Chapter 2 - Shadows of a Twelve-Year LieThe silence inside the subterranean room was heavy enough to crush bone.
Beatrice remained on her knees, looking frantically between me and the frail woman on the bed, her face pale with confusion and absolute terror.
"You... you know her?" Beatrice whimpered.
I didn't answer. I dropped to my knees on the cold floorboards, uncaring of the dirt soaking into my trousers. I reached out with a hand that had ordered the deaths of a hundred men, but as I touched Sophia’s scarred cheek, my fingers trembled violently.
Her skin was paper-thin and freezing. But she was warm. She was breathing.
"Dominic," Sophia wept, tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks. She reached out, her thin, frail fingers grasping my coat lapels. "Is it really you? Or am I dreaming again?"
"It's me, Little Bird," I used the childhood name our father had given her, pulling her thin body into my arms. "It's me. I swear to God, it's me."
She sobbed into my shoulder, her weak frame shaking against mine. For twelve years, I had carried the suffocating weight of her ghost. I had turned my heart into stone, convinced that feeling anything would make me weak in a world of wolves.
When she pulled back slightly, her eyes flickered with a sudden, sharp panic. She grabbed my wrist, her grip surprisingly tight.
"You have to go," she gasped, looking toward the open door. "Dominic, if he finds out you're here, he'll kill you too!"
I frowned, my brow furrowing. "Who will kill me, Sophia? The Marcones? The Russian syndicate? I wiped them out years ago. They're gone."
Sophia shook her head wildly, her scarred jaw tightening. "Not them! It was never them!"
Beside us, Beatrice stood up slowly, clutching the canvas bag to her chest. "Don Dominic... the man who set the fire on Pier 4... it wasn't a rival family."
I turned my gaze up to Beatrice, my eyes narrowing into slits. "What are you talking about?"
"Twelve years ago, I was a sixteen-year-old kitchen girl at your father's estate," Beatrice said, her voice steadying despite her fear. "On the night of the explosion, I was sent to the pier to deliver paperwork for your father. I was in the secondary office when I heard voices."
Beatrice took a deep breath, swallowing hard.
"I saw Lorenzo Vale," Beatrice whispered. "He locked the fire exit doors from the outside. He set the gasoline charges himself. I saw Lady Sophia trapped behind the reinforced glass. When Lorenzo walked away to set off the detonator, I managed to break a coal chute grate at the back of the building. I dragged her out seconds before the roof collapsed."
The world seemed to spin on its axis.
Lorenzo.
My second-in-command. The man who sat at my right hand. The man who had held my mother as she wept at the funeral. The man who had convinced me to launch a dozen retaliatory strikes, carving a bloody path through Chicago so he could seize the rival territories in the aftermath.
"Why didn't you bring her home?" I demanded, my voice dropping into a lethal, vibration-rich register. "Why did you hide her in a cellar for twelve years?!"
"Because Lorenzo came to the hospital where I took her!" Sophia cried out, grabbing my collar. "He owned the doctors! He bought the dental records! He told Beatrice that if anyone ever found out I was alive, he would execute every member of her family and burn down the city! We had nowhere to go, Dominic! We thought you were part of it!"
"Part of it?" I echoed, the pain striking deeper than any blade.
"Lorenzo told us you ordered the hit," Beatrice said softly, looking at me with a mixture of pity and regret. "He said you wanted your father's throne and that your sister was collateral damage. For twelve years, we believed you were a monster."
I sat frozen on the floor, the truth sweeping through my mind like a forest fire.
Lorenzo hadn't just stolen twelve years of my sister's life. He had turned me into his personal executioner, using my grief and rage to eliminate his political enemies while keeping me trapped in a web of engineered violence.
Every dollar in my vault, every block of territory under my control, had been bought with the blood of my sister's suffering.
I stood up slowly. The air around me seemed to drop twenty degrees.
"Don Dominic?" Beatrice whispered, taking a cautious step back from the raw, absolute malice radiating off my frame.
I reached down, picking up the plastic container of food from the floor. I set it gently on the small wooden table beside the cot.
Then I looked at Beatrice. Really looked at her.
She had spent twelve years working double shifts, enduring low wages, living in squalor, and sneaking leftovers out of my mansion—all to keep my sister alive and hidden from the demon sitting in my study.
"What is your full name?" I asked quietly.
"Beatrice... Beatrice Eleanor Gallagher, sir."
I bowed my head slightly to her—a sign of respect I had never offered to any capo or syndicate Don in my entire life.
"Beatrice Gallagher," I said, my voice heavy with absolute solemnity. "You saved the life of a Moretti. You bore a burden that should have broken you, and you protected my blood when I was too blind to see the snakes in my own home."
I pulled a encrypted satellite phone from my inner pocket and dialed a number known only to three people in the world.
"Marco," I commanded the moment the line clicked open. "Bring the armored van, Dr. Vance, and six of your most loyal men to 412 Mercer Street. Off the books. If anyone asks, you're securing a routine drop. If Lorenzo finds out, I'll put a bullet through your head myself."
"On my way, Don Dominic," Marco replied without hesitation.
May you like
I ended the call and turned back to Sophia and Beatrice.
"The lie ends tonight," I promised, my eyes burning with a cold, absolute resolve. "Starting now, you are safe. And Lorenzo Vale is going to learn what happens when you build an empire on a grave."
