Chapter 5 - The Red Ledger
The private chapel of the Moretti estate was cold, untouched by heat for years. Thin dust motes danced in the pale morning light streaming through a small stained-glass window depicting St. Michael holding a golden sword over a fallen dragon.
In the center of the small stone room stood a simple marble altar, carved from white Italian stone my father had imported from Tuscany thirty years ago.
I stood before it, holding an iron crowbar in my hand. Behind me, Viktor and Marco held two heavy sledgehammers, their breath misting in the freezing air of the unheated space.
“Where did she say it was, Boss?” Viktor asked, glancing around the stone walls. “We swept this chapel three years ago after your father died. We didn't find anything.”
“You searched the walls and the floor,” I said, stepping up to the altar. “You didn't look at the foundation.”
I knelt on the cold stone floor, running my gloved fingers along the base where the white marble met the grey mortar. At the back of the altar, facing the stone wall where no one could see without lying flat on their stomach, there was a seam—thin, clean, missing the rough grout that lined the rest of the structure.
I wedged the flat edge of the crowbar into the seam and leaned my weight into it.
With a sharp, grinding screech of stone against stone, a twelve-inch square slab of marble popped forward an inch.
I pulled the slab away. Inside was a dark, steel-lined recess built directly into the core of the altar.
Inside the recess lay three items:
A leather-bound notebook with a faded red cover, stamped with the Moretti family crest. A encrypted USB drive wrapped in silver foil. And a small silver chain, tarnished with age, carrying a gold locket.
I reached in and pulled the items out into the cold light.
I opened the locket first. Inside were two tiny, black-and-white photographs—one of Ewan as a boy of ten, smiling with a missing front tooth, and one of Delia Marlowe, young, laughing in her white medical coat on the day she graduated from residency.
Ewan hadn't just trusted Delia because she saved his life. He had loved her.
I swallowed hard, closing the locket gently, and opened the red notebook.
The first fifty pages were filled with my father’s precise, elegant handwriting—dates, shipping container numbers, offshore accounts in Switzerland, the Bahamas, and Liechtenstein. It detailed thirty years of trade history between the Moretti and Vandermark families.
But on page fifty-one, the handwriting changed.
It became erratic, fast, written in dark red ink by my brother Ewan in the frantic days before Pier 44.
“If you are reading this, Leo, then I am already dead, and Celeste has taken control of the North Side.”
My eyes burned as I read my dead brother’s words across six years of silence.
“Father didn't know at first. When he realized what the Vandermarks were shipping through our docks—precursor agents for weaponized Sarin gas sold to foreign cartels—he tried to cancel the contracts. The next day, Father suffered his first 'stroke.' It wasn't a stroke, Leo. Celeste’s father had Dr. Harrison lace his evening wine with a heavy neurotoxin. They killed Father slowly so they could force you into taking the boss seat before you were old enough to question the ledger accounts.”
I gripped the edges of the book so tightly the leather groaned under my fingers.
They hadn't just killed my brother. They had murdered my father. They had turned my family’s house into a gilded graveyard, stepping over the corpses of my blood to build their pharmaceutical empire.
“The USB drive contains the full digital copies of the shipping manifests, the wire transfers to the Governor’s campaign fund, and the recorded phone calls between Celeste and Dr. Harrison detailing the dosage for Mother. Everything is backed up on a secure cloud server managed by First National Bank. The access code is Delia’s birthday.”
I closed the red notebook.
The silence in the cold chapel was absolute. Viktor and Marco stood behind me, their faces dark, their eyes burning with a terrifying, ancient rage. They had served my father. They had carried Ewan on their shoulders when he was a boy.
“Boss?” Marco whispered, his voice trembling with a bloodlust that had been sleeping for six years. “What are your orders?”
I stood up slowly, slipping the red ledger into my coat pocket, holding the USB drive in my palm.
“Call the captains,” I said, my voice dropping into a register so cold it didn't belong to a living man. “Every crew chief from the South Side docks to the Indiana border. Tell them to gather at the warehouse on 4th Street by noon. Bring arms. Bring armor.”
“And Celeste, sir?” Viktor asked, pointing a thumb toward the main house.
May you like
I looked down at the gold locket in my hand—the picture of Ewan and Delia smiling in a world that hadn't yet been destroyed by the Vandermarks.
“Leave her in her room,” I said softly. “Let her think she’s winning for three more hours. When a snake thinks it has trapped its prey, it doesn't notice the fire surrounding the grass.”
