Chapter 7 - The Bellini Shadow
While peace reigned within the sanctuary of the Moretti estate, sixty miles south in an abandoned industrial warehouse along the Calumet River, the remnants of the Bellini syndicate were drowning in fury and desperation.
Don Corrado Bellini sat in a rusted steel chair, his right arm bound tightly in bloody surgical gauze and temporary splints. A rogue back-alley doctor had patched the gunshot wound Damian had inflicted, but the agony radiating from his shattered bone was nothing compared to the venom burning through his veins.
Across the dimly lit concrete floor, Isabelle paced hysterically.
She had torn off her designer heels, her mascara was smeared across her cheeks, and her voice grated against the corrugated metal walls like a rusty saw.
“You let him shoot you!” Isabelle screamed at her father. “You let him strip our territory in front of the entire Commission! And for what?! For that little South Side tramp! I should have slit her throat last night instead of cutting her hair!”
“Shut up, Isabelle!” Corrado roared, his face mottled with feverish rage. “Your childish theatrics are the reason Damian moved early! If you hadn't provoked him over that stupid servant, we would have had another three months to liquidate the offshore accounts!”
“Don’t blame me!” Isabelle snarled, stepping into his face. “You’re the one who failed to kill Salvatore Vasquez properly twenty years ago! You left a daughter behind to crawl out of the gutters and take everything that belongs to me!”
Corrado gripped the armrests of his chair, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. “She won’t have it for long.”
Isabelle froze, her eyes narrowing with vicious curiosity. “What do you mean?”
Corrado signaled to his surviving lieutenant, a scarred, ruthless mercenary named Vane who stood by the metal doors. “The Commission thinks I’m defeated. They think because Damian took our Chicago docks, the game is over. But they forget that before Salvatore went to prison, he gave his wife a physical safety deposit key. It holds the cryptographic master codes to the eighty million dollars hidden in the Swiss Zurich vaults.”
Isabelle’s breath caught. “The Swiss vaults? I thought that was a myth.”
“It’s not a myth,” Corrado spat. “Salvatore hid the key in an heirloom locket he gave to Elena when she was a child. Damian has the ledgers, but without that physical key and the cipher inside it, the Moretti family cannot legally or digitally touch a single cent of the Vasquez fortune.”
Isabelle stepped closer, her cruel, vindictive smile slowly returning to her lips. “And Elena has the locket?”
“She never took it off,” Corrado said, a sinister, murderous gleam in his feverish eyes. “Even when she was working as a scrubwoman, my informants told me she wore a silver filigree cross beneath her apron. That cross is the housing for the key.”
Isabelle’s chest heaved with renewed malice. “Then we don’t just leave Chicago. We take the locket. We take the girl. And we make Damian Moretti watch while we burn everything his father built to the ground.”
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Corrado nodded slowly, his face twisting into a hideous mask of bloodlust. “Call our contacts in the Detroit faction. Tell them I will pay five million dollars in unmarked cash for twelve heavy tactical operators. We strike tonight, while Damian is celebrating his victory.”
***
