Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the BasementI waited three minutes to let her settle before sliding down the alleyway. The air down here smelled of damp earth, coal dust, and old iron.
The basement door was left ajar by an inch. I crept forward, moving with the silent, predatory grace that had kept me alive through three bloody succession wars. Pressing my eye to the gap, the breath caught in my throat.
The basement was a makeshift home, shockingly clean despite the crumbling concrete walls. A small space heater glowed red in the corner, throwing desperate waves of heat across a thin mattress on the floor.
Beatrice was kneeling beside the bed.
“I brought it, sweetheart,” she whispered, her voice cracking with an emotion so raw it made my own chest ache. “It’s still warm. Well, I can microwave it in a minute. Look, prime rib. Just like the ones from the master's table.”
A small, thin hand reached out from beneath a pile of heavy wool blankets.
The person beneath the covers shifted, coughing—a wet, rattling sound that signaled advanced pneumonia or worse.
“Mom…” a frail voice rasped. “You shouldn't have gone back there. It’s too dangerous. If Victor Vale finds out—”
My blood turned to liquid nitrogen.
Victor Vale. That was my name. Not a name whispered in love, but a name feared across the entire Midwest. Why would someone hiding in a rat-infested basement in the dead of winter speak my name with such terror?
I leaned closer, my fingers tightening instinctively around the grip of the Beretta hidden beneath my coat.
“He won't find out,” Beatrice soothed, gently peeling back the blanket to feed her child a piece of the meat. “He’s a monster, Elena. But he’s arrogant. He only looks at money and power. He never looks down.”
Elena raised her head into the weak glow of the single overhead bulb.
My world stopped spinning.
The breath was violently sucked from my lungs. The concrete walls seemed to tilt sideways, and the ambient hum of the city vanished, replaced by a deafening roar in my ears.
I knew those eyes. I had traced those exact cheekbones in my memory every single day for twelve agonizing years.
It was Elena.
May you like
My younger sister.
The sister whose charred remains I had personally identified after a car bomb ripped through our family estate a decade ago—a bombing I had spent twelve years avenging by building a mountain of corpses.
