Chapter 20 - The Face in the Shadows
The ruins of Saint Jude’s Cathedral loomed out of the swirling snowstorm like the skeletal ribcage of a dead beast. Charred stone pillars reached toward the black sky, their stained-glass windows long shattered by fires from the 1980s gang wars.
Elena stepped out into the freezing wind, pulling her dark woolen coat tight around her body. The cold bit through her clothes, but inside, her blood was on fire.
In her coat pocket, her right hand gripped the Beretta she had stolen from Vincent’s belt. In her left, she held the empty velvet box that had once carried the locket.
She walked through the broken stone archway, crunching across blackened timber and frozen gravel.
A narrow stone staircase led down into the subterranean crypts beneath the altar—the old catacombs where the city’s founding families had buried their dead a century ago. The air grew instantly warm, damp, and suffocating, smelling of old wax, rot, and copper.
Flickering red prayer candles lined the ancient stone walls, guiding her path through the vaulted corridors.
"I'm here!" Elena’s voice echoed against the weeping stone. "I brought what you wanted! Show yourself!"
Silence answered her. Only the distant drip of condensation echoed through the crypt.
She walked into the central burial chamber. In the middle of the room, atop an ancient stone sarcophagus, sat a single, clear glass vial containing a pale blue liquid, attached to a pre-loaded syringe.
The antidote.
Elena’s heart leaped into her throat. She took a frantic step toward the sarcophagus, reaching out her trembling hand.
*CLACK.*
The sound of a hammer cocking behind her froze the marrow in her bones.
"I wouldn't touch that, Miss Vance," a voice purred from the darkness behind a stone pillar.
Elena did not turn around immediately. She kept her eyes on the vial, her fingers hovering inches away. "The ledger is in my coat. Take it and let me have the syringe. Lily has ten minutes."
"Oh, the ledger is already irrelevant," the voice chuckled.
It wasn't a Russian accent. It wasn't Dante’s voice from the phone.
It was an accent refined, educated, and chillingly familiar.
Footsteps echoed across the stone floor. Elena slowly turned her head, keeping her hand near her weapon.
A tall figure stepped out from the shadows into the crimson glow of the candlelight. The man pulled down the hood of his black cashmere coat, revealing immaculate silver hair, sharp aristocratic features, and cold, pale blue eyes.
Elena gasped, the breath violently expelled from her lungs.
It wasn't Dante Donati.
It was Don Luciano—the supreme head of the Blood Council.
"You?" Elena stammered, her mind spinning into absolute chaos. "Vincent’s council leader... you poisoned my daughter?"
Luciano smiled, a sickening, grandfatherly expression that made the skin crawl on her neck. "Vincent’s brother Dante died ten years ago, my dear. I merely kept his ghost alive to keep Vincent looking over his shoulder. The voice on the phone was a recording generated by my specialists."
"Why?" Elena wept, her voice trembling with hatred. "Why Lily? She’s an innocent child!"
"Because Vincent was becoming soft," Luciano said, taking a slow step toward her, his custom silver-plated revolver resting lazily in his hand. "He was defying the Commission. He was going to dismantle our networks, all because he fell in love with a broken maid. I needed him distracted. I needed him to tear his own empire apart searching for a ghost in the snow, while I took the eighty million and buried him under the ruins of Chicago."
Luciano reached out with his left hand, picking up the small glass vial of blue liquid. He held it between his wrinkled fingers, dangling Lily’s life over the stone floor.
"Drop your weapon, Elena," Luciano ordered softly. "Or I drop the vial."
Elena swallowed hard, her chest heaving. Slowly, agonizingly, she reached into her coat, pulled out Vincent’s Beretta by two fingers, and let it clatter onto the stone floor.
"Now give me the antidote," Elena begged, falling to her knees on the cold dirt, tears burning her frozen cheeks. "Please. Kill me if you want, but send the medicine to the manor. Please, Don Luciano, I beg you!"
Luciano looked down at her, his pale eyes devoid of any human pity. He smiled a thin, cruel smile.
"A mother’s love," Luciano murmured. "How wonderfully tragic."
He opened his fingers.
The glass vial fell.
"NO!" Elena screamed, lunging forward with all her strength—
A deafening gunshot shattered the crypt.
The vial did not hit the floor; it exploded in mid-air, raining blue liquid and shattered glass across the stone.
At the exact same instant, the heavy iron doors at the top of the catacombs were blown off their hinges with a thunderous blast of C4 explosives. Smoke and fire poured down the stairs, and a voice—monstrous, enraged, and carrying the wrath of an entire army—bellowed through the darkness:
*"ELENA!"*
Luciano spun toward the stairs in shock, raising his weapon, but from the shadows behind the sarcophagus, a second figure—someone who had been hiding in the crypt the entire time—stepped forward, pressing the cold barrel of a gun directly against the back of Elena’s head.
"Don't move, Donati," the shadow whispered into Elena's ear.
Elena froze, her blood turning to pure ice as she recognized the voice of the person holding the gun to her skull—a person who was supposed to be dead, whose body Vincent had supposedly buried at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
May you like
The man who had hurt her.
*Marcus Vance.*
