Chapter 3 - The Second Ashford
Evelyn stared in stunned disbelief between the two men. They looked enough alike to be twins, yet the man tied to the pillar—Julian—carried an aura of desperate, reckless energy that Gabriel entirely lacked.
Gabriel holstered his weapon, rushing forward with frantic urgency to untie the heavy nylon ropes binding his brother to the stone pillar.
"What happened?" Gabriel demanded, pulling the sodden knots apart with his bare hands. "Everyone in the city thinks you skipped town with three million dollars from the South Side docks six months ago!"
Julian slumped forward the moment the final rope gave way, catching himself on his hands and knees in the rising, icy water. Gabriel and Evelyn both dropped down, grabbing his arms and hauling him upright, dragging him out of the flooded vault and onto the higher, dry stone steps of the corridor.
"I didn't skip town," Julian coughed, spitting out a mouthful of brackish water. "Margaret staged the whole thing. I discovered she was skimming funds from the union pensions to finance a private militia for the Delaneys. When I threatened to take the proof to the commission, she had her enforcers jump me in the East Wing garage."
Julian looked up at Gabriel, his eyes wide with frantic warning.
"They didn't kill me because Margaret wanted a spare body," Julian continued, gripping Gabriel’s lapels with shaking fingers. "She planned to fake my death—or yours—to trigger the emergency succession clause. Upstairs right now, the twenty-three captains are voting to hand absolute wartime authority to her. And the body they’re about to display in the open-casket funeral in the main hall isn't a corpse from the morgue... it's a decoy designed to look like whichever one of us she decided to sacrifice today."
Evelyn’s blood ran cold. The black memorial candles. The secret emergency council. The sealed chapel doors. It all clicked into a terrifyingly clear picture. Margaret Ashford wasn't just planning a coup; she was orchestrating a bloody coup d'état disguised as a family tragedy, complete with a state funeral for a man who wasn't even dead yet.
"We need to get to the chapel," Evelyn said, her voice cutting through the panic. "Now."
"If we walk through those front doors, Margaret's guards will drop us before we cross the threshold," Julian groaned, clutching his bruised ribs. "She has twenty armed men stationed in the cloisters."
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Gabriel stood up slowly, the cold, ruthless authority of the Ashford boss settling over him like heavy armor. The hesitation was entirely gone.
"We aren't going through the front doors," Gabriel said, his voice dangerously calm. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small brass tag number seventeen that Evelyn had handed him earlier. "We're going up through the bell tower."
