Chapter 5 - The Underboss in the Dark
The concrete corridor offered no alcoves, no maintenance doors, and no shadows deep enough to conceal a human frame.
The heavy footsteps advanced with terrifying, mechanical rhythm: Click. Clack. Click. Clack.
I didn't run toward the entrance; doing so would have meant sprinting directly into the arms of the man walking toward me. Instead, I pressed my back flat against the cold steel door of Cell 213, pulled the heavy flashlight tight against my ribs, and reached into my pocket for the master keycard.
A shadow stretched down the corridor—long, broad-shouldered, and distorted by the single emergency light at the far corner.
A man stepped into the faint fluorescent glow.
He was forty-two years old, standing six-foot-two, with the same aristocratic jawline as Dominic Vale, but his hair was slicked back with expensive pomade, and his face was unmarred by the scars of war. He wore an immaculate camel-hair overcoat over an Italian silk suit, a gold signet ring glinting on his right pinky finger as he drummed his manicured nails against the silver head of a walking cane.
Marcus Vale. The underboss of the Chicago Syndicate.
He stopped ten paces away. His cold, slate-gray eyes took in my gray wool cardigan, my stockinged feet, and the master keycard clutched in my trembling fingers.
A slow, venomous smile spread across his thin lips.
"Miss Hayes," Marcus purred, his voice a smooth, cultured baritone that lacked every trace of his brother's raw gravel. "The agency in Manhattan assured me you were an expert in developmental psychology, not industrial espionage. I see they understated your qualifications."
I forced my chin up, ignoring the fiery agony radiating from my cracked ribs. "You're keeping your sister-in-law in a dog cage, Marcus."
Marcus let out a quiet, appreciative chuckle, resting both hands on the silver head of his cane. "Kalliope is not a sister-in-law, Miss Hayes. She is an unfortunate accounting discrepancy. Four years ago, my brother’s late wife, Julianna, made the tragic mistake of attempting to cooperate with the federal grand jury in Boston. She had forty gigabytes of offshore banking manifests stored on a private flash drive. Kalliope was helping her."
Marcus took two slow, unhurried steps forward, his cane clicking against the concrete.
"The car bomb was an unfortunate necessity to preserve the syndicate’s enterprise structure. But Kalliope... dear, resilient Kalliope... carried the secondary biometric passwords in her head. For four years, she has been remarkably cooperative in signing our quarterly liquidity authorizations. Until tonight."
Marcus’s smile vanished, his gray eyes turning into two shards of frozen slate.
"You poured the tea down the drain, didn't you, Clara?"
"I know what prussic acid smells like, Marcus," I replied, my voice steady despite the ice running through my veins. "Dominic is awake. He knows Noah threw the bronze. He knows something is broken in this house."
Marcus laughed—a dry, barking sound that echoed unpleasantly off the concrete walls.
"Dominic knows nothing," Marcus sneered, taking another step. "Dominic is a broken beast who has spent four years staring at the lake, waiting for his wife’s ghost to forgive him. He can barely look his own child in the face because the boy has Julianna's eyes. He is weak, Clara. He rules this syndicate with the ghost of a reputation, while I am the one who handles the politicians, the port authorities, and the judges."
Marcus reached inside his camel-hair coat, his hand emerging with a small, sleek .380 automatic pistol fitted with an integrated titanium suppressor.
"You were supposed to be the nineteenth nanny to flee into the night, Miss Hayes," Marcus murmured, leveling the weapon directly at my forehead. "You were supposed to leave in tears, bruised by an uncontrollable little monster, providing the family council with the perfect justification to declare Dominic unfit as a father and sovereign trustee. But you had to be clever. You had to touch the lock."
"Shoot me, Marcus," I said, my voice rising slightly, echoing toward the open security grate of Cell 213. "The acoustic sensors on this corridor are hardwired into the central communications console in the master bedroom. The moment that round leaves the barrel, Dominic’s personal guards will seal every blast door in this wing."
Marcus’s eyes flickered with a microsecond of doubt.
In that fraction of a second, I didn't reach for a weapon. I hurled the heavy four-pound brass flashlight straight at his face.
CRACK.
The solid metal struck Marcus squarely across the bridge of his nose. Blood sprayed across his silk tie, his head snapping back with a sickening crunch. The suppressed pistol discharged with a muffled pfft, the bullet chewing into the ceiling plaster above my head.
Marcus roared in fury, staggering backward, clutching his shattered nose with his left hand as blood poured through his fingers.
I didn't wait for him to recover.
I bolted down the concrete corridor at a dead sprint, ignoring the tearing agony in my ribs, my socks sliding across the cold cement as I threw my entire weight against the heavy double iron doors at the entrance of the north wing.
I burst through into the carpeted silence of the second-floor gallery, slammed the doors shut, and drove the manual deadbolt home with a concussive CLANG.
I spun around, panting, clutching my side, blood dripping from where the plaster had grazed my cheek.
Standing ten feet away in the shadows of the master gallery, holding a twelve-gauge tactical shotgun at the low ready, was Dominic Vale.
Beside him, clutching the hem of his father's trousers, was four-year-old Noah.
Dominic’s eyes were not looking at me.
May you like
They were fixed on the heavy iron doors behind me, where Marcus was violently slamming his shoulder against the steel, screaming curses that were muffled into gibberish by four inches of reinforced oak.
"Clara," Dominic said, his gravelly voice dropping into an octave of terrifying, ancient thunder. "Tell me who is on the other side of that door."
