Chapter 4 - The Ghost in the Study
The sound of shattering wood echoed through the penthouse like a gunshot.
“Go!” Dante shouted, shoving me through the master bedroom door and slamming it shut behind us, throwing the heavy brass deadbolt just as heavy boots began stomping across the hardwood floors of the main sitting area.
I didn't hesitate anymore. Panic was a cold, sharp blade cutting through my confusion. I sprinted across the expansive bedroom, throwing open the sliding glass balcony door. The freezing Chicago wind whipped through my hair, stinging my face, but I barely felt it. Below us, the service fire escape zigzagged down the side of the brick building into a narrow, shadowed alleyway.
I didn't go down.
Instead, my father’s words echoed in my mind—not spoken to me in life, but transcribed in the margins of his old leather-bound journals that I had packed into our luggage back in Zurich. History isn't found in what is printed, Elena. It’s hidden in the bindings of what everyone else ignores.
If my father was the shadow treasurer for the Chicago Outfit, and if his "retirement" was actually a deep-cover extraction engineered by Dante, then the ledger wasn't stored in a bank vault or a digital cloud. It was physical. And it was buried in the one place he spent every waking hour of his final years: his study back at the Carter family estate on the North Side.
The estate where Victoria was currently living as Mrs. Dante Moretti.
Ten minutes later, I was behind the wheel of Dante’s black SUV—which his security keys had conveniently unlocked in the basement garage—driving blindly through the sleet-slicked streets of Chicago. Mia was safely in the passenger seat, having been dumped unconscious but alive into the service elevator shaft by Dante’s quick-thinking guards before the breach. She was groggy, clutching a bruised shoulder, but breathing.
“Elena, where are we going?” Mia groaned, pressing her fingers against her temple as the car skidded slightly on an icy turn. “That man in the hallway had a gun. We need to go to the police!”
“The police in Chicago belong to the Outfit, Mia,” I said tightly, my hands gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles were translucent. “If we go to the police, we’re handing ourselves directly to the traitors.”
“Then where the hell are we going?”
“To my childhood home,” I said, my voice dead calm. “We’re going to see my sister.”
The Carter estate loomed out of the swirling snow like a gothic monolith. Set behind high wrought-iron gates in a secluded northern suburb, the sprawling brick manor looked dark and forbidding against the winter sky. Only a few dim lights burned on the second-floor windows.
I killed the headlights a block away, coasting the SUV to a stop beneath the heavy boughs of an oak tree.
“Stay here with the phone,” I told Mia, reaching into the glove compartment where Dante’s Sig Sauer still rested—he must have slipped it inside before sending me out the balcony. The cold steel felt heavy and alien in my palm, but I checked the chamber the way I had watched Dante do a hundred times.
“Elena, you’re walking into a lion’s den,” Mia protested, grabbing my arm. “Victoria hates your guts. And if she’s married to Dante, she’s part of this entire nightmare.”
“She’s my sister,” I whispered, though the words tasted like copper. “And she’s the only one who can tell me where our father hid the truth.”
I slipped out into the freezing sleet, ducking beneath the shadow of the brick wall until I reached the side service entrance. To my surprise, the door wasn't locked. It clicked open easily under my hand, swinging inward with a soft, mournful creak.
The interior of the house smelled of old paper, polished mahogany, and faint lavender—the exact scent of my childhood. But it felt wrong. The dust covers were off the furniture, yet there was no sign of life. No servants, no security guards, no cheerful fires in the hearth.
I moved silently down the familiar hallway toward my father’s study.
The door was ajar. A single beam of light cut across the dark Persian rug from a desk lamp inside.
I raised the pistol, holding it with both hands the way Dante had shown me years ago on a private shooting range outside the city, and pushed the door open with my foot.
Sitting behind my father’s massive mahogany desk wasn't Victoria.
It was a man I hadn't seen in five years. A man whose face was supposed to be buried six feet under in a family plot in upstate New York.
My uncle Arthur—my father’s younger brother—slowly looked up from a stack of leather-bound ledgers, a cold, knowing smile spreading across his thin lips.
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“Well, well,” Arthur said, swirling a glass of amber whiskey in his hand. “I told Dante you were too stubborn to stay away in Europe. Welcome home, niece.”
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