Chapter 3 - The Shadow Behind the Throne
"Who are they?" I demanded, my hands instantly snapping back to reality as I drew the Kimber .45 from my jacket, stepping between my brother's cot and the basement stairs.
Julian pulled himself up on his elbow, terror returning to his frail features with brutal clarity. "They're... they're Dominic’s clean-up crew, Nicholas! They come every month! To collect the payment!"
"Payment?" I growled. "What payment?"
"To keep him alive!" Beatrice cried, her arms wrapped tightly around Julian's trembling shoulders. "A man named Vance... he comes every four weeks! He takes my salary! He takes everything I earn from your house! He said if I stopped paying... if I told anyone Julian was alive... they would put a bullet in his head and throw his body in the river!"
A cold, terrifying realization began to form in the pit of my stomach—a puzzle made of blood and treason whose pieces were violently snapping into place.
Vance was Lorenzo Vale's chief lieutenant.
The man who had handled my father's private banking accounts. The man who had managed the internal security files after Julian’s 'accident.'
"Lorenzo," I whispered into my comms, my voice flat, cold, and deadlier than the winter outside. "Who is at the brewery?"
Static answered me.
Then, a smooth, familiar voice came through the channel—not with the panicked urgency of an enforcer, but with the cool, arrogant calm of a man who had finally dropped his mask.
"I tried to keep it simple, Nicholas," Lorenzo said over the speaker. "I really did. I told you to let me handle the girl. I told you she was just a thief. But you always had your father's curse—you always had to look too closely at things that didn't belong to you."
"You set up the crash twelve years ago," I said, my thumb clicking the safety off my pistol.
"Julian was soft," Lorenzo sneered through the receiver. "He wanted to legitimize the syndicate. He wanted to pull us out of the ports, out of the gambling halls, out of the narcotics pipelines. Your father was dying, and if Julian had taken the throne, we all would have become honest businessmen making five percent margins."
"So you staged his death," I continued, listening intently to the heavy, tactical footsteps crunching through the rotted floorboards directly above our heads. "You broke his body, hid him in a cellar, and used him to keep Beatrice under your thumb while you used me to fight your wars."
"You were so easy to manipulate, Nicholas," Lorenzo chuckled softly. "Give a angry twenty-four-year-old boy an enemy to hate, and he'll kill anyone you point him at. You wiped out the Chicago Outfit for me. You built me an empire worth three billion dollars. And all it cost me was a few hundred bucks a month to keep your broken brother breathing in a coal hole."
Heavy boots began to descend the concrete stairs.
"Vance is down there with six men, Nicholas," Lorenzo added chillingly. "They're armed with fully automatic weapons. I'm taking the rest of the crew back to Lake Shore Drive. By morning, the Commission will be informed that you were killed in an unfortunate ambush by rival cartels... and I will take my rightful seat at the head of the table."
The radio channel went dead.
"Nicholas!" Julian gasped, dragging himself off the cot, his bare feet hitting the freezing floorboards. "There's an old coal chute behind the boiler! It leads to the alley!"
"No," I said, stepping into the center of the basement aisle, holding my gun at low ready. "I'm not running anymore, Julian. I spent twelve years running down ghosts for a traitor."
I turned to Beatrice. "Get him behind the iron boiler. Keep his head down."
"Nicholas, there are too many of them!" Julian pleaded, his voice thick with tears.
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I looked back at my brother—broken, malnourished, stripped of his youth and his birthright—and felt a rage so vast, so profound, that it burned away the freezing chill of the basement until my blood felt like liquid fire.
"They brought guns to my brother's house, Julian," I said softly, stepping toward the stairs. "They're going to realize very quickly that they brought the wrong monster."
