Chapter 20 - The Shadow at the Top of the Stairs
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In the freezing silence of the gutted Pilsen basement, the crunch of gravel echoed softly from the top of the cellar doorway above Tessa’s head.
"Miss Tessa?" Matteo’s deep voice called down into the gloom, his heavy boots stepping onto the top wooden stair as the beam of his tactical flashlight swept down toward the corner where she was kneeling beside the open steel footlocker. "It’s getting dark out, and the boss wants you back at the hotel before six. Did you find anything else in the bottom of your dad’s box?"
Tessa’s blood turned to liquid nitrogen in her veins.
If Matteo came down those stairs and saw the open mahogany case containing Don Lorenzo Vane’s ivory-gripped 1911 and the 2016 Medical Examiner folder proving that Dr. Rossini and Matteo had orchestrated the murder of Roman’s father ten years ago—and that Chloe was Lorenzo Vane’s surviving heir—she would never walk out of this basement alive!
Wait—why had Matteo fought beside Roman at Mercy General and in the river tunnel if he and his uncle Dr. Rossini had killed Roman’s father in 2016?!
Because Victor Vance and Arthur Sterling had been greedy loose cannons who were going to ruin the two-billion-dollar casino license with their sloppy carfentanil deal! Dr. Rossini and Matteo had needed Roman to eliminate Victor and secure the clean, two-billion-dollar casino monopoly first—and last week, while Dr. Rossini had drawn ten-year-old Chloe’s pre-op blood panel at the Oak Brook villa for her heart surgery, Rossini must have spotted the rare hereditary Vane genetic marker in Chloe’s bloodwork!
That was why Dr. Rossini had been so eager to bring his granddaughters to the sixty-fourth floor tonight to sit with Chloe while Matteo brought Tessa to an abandoned, condemned building in Pilsen!
Moving with silent, lightning speed before Matteo’s flashlight beam reached the corner of the cellar, Tessa shoved the 2016 folder inside the waistband of her trousers beneath her wool coat, kicked the false sheet-metal plate back over the bottom of the footlocker, and closed her left hand around the ivory grip of Don Lorenzo Vane’s loaded Colt 1911—sliding it silently beneath her folded scarf just as Matteo’s boots reached the bottom of the stairs ten feet away!
"Just some rusted carpentry tools at the bottom, Matteo," Tessa said, forcing her voice to remain completely steady as she stood up and turned toward him with a calm smile, keeping the folded cashmere scarf draped naturally over her left hand where her finger rested on the safety of the .45 automatic.
Matteo stopped six feet away in the dim cellar.
His flashlight beam didn't stay on her face. It dropped to the concrete floor beside the footlocker—where a single yellowed corner of the 2016 Mercy General birth certificate ribbon had caught on a rusted rivet of the false bottom!
Matteo’s eyes lifted slowly from the ribbon to the bulge of the cashmere scarf over Tessa’s left hand.
The loyal, respectful bodyguard expression on his scarred face vanished—replaced by cold, quiet calculation as his right hand slid slowly toward the suppressed SIG Sauer beneath his leather jacket.
"Uncle Emilio called me five minutes ago from the sixty-fourth floor, Tessa," Matteo said softly, blocking the only staircase out of the cellar. "When the genetic lab in Boston ran Chloe’s tissue match for her new heart valve on Friday, the automated family-donor registry flagged a fifty-percent paternal sibling match to Roman Vane’s DNA profile on file at the clinic. We wondered how a building inspector’s kid had Lorenzo Vane’s blood in her veins."
"If your uncle touches a hair on Chloe’s head on the sixty-fourth floor, Roman will tear you both apart with his bare hands," Tessa said, her voice dropping into ice.
"Roman won't be on the sixty-fourth floor," Matteo replied evenly. "Uncle Emilio just poured Roman’s six-o’clock scotch in the penthouse library—and as for you, it’s a tragedy how unstable these burned-out basement floors are when a grieving daughter comes back to look for old photos."
Matteo’s hand jerked inside his jacket for his gun.
He forgot that Tessa didn't have to draw from a holster—her finger was already on the trigger inside the cashmere scarf.
Before Matteo’s barrel cleared his leather lapel, Tessa fired Don Lorenzo’s Colt 1911 straight through the wool of her scarf—putting a heavy .45 round squarely through Matteo’s right collarbone and slamming the six-foot-four enforcer backward against the wooden staircase support post!
As the rotting, fire-weakened staircase beam splintered under Matteo’s weight, dropping half the burning cellar ceiling timber down between them to pin him to the concrete floor, Tessa scrambled up the outer brick coal-chute ladder into the snowy Pilsen alley, yanked her phone from her pocket with her bandaged hand, and hit speed-dial One as she sprinted toward the street.
Up on the sixty-fifth floor of The Sovereign Hotel, standing by the glass conservatory window with a crystal tumbler of amber scotch that Dr. Rossini had just handed him raised halfway to his lips, Roman Vane’s phone began to ring.
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"Roman—DON'T DRINK THE SCOTCH!" Tessa’s voice screamed through the receiver as the glass in Roman’s hand froze half an inch from his mouth. "Chloe isn't my sister—she’s YOURS—and Dr. Rossini is the man who killed your father!"
Across the penthouse library, standing right beside the open doorway leading down to Chloe’s room on the sixty-fourth floor, Dr. Emilio Rossini’s grandfatherly smile vanished—and his hand dropped to the surgical scalpel in his pocket just as the lights in the penthouse went dead.
