Chapter 2 - The Ghost at the Table
I didn't draw my gun. I stepped through the doorframe, my heavy coat casting a long shadow across the dirt floor.
Beatrice gasped, dropping her fork to the concrete with a loud clatter. She scrambled backward, throwing her small body over the frail old man on the cot, shielding him with her torso as if her thin coat could stop a hollow-point bullet.
"Mr. Moretti!" she sobbed, her hands shaking hysterically as she looked at me. "Please! Please, don't hurt him! He didn't take the food! I took it! Kill me, but please leave him alone!"
Gabe Moretti didn't scream. He gently reached up with his emaciated hand, pressing two fingers against Beatrice’s shoulder, pulling her slowly behind his back. He looked up at me through bloodshot, cloud-covered gray eyes.
He didn't see a mob boss. He saw a six-foot-three man standing in an expensive coat, wearing the same dark blue eyes and heavy jawline as his dead brother.
"Michael?" Gabe whispered, his voice trembling so violently the words barely formed. "Is that... is that you, boy?"
I stood frozen, my gloved hand still resting near my waist. "You died in the river twelve years ago."
A low, bitter laugh bubbled up from Gabe’s chest, turning into another dry, painful cough. "The river was Julian’s idea," Gabe rasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "He didn't want a funeral. He wanted an empty box so nobody would ask to see the body."
Beatrice whimpered, her hands clutching the hem of Gabe's faded jacket. "Mr. Moretti, he's your nephew... he's the Don now..."
"He's a prisoner, Beatrice," Gabe said softly, his gray eyes fixing on mine with a terrifying, absolute clarity. "Look at him. He wears the coat, he holds the gun, but he marches to Julian Rossi’s drum just like his father did before they put him in the ground."
My jaw tightened, a cold anger flaring in my chest. "My father died of a heart attack."
"Your father was poisoned in his own bed, Michael," Gabe spat, his voice suddenly rising with a flash of his old, terrifying authority. "By the same man who paid three hitmen to shoot me in that warehouse! The same man who sits in your executive parlor every afternoon, drinking your scotch and telling you who to kill!"
The basement went deathly quiet, save for the rhythmic dripping of water from a rusted pipe in the corner.
"Prove it," I said, my voice dropping into a register that made Beatrice shrink back into the shadows.
Gabe reached beneath his thin mattress, pulling out a small, oilskin-wrapped package tied with thick twine. His hands shook as he held it out toward me.
"Julian didn't just try to kill me to take the family business, Michael," Gabe whispered. "He did it because I found out what he was doing behind my brother's back. The human trafficking rings out of the port... the offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands registered under your father's forged name... and the grand jury subpoenas that Julian redirected to make your father look like the mastermind."
I took three steps forward. The floorboards groaned beneath my boots as I reached down and took the oilskin package from my uncle's hands.
I unwrapped the cloth. Inside was an old, leather-bound ledger—its pages yellowed and stained with old blood—along with a series of certified bank wire transfers bearing the official seal of the Rossi Financial Group, dated one week before my father's death.
At the bottom of the last page was a handwritten contract signed by Julian Rossi, authorizing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar transfer to an offshore account registered to the lead investigator of the Chicago Organized Crime Task Force.
It wasn't just a betrayal of my family. It was a complete, systematic liquidation of the Moretti name, designed to turn me into a figurehead while Julian ran a rogue shadow syndicate behind my back.
I closed the ledger. The snap of the leather cover sounded like a gunshot in the small cellar.
I looked at Beatrice, who was trembling, watching me like a condemned woman waiting for the axe to fall.
"You knew who he was?" I asked her quietly.
"I... I found him four years ago," Beatrice stammered, tears running down her cheeks. "I was working as a dishwasher at a soup kitchen downtown. He was freezing to death in an alley behind the alleyway dumpsters. He was delirious, calling out your father's name. When I helped him, he told me who he was. I took this cleaning job at your mansion three months ago... just so I could get close enough to see if you were like Julian... or if you were still your father's son."
I stared at her—at the thin, exhausted woman who had risked execution every night just to carry cold prime rib in a cracked plastic container to a broken old man.
"Get your things," I commanded.
Beatrice blinked, her face draining of color. "What...?"
"Both of you," I said, slipping the ledger into my inner coat pocket. "Julian has men monitoring this sector. If my car stays parked at the corner for another ten minutes, Lorenzo will send a sweep team."
Gabe looked up at me, a faint, sad smile touching his scarred lips. "Where are you taking us, Michael?"
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I looked my uncle in the eye—the man who had built the empire I currently inherited on blood and silence.
"To a house where nobody looks for ghosts," I said.
