Chapter 5
Brotherly Despair
Leo's disappearance crushes Danny. The weight of potential failure and the fear of losing his brother ignite a desperate, all-consuming need to find him.
The laundromat’s fluorescent hum was a mockery of silence. Leo was gone. Three days. Three days of dead-end alleys and unanswered calls, each one a fresh twist of the knife. Danny watched the indifferent spin of whites, his reflection a distorted ghost against the glass. The street had taught him survival, not this hollow ache, this suffocating dread. Leo, his kid brother, his only light, had vanished.
Danny’s gut, his old compass, spun wildly. He’d seen the city’s worst, the shadowed corners where lives dissolved like cheap ink. But Leo wasn't part of that. Leo was the escape, the reason Danny fought. Now, the fear that his own ambition had pushed Leo away, into the maw of the city, was a torment. Leo’s hopeful eyes haunted every flicker.
He’d already bled old favors, calling in markers from a life he’d tried to bury. The faces he’d tried to forget stared back, the unspoken question in their eyes: What’s a Bird like you doing back in this nest? Then Frankie "Fingers" Moretti’s name surfaced. A greasy phantom. Danny’s stomach clenched.
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