Chapter 13 - The Fire of Ninety-Six
"You weren't supposed to find the ledger in the basement, Nate," Vincent said, pulling a silver hip flask from his breast pocket and taking a slow, measured pull before offering it to me. I didn't take it. "That book was supposed to stay buried until the statute of limitations ran out on the federal RICO indictments. Sterling jumped the gun because he’s desperate. The new board is starving for liquidity."
"Liquidity?" I snapped, my temper finally snapping the thin wire of patience I’d been holding onto since I walked into Apartment 4B. "Vincent, that little girl upstairs—your daughter—was sewing her fingers to the bone in a tenement while you've been playing ghost for thirty years? What kind of sick game are you and our old man running?"
Vincent didn't flinch. He didn't raise his voice. He just capped the silver flask with a soft click and slid it back into his jacket.
"You think I wanted to leave her there?" Vincent’s voice dropped an octave, turning hard and cold as iron. "You think I liked watching my little girl grow up in a hole while I lived off burner phones and offshore wire transfers in the Cayman Islands? If I had shown my face in Chicago before last month, Marcone’s remaining crew would have put a bullet in her head before she learned how to read."
He stepped closer, invading my space, his eyes burning with a desperate, frantic intensity.
"The debt wasn't about money, Nate. It never was. The ledger contains the names of every federal judge, every police captain, and every district attorney who took payoffs to keep the Moretti family out of the electric chair. If that book gets published—if Vance gets her hands on the unencrypted drive—half the government in Illinois goes down in flames. And the people who survived will hunt down every single blood relative with my last name to make sure no one tells the rest of the story."
"Then why give it to Lily?" I demanded. "Why put that kind of target on a seven-year-old kid's back?"
"Because Lily is the only one they won't suspect," Vincent said grimly. "And because she has her mother’s brains. Sarah knew how to hide the digital keys inside the physical mechanics of that sewing machine. Every stitch she made wasn't for rent money, Nate. She was threading the encryption codes into the cloth patterns, selling them piece by piece to the only people who still honor the old code."
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Before I could answer, a sharp crack echoed through the concrete garage—not a car backfiring, but the unmistakable sound of a high-powered rifle round ricocheting off a concrete pillar ten feet to our left, showering us in a cloud of white dust and sharp stone chips.
"Get down!" Vincent roared, tackling me to the floor behind the engine block of my Lincoln just as a second round punched clean through the driver’s side window, shattering safety glass all over the leather seats.
