witnesses say it was a message to someone, but no one's talking. You recognize him?"

Eve studied the photo. The victim's face was swollen, beaten beyond recognition, but there was something familiar about his build, his tatto-

Her breath caught; she recognized him. He was a former informant; someone Luke had trusted before everything fell apart. Someone who had promised to help her after Luke's murder-only to vanish off grid, and now he was dead, murdered like cattle and left in a dark alley.

She subconsciously tightened her grip on the file. She had been so close. Every time she thought she had a lead, El Reino Oscuro cut it off like a snake shedding its skin.

"That bastard doesn't leave loose ends," Sam said, watching her reaction.

Eve exhaled through her nose, determined to not waver. "We need to find a way to get to him."

Sam scoffed. "You and every cop in Chicago."

"I'm not every cop."

"No, you're not, and that's gonna get you killed."

She didn't answer, because part of her already knew that.

---

She walked Sam out, but instead of heading back to her desk, she found herself stepping outside, onto the rain-soaked streets of Bridgeport.

She didn't know why she had come here. Maybe she just needed to feel the cold, the sharp bite of the wind against her skin-or anything really---to remind her that she was still alive. Her feet carried her toward an old brick apartment building, the place she used to call home.

The door was different now. Someone else lived there, but in her mind, she was still standing in that doorway, waiting for Luke to come home.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Three years ago.

She could still hear the muffled sound of the TV, smell the faint scent of coffee lingering in the air. Luke had kissed her goodbye that night, his lips warm against her forehead.

"Don't wait up, Evie."

"Be careful," she had told him.

And he smiled-that goddamn smile. The one that made her believe they had a future. The one that was supposed to grow old with her. The one that was stolen away from her.

But instead, she had woken up to a knock at the door. The look in Sam's eyes had told her everything. She had fallen to her knees before he could even say the words.

Her nails dug into her palms now, forcing the memory away. She wasn't that woman anymore, she wasn't Evie, the grieving widow. She was Evelyn Bennett, the prosecutor for the state of Illinois against Luis Ortega, and she had a job to do.

---

Back at the office, Eve dove headfirst into research. She needed to find something, anything, on Antonio Costa, but there was nothing. No paper trail. No arrests. No records before his rise to power. It was like he had appeared out of thin air.

She tapped her fingers against her desk, thinking. What if she was looking in the wrong place? Instead of focusing on the present, what if she needed to go back. Find the point he became a ghost.

She pulled up old gang records, sifting through the CPD archives with dangerously little patience. She had started with the basics-arrest reports, known associates, case files from the early 2000s-but nothing connected the dots. Then she saw it. A single mention of an, Antonio Costa, in a juvenile detention report from nearly twenty years ago. Her heart pounded. Could this be him? She clicked on the file, pulling up the details, impulsively crossing her fingers in the process.

Age: 15. Crime: Armed robbery, gang-related violence. Sentenced to six months in juvenile detention.

And then nothing. No arrests. No police record. He had just... vanished. Until he reappeared years later as El Gusano. A lesser person would have ruled it out as a coincidence... Eve didn't believe in coincidences. Someone had wiped his past clean, someone with the power to do so.

She picked up her phone and dialed Sam. "I need a favor," she said when he picked up.

"That bad?"

"Worse."

-

Hours later, Eve met Sam at a diner in Little Village.

"You're pushing too hard," he muttered as she slid into the booth. "I don't have time to play it safe," she shot back. Sam sighed and handed her a folder. "This is all I could dig up on Costa's early days. But be careful, I people who dig too deep into his past don't end well."

She ignored the warning and flipped through the papers.

Her heart stopped.

Amongst the documents was a photo of a young Antonio Costa.

And beside him was a familiar face.

Her hands trembled as she stared at the photo, her blood ran cold.

Luke.