Chapter 3 - Blood on the Velvet
Above the underground bunker, the Moretti estate was waking up to a nightmare.
The great limestone manor, standing high above the icy swells of Lake Michigan, was usually a fortress of disciplined silence. Now, the courtyard swarmed with black Cadillac Escalades, their halogen lights sweeping across manicured gardens. Men in tailored charcoal suits paced the perimeter, assault rifles unslung from their shoulders, their communication earpieces crackling with nervous static.
In the second-floor master study, beneath an oil painting of the family’s Sicilian forebears, Marco Vance sat behind Don Vincent’s mahogany desk.
A bag of frozen peas was pressed against Marco’s swollen, crimson eyes. Beside him, Dr. Bradley Evans sat hunched in a leather armchair, a glass of bourbon trembling so violently in his grasp that the ice cubes chimed like funeral bells. Dr. Evans’s neck was ringed with deep, purple bruises where Vincent’s fingers had clamped shut.
The heavy double doors swung open, and Frankie "The Hammer" Ruscitti stepped into the room.
Frankie was fifty years old, built like a fire hydrant, with a flat, broken nose and knuckles scarred from thirty years of enforcing the Moretti will. He was the street boss—the man who commanded the loyalty of the family’s two hundred foot soldiers.
Frankie’s eyes scanned the room, lingering on the bloodstain on Marco’s collar and the terror on the doctor’s face.
"What the hell is going on, Marco?" Frankie demanded, his voice like grinding millstones. "The silent alarm from the sub-level tripped. The captains are blowing up my phone. Where is the Don?"
Marco slowly lowered the ice pack. He had rehearsed the lie during the ten minutes it took Dr. Evans to wash the blood from his hands.
"He's dead, Frankie," Marco said, his voice dropping into an octave of heavy, manufactured sorrow.
Frankie went rigid. The color drained from his leathery face. "Dead? He was stable yesterday. He was recovering from the bypass surgery."
"He was poisoned," Marco lied smoothly, rising to his feet and walking toward the grand floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the misty lake. "We found him in cardiac arrest. Evans tried to revive him, but it was too late. The neurotoxin was fast-acting."
Frankie took a step forward, his fists balling into knots. "Who did it? Who breached this house?"
Marco turned, pointing an accusing, bandaged finger at the desk. "The maid. The little Hispanic girl Vincent brought in from the South Side. Elena Ramos."
Dr. Evans swallowed hard, nodding rapidly. "It was in the Don’s late-night broth. Digitalis and a synthetic curare base. She... she must have been turned by the Russian syndicate. When I realized what she had done, she went berserk. She smashed the lab, pulled a gun, and... she stole the Don’s body."
Frankie’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure fury. "She stole the body? A ninety-pound maid took a two-hundred-pound man out of a locked bunker?"
"She had an accomplice inside," Marco countered sharply, stepping into Frankie’s personal space, asserting his authority. "Someone unlocked the service tunnel. They dragged the Don’s remains out toward the tracks. They want to desecrate his corpse, Frankie. They want to paralyse the Moretti family by showing the city our Don was murdered in his own bed by the help."
Frankie stared at Marco for three long, agonizing seconds. There was an unsettling smell in the air—the sharp scent of fired gunpowder that had not come from the shooting range outside. But Frankie was a soldier who understood the chain of command. Vincent had named Marco his underboss three years ago.
"What are your orders, boss?" Frankie asked, the title tasting bitter on his tongue.
Marco felt a rush of raw, intoxicating power wash through his veins. *Boss.* The word he had waited fifteen years to hear.
"Put a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on the girl," Marco commanded. "Dead or alive. Put word out to every precinct commander on our payroll: she is armed, dangerous, and wanted for the assassination of Vincent Moretti. Scour the rail yards. Check every clinic, every flophouse, every safehouse between here and Gary, Indiana."
"And if she talks?" Frankie asked quietly.
"Put a bullet between her eyes before she can open her mouth," Marco snapped. "Nobody disrespects the Moretti family and lives to see the dawn."
Frankie gave a curt nod and spun on his heel, striding out of the office to unleash the hounds of Chicago’s underworld into the rainy night.
Left alone in the study, Marco turned back to Dr. Evans. The fake sorrow vanished from his face, replaced by a cold, murderous glare.
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"Find them, Bradley," Marco whispered, his voice trembling with suppressed rage. "Because if Vincent recovers enough to walk into a sit-down with the Commission... you and I won't just die. He will skin us alive in the meatpacking district."
***
