Chapter 2 - The House of Mirrors
By 3:00 AM, the top floor of Cavallaro Tower had been converted into a tactical war room.
Rocco stood beside the mahogany desk, setting down three encrypted tablets displaying financial wire logs, phone records, and traffic camera footage from the night Sophie disappeared six months ago.
"You were right, boss," Rocco said, his voice tight with disgust. "The private security footage from the garage the night the ledger went missing... it wasn't deleted by an outside hacker. The master override came from Julian’s personal terminal in the penthouse basement."
Dante stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass window, staring down at the rain-slicked grid of Chicago. In his right hand, he held a glass of untouched scotch.
"Where is my brother right now?" Dante asked calmly.
"He logged into his office at the South Side docks an hour ago," Rocco replied. "He thinks you're still at the warehouse meeting. He doesn't know we found Sophie in the dumpster."
"How did he pull it off, Rocco?" Dante turned around, his eyes pitch-black in the dim light. "How did he hide a living, breathing woman in this city for six months without a single one of my soldiers noticing?"
"Because he didn't hide her in the city," Rocco said, tapping a tablet. "He kept her at the old Vance meatpacking plant in Gary, Indiana. It’s off our grid. Silas Vane’s men guarded the perimeter. Julian was dosing her with paralytics and hallucinogens, trying to force her to give him the secondary encryption key to your offshore trust accounts."
"And the ledger?"
"The ledger was never missing," Rocco whispered. "Julian used it to blackmail three city councilmen and two federal prosecutors. He’s been siphoning millions from our docks into Vane’s shipping accounts. He was planning to stage a coup at the annual Syndicate Summit next month."
Dante set his scotch glass down on the desk with a quiet clack.
For six months, he had blamed himself for being weak. He had thought that letting a sweet, innocent maid into his dark, violent life had been his greatest mistake. He had spent nights drinking himself into numbness, staring at the empty library where she used to clean, hating her for breaking his trust.
And all the while, she had been chained to a pipe in an abandoned meatpacking plant twenty miles away, being branded like cattle by his own blood.
"Rocco."
"Yeah, boss?"
"Assemble the First Guard," Dante said, his voice dropping into a register that made even Rocco’s breath catch. "Thirty men. Heavy weapons. Silencers. I don't want a single alarm tripped."
"Are we taking Julian alive?"
May you like
Dante looked toward the master bedroom door, where Sophie was currently sleeping under the watchful eye of Dr. Evans.
"I am going to bring Julian back here," Dante said softly. "And I am going to make him ask Sophie for forgiveness on his knees before I send his head to Silas Vane in a box."
