Chapter 2 - Ghosts in the Ashes
The sound of the impact shattered the quiet alley like a gunshot.
Inside, I heard a sharp gasp, the sound of a chair violently scraping against concrete, and the unmistakable, metallic clack of a gun slide being racked back.
"Beatrice, get behind me!" the dry voice barked from inside.
I didn't give them time to prepare. I drew my weapon, angled my body, and drove my heavy combat boot into the weakest point of the reinforced door—the lower hinge. The rusted bolts tore free from the rotted concrete with a loud crunch. I kicked it a second time, and the iron door gave way, crashing inward and hitting the floor with a deafening boom.
I stepped into the room, my gun raised, my eyes sweeping the darkness in a fraction of a second.
"Move and you're dead!" I roared, my voice echoing off the damp concrete walls.
The space was tiny, smelling of damp earth, rubbing alcohol, and cheap kerosene from a flickering space heater in the corner. Shelves made of rusted cinderblocks were packed with old cans of food, medical supplies, and dog-eared books.
In the center of the room stood an old man in a threadbare wool coat. His left arm was gone from the elbow down, the empty sleeve pinned up with a rusted safety pin. His face was a map of deep, jagged fire scars that pulled his left eye into a perpetual, milky squint. In his remaining right hand, he held an ancient, pitted revolver, pointing it squarely at my chest.
Behind him, her back pressed against the far wall, stood Beatrice. She was hyperventilating, her hands clutched over her mouth, her green eyes wide with total, unadulterated horror.
"Dante..." the old man breathed.
The revolver in his hand began to shake. The milky, scarred eye widened as he took in my face, my coat, and the silver signet ring on my finger.
"Arthur," I said, my voice dropping an octave, heavy with a lethal, suffocating weight. "Lower the weapon."
"Arthur, don't!" Beatrice cried out, her voice breaking as she stepped in front of the old man, shielding his body with her own frail frame. "Dante, please! Don't shoot him! He didn't do anything! It was all me! I took the food! I took the money from the pantry! It was me!"
I looked at her. Really looked at her.
The quiet, meek girl who scrubbed my marble floors was standing in front of a loaded gun, placing herself between me and an ex-legionnaire of the Vale family. Her eyes were terrified, but her jaw was set.
"Step aside, Beatrice," I said coldly, keeping my sightline trained over her shoulder, directly at Arthur's face. "You have five seconds to tell me why a man who was buried in a empty casket twelve years ago is living in a hole in the West Side, eating scraps from my trash."
"I didn't die on the docks, Dante," Arthur rasped, lowering his revolver slowly. He reached out with his single hand and gently pushed Beatrice behind him. "Though God knows there are days I wish I had."
"You deserted," I snapped, my finger tightening on the trigger. "The Vale syndicate paid your family a pension for ten years because we thought you died defending my brother. If you survived, you were bound by oath to return to the family. To report to my father. To report to me."
"Report to who?" Arthur laughed—a horrific, dry sound that turned into a violent coughing fit. He spat a fleck of dark blood onto the floor. "Report to your father? To the man who set the fire?"
The room seemed to drop another ten degrees.
"What did you say?" I whispered.
"Your father built that dock house to fail, Dante," Arthur said, his single good eye burning with an old, furious grief. "It wasn't an attack by the Marcones. It wasn't an Irish hit squad. It was an execution. Your father found out what Julian was planning. He found out Julian was going to take his entire division, turn over the ledgers to the federal prosecutors, and burn the Vale empire to the ground from the inside."
"You're lying," I said, my voice tight, though a strange, sickly coldness began to creep into my stomach.
"Am I?" Arthur pointed his crippled arm at the corner of the room, toward a small, heavy iron trunk tucked beneath a cot. "The ledgers are in there, Dante. Julian’s private journals. His bank statements. The blueprints of the shipping lanes. He spent three years building a case to tear your father's business apart because he couldn't stomach the blood anymore."
"My father loved Julian!" I roared, the composure I had maintained for a decade finally cracking. "Julian was his favorite! He mourned him until the day he died!"
"He loved the empire, Dante!" Arthur shouted back, stepping forward, his scarred face twisted in agony. "Your father loved the power! Julian was going to destroy it all! So your father had the warehouse rigged with thermite. He sent Julian down there to inspect a arms shipment that didn't exist. I was at the door when the first charge went off. I lost my arm pulling him out of the fire!"
My breath caught in my throat.
Pulling him out.
I stopped. The world around me seemed to tilt on its axis. The flickering warm light of the kerosene heater cast long, distorted shadows across the concrete floor.
"Pulling... who out?" I asked, my voice barely audible above the hum of the heater.
Arthur didn't answer. He turned his head slightly, looking toward a dark, heavy curtain that hung across an archway at the back of the basement room.
Beatrice lowered her hands, her tears flowing freely now, pooling on her pale cheeks.
"He's been in there for twelve years, Dante," she whispered softly, her voice filled with a terrible, infinite pity. "He can't walk. He can't speak very well. The smoke destroyed his lungs, and the fire took almost everything else. Arthur brought him here the night of the explosion. They’ve been hiding in the dark ever since."
My hand holding the gun began to tremble. A cold sweat broke out across my back.
I dropped my weapon, letting it fall into the dirt floor with a soft thud.
I pushed past Arthur. I pushed past Beatrice.
My hand reached out, my fingers wrapping around the thick, rough canvas of the rear curtain. My mind screamed at me to stop, to turn around, to run back into the icy night and pretend I had never left my study. But my body moved on its own.
I pulled the curtain back.
Behind it was a tiny alcove, warmed by two heat lamps. Sitting in a heavily modified, rusted wheelchair was a man wrapped in thick wool blankets.
His body was thin, almost skeletal. His head was bowed, his face buried in the shadows of a dark hood. His skin, where the light caught it, was a landscape of pale, tight scar tissue. His left leg was missing below the knee, and his hands, resting on his lap, were gnarled and twisted like old tree roots.
Hearing the heavy curtain pull back, the man slowly, painfully lifted his head.
The light of the heat lamp struck his eyes.
They were deep, bright, piercing blue. The exact shade of blue that I saw every morning when I looked into the mirror.
My mother’s eyes.
Julian's eyes.
He looked at me through the haze of twelve years of pain and darkness. His pale, scarred lips parted, straining to form a word through a throat ruined by fire and smoke.
May you like
"Dan... te..." he rasped, a sound like dry leaves scraping across concrete.
I fell to my knees on the cold floor, the breath knocked completely out of my lungs, as the world I had built my entire life upon shattered into a thousand jagged pieces.
