Chapter 1 - The Shadows of Sasselini and the Cold Chicago RiverEight years. For some, eight years is a lifetime of milestones—marriages, children, career climbs. For me, Jessica Richardson, it was a slow-motion descent into a rabbit hole that had no bottom. I had spent nearly three thousand nights chasing ghosts through the jagged, industrial underbelly of Chicago, assembling a puzzle that the rest of the world wanted burned.
My father, Marcus Richardson, disappeared when I was eighteen. One day he was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of black coffee and telling me I needed to check the oil in my car. The next, he was a vapor. No note. No frantic phone call. No blood on the carpet. Just a void where a man used to be. Within forty-eight hours, official paperwork was filed by people I’d never met, declaring him dead by "unspecified circumstances." The city of Chicago, with its towering steel skyscrapers and its dark, muddy history, seemed determined to swallow his memory whole.
The police called it a closed case. My mother called it a tragedy, her spirit breaking so thoroughly that she eventually retreated into a shell of herself, never to recover. I called it a lie. And I spent the next decade turning that anger into a weapon.
By twenty-eight, I wasn’t just a daughter; I was a hunter. I took low-level freelance assignments for the Chicago Tribune, writing about mundane things—urban development, city zoning, municipal corruption. My editor, a man who smelled of stale cigarettes and disappointment, thought I was wasting my life on "small-ball" stories. He didn’t know that every zoning permit I looked at was actually a search for Sasselini-owned land. He didn’t know that every "boring" interview I conducted with a city clerk was a cover to slip a hundred-dollar bill across a desk for access to sealed archives.
The pattern finally emerged in 2017. Twelve people had vanished in ten years. A baker, a foreman, a legal secretary—people with no apparent connection except for one name that appeared in the fine print of their lives: Sasselini. The Sasselini family didn't just run the docks; they ran the air people breathed in this city.
At the center of it was Gabriel Sasselini. At thirty-five, he was the crown prince of Chicago’s dark side. He was handsome in the way a wildfire is handsome—mesmerizing, but capable of turning everything you love into ash. He moved through the city like a god, connected to mayors and mobsters alike. He was untouchable.
My apartment was a testament to my obsession. The walls were covered in photographs connected by red string, maps of the river marked with black X’s, and grainy security footage stills that I had spent months analyzing. It was the kind of room that would make a psychiatrist reach for a prescription pad. But the red strings didn't lie. They all pointed to a specific warehouse on the edge of the industrial district—a building that officially didn't exist.
October 15 was a Wednesday. The sky was the color of a bruised lung, and the wind off Lake Michigan carried the scent of rain and rot. I parked three blocks away, dressed in black, carrying nothing but a camera, a notebook, and a heart full of reckless intent.
The warehouse was a skeletal remains of a forgotten era—rusting steel and crumbling concrete. I slipped inside through a side door that had been expertly painted to look welded shut. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of old oil and something metallic—blood, or maybe just the scent of heavy machinery.
I was documenting serial numbers on storage containers when the silence broke. Footsteps. Heavy, rhythmic, and professional. They weren't hiding. They were clearing the floor.
I ran. I didn't have a plan, only an exit strategy I’d scouted weeks ago. I reached the loading dock, the Chicago River churning like black ink four meters below me. The voices were closer now. Sharp commands in Italian. I didn't wait to be caught. I jumped.
The river didn't feel like water; it felt like a physical blow. The cold was a scream that filled my lungs. I went under, the current grabbing me like a giant’s hand, spinning me into the darkness. I fought for the surface, but the weight of my soaked clothes was a shroud. This is it, I thought. Eight years of searching, only to become the thirteenth ghost.
Then, hands found me.
They were massive, powerful hands. They grabbed the collar of my jacket and hauled me upward with a force that felt like a miracle. I broke the surface, vomiting river water, gasping for air that felt like knives in my chest. I was dragged onto the concrete bank, shivering so violently I thought my bones would snap.
A man stood over me. The light from a nearby security perimeter caught his face. My vision was blurred, my mind reeling from the brink of death, but I knew that jawline. I knew those eyes.
Before I could stop myself, before my brain could filter the danger, a word escaped my lips—a word I had heard my father whisper into a phone in the middle of the night, years ago. A name that was a secret, a code, a ghost.
May you like
“Phantom,” I whispered.
Gabriel Sasselini froze. The man who never showed emotion looked as though I had just shot him in the heart. In that moment, the hunter became the prey, and the world went black.
