Chapter 10 - The Sovereign Price
Tears erupted from Clara’s eyes, hot and blinding, spilling over her pale cheeks as she looked up at the giant stranger.
"Why?" she sobbed, her voice breaking into ragged, frantic gasps. "I don't know you! Who are you? What... what do you want from me? I don't have anything! I don't have anything to give you!"
She reached out with her trembling hands, trying to push the yellow package back toward his side of the table. "Take it back! Please! If this is... if this is a loan, I can't repay it! I make eight dollars an hour! I'll never be able to repay this!"
Silas did not take the package back. He placed his large, heavy hand on top of the yellow oilskin, pinning it securely to the table between them.
"It's not a loan," Silas said softly. His steel-gray eyes glistened under the diner's dim yellow lights, a sudden, profound sorrow breaking through his harsh, scarred features. "And you don't owe me anything. Not a single cent. Not a single word."
He leaned down slightly, his voice dropping into a rough whisper that barely carried over the sound of the rain outside.
"Eleven years ago," Silas said, "I sat in a hospital waiting room in Chicago. My daughter... her name was Maya. She was four years old. Same red hair as yours. Same blue eyes."
Clara stopped sobbing, her wide, tear-streaked eyes locked onto his face.
"I had money," Silas continued, his hand tightening on the oilskin tarp. "I had eighty thousand dollars in a briefcase under my bed. But I got caught. I got locked in a steel cell, and I spent six days screaming at guards while doctors canceled her surgery because the check didn't clear in time."
A tear slipped from Silas’s dark eye, tracking down through his heavy beard, vanishing into his leather vest.
"She died alone, Clara," Silas whispered. "In a cold room. While I sat in the dark with my hands tied."
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He looked down at the money sitting on the table between them, then back up into Clara’s face.
"I’ve carried this cash in a dark box for three years," Silas said, his voice trembling with a terrifying, beautiful sincerity. "It was blood money then. It was useless paper. But today... today it can buy a four-year-old girl her fifth birthday."
