Chapter 55 - Shadows in the Wake
The barge cut through the freezing chop of Lake Michigan, heading north toward the desolate shoreline of Door County, Wisconsin.
Below deck, Dante stirred.
I sat beside him on the narrow cot, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with a damp cloth. His eyelids fluttered open, dark and clouded with pain, but they locked onto me with immediate intensity.
"Mateo..." he whispered.
"He's asleep, Dante. He’s safe. Marcus fed him and he’s out cold in the captain’s bunk."
Dante exhaled, a long, shuddering breath, and reached out to cover my hand. "Laura... on that roof... when Victoria had him..."
"Don't," I cut him off, my voice trembling between love and profound betrayal. "Don't give me the hero’s speech, Dante. Not until you tell me about Elena."
Dante froze. His hand went rigid against mine, the color draining from his lips even faster than it had when the steel was lodged in his ribs.
"Where did you hear that name?" he breathed.
"Marcus found the Sovereign Ledger. The automated fail-safe that triggered the second Castiglione’s heart stopped. She’s alive, isn't she? All those years you spent mourning her, all those trips to the private cemetery in Milan... it was all a lie."
Dante closed his eyes, two solitary tears cutting lines through the soot on his cheeks.
"She wasn't in an asylum, Laura," he said, his voice hollowed out by decades of buried grief. "She was the architect. She was the one who built Castiglione Industries. My father was just her front man—a handsome face in an Italian suit who knew how to talk to Wall Street. When she realized how sick he was, how degenerate his appetites were, she tried to take the company and run with me."
"And what happened?"
"He staged her suicide. Threw her into a private black-site facility outside Zurich. I thought she died there twenty years ago. I swear on Mateo’s life, Laura—I thought she was dead!"
Before I could answer, the entire barge rocked violently with an impact that threw me off the bench.
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A deafening horn blasted through the night air, followed by the blinding beam of a megawatt searchlight pouring through the portholes, turning the cabin into day.
***
