Chapter 2 - The House on Deadwood LaneThe address was not a penthouse or a sleek Back Bay brownstone. It was a rotting Victorian lean-to on Deadwood Lane, tucked away in the industrial shadow of Chelsea, where the salt air smelled of dead fish and chemical runoff.
Dante’s black Maybach idled at the curb, its dual exhaust cutting low thrums into the silence of the abandoned alley. Nico killed the headlights.
"Boss, this smells like a setup," Nico warned, resting a hand beneath his jacket where a SIG Sauer rested in its shoulder holster. "Salvatore’s been looking for a weakness. If he planted kids with a fake painting—"
"Look at their eyes, Nico," Dante cut him off, stepping out into the slush. "You can't fake those eyes."
He followed the girls up a sagging wooden staircase that groaned under his heavy boots. The door to apartment 4B was unlatched, held together by a warped strip of duct tape. Inside, the apartment was freezing. There was no heat, only the faint, sickeningly sweet smell of cheap cough syrup and burning kerosene from a smoking portable heater in the corner.
And then he heard the cough.
It was a deep, tearing sound that seemed to rip a person apart from the inside out.
Dante pushed the door open. The hinges shrieked.
Sitting on a mattress laid directly on the bare floorboards, wrapped in a faded quilt, was a woman. Her hair, once a rich dark blond, was streaked with premature silver and plastered to a sweat-drenched forehead. Her skin was translucent, stretched over high cheekbones. But even hollowed out by starvation and disease, the face was unmistakable.
May you like
Elena turned her head toward the sound of the door. Her green eyes widened in absolute, unadulterated terror.
"Dante..." she breathed, the word slipping out like a ghost from a tomb. "No... no, you shouldn't have found us."
