Chapter 3 - The Lies of Seven Years"You died," Dante said. His voice wasn't angry. It was terrifyingly, unnaturally quiet. He crossed the small room in two strides, dropping to his knees beside the mattress. His large, scarred hands hovered over her shoulders as if afraid she would shatter if he touched her too hard. "I buried you, Elena. I stood in the rain. I saw the car."
Elena turned her face away, coughing violently into a rag that came away stained dark with crimson.
"I didn't die, Dante," she whispered, her voice cracking. "The woman in that car... wasn't me."
"Then whose body was it?" Dante demanded, his fingers gripping the edge of her quilt. "The dental records—"
"Were swapped," a harsh voice interrupted from the shadowy kitchenette.
Dante spun around, his hand instinctively flashing to his belt, but stopped. Standing in the doorway was an old woman with iron-grey hair and a butcher's knife tucked into her apron. It was Mrs. Gable, the landlord, though Dante recognized her instantly from his old intel files as a retired falsifier of identity papers for the South Boston docks.
"Mr. Russo," Mrs. Gable said coldly, stepping into the dim light. "You think you own the city, but you don't know the half of what people do to survive when men like you start waging wars. Seven years ago, Elena was pregnant with your children. Salvatore’s men found out. They didn't just want you dead, Dante; they wanted your bloodline wiped out before it drew breath."
Dante froze. "Salvatore..."
"He had a hit squad waiting at your maternity clinic," Mrs. Gable continued, pointing the flat of her knife toward Elena. "I pulled her out the back window. I put a junkie girl who had overdosed into Elena’s car, rolled it down the embankment on I-93, and torched it. The dental records matched because I had bought the medical charts of a Jane Doe from a corrupt coroner two weeks prior."
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Elena began to weep silently, her thin shoulders shaking under the quilt. "I had to run, Dante. If I stayed, you would have spent your whole life fighting a war to protect us, and we would have ended up in a ditch anyway. I went into hiding. I raised our girls in the dark. But my lungs... the chemical plant where I worked the night shift... it destroyed me."
Dante stared at her, the entire architecture of his life—his vengeance, his cold empire, his seven years of mourning—collapsing into dust.
