Chapter 14 - The Name in the Cellar
|
Twenty minutes later, the five capos had been dismissed from the main house after swearing renewed blood oaths and receiving orders to seize every bank account, dock warehouse, and safe house registered to Victor Halstead across Illinois.
Upstairs in the sunny conservatory—where the spilled watering can had already been cleaned away and fresh white orchids bloomed beneath the glass dome—Clara sat wrapped in a warm shawl while the estate’s chef nervously brought her hot tea and pastries, treating her less like a former coworker and more like the reigning queen of the house.
Down in the soundproof wine cellar thirty feet beneath the kitchen, the atmosphere was considerably colder.
Victor Halstead sat strapped to a heavy oak chair beneath a single hanging tungsten bulb, his shattered right hand crudely splinted to the armrest. His camel-hair coat was gone, his silk shirt soaked in sweat and blood.
Lucian stood leaning against a rack of vintage Bordeaux ten feet away, his arms folded over his chest while Roman stood behind the chair holding a pair of steel pliers.
"You know how this ends, Victor," Lucian said calmly. "You’ve watched me conduct forty interrogations in this room over the last decade. There is no scenario where you walk back up those stairs. The only thing you are negotiating right now is whether it takes ten seconds or ten hours."
Victor lifted his swollen, bruised face toward the light. Despite the agony radiating from his broken hand, a bitter, manic laugh bubbled up from his throat, staining his teeth pink.
"Ten hours? Go ahead, Lucian!" Victor spat onto the stone floor. "You think you won today because you intercepted a train and saved your little housekeeper? You arrogant, blind bastard! You don't even know what you brought into your bed last night!"
Lucian didn't flinch. Not a single muscle in his face moved. "Speak plainly."
"You think I picked Clara Hayes out of three million people in Chicago two years ago just because her father needed a kidney machine?" Victor wheezed, his eyes gleaming with malicious triumph behind his cracked spectacles. "Ask yourself why I paid forty-two thousand dollars for a dying mechanic named Thomas Hayes! Or better yet—ask yourself what Thomas Hayes’s real name was before he moved to Illinois twenty years ago!"
A sudden, icy stillness settled over the cellar.
Lucian pushed himself off the wine rack and took three slow steps into the circle of light beneath the tungsten bulb.
"Who was Thomas Hayes?" Lucian asked softly.
"His real name was Thomas Henderson," Victor whispered, smiling through his bloodied lips. "Thirty years ago, before you were old enough to hold a pistol, he was the chief forensic accountant for the New York Commission—and your mother’s personal trust officer before she married your father."
Roman’s eyes widened behind the chair. "Boss, your mother’s family in Michigan—"
"Shut up, Roman," Lucian ordered quietly, never breaking eye contact with Victor. "Keep talking, Victor. Why were you watching his daughter?"
"Because ten years ago, the night your father and mother were gunned down outside the opera house," Victor hissed, leaning forward against the leather straps, "it wasn't the Irish mob who ordered the hit! It was Don Lorenzo Bellini—the head of the Commission in New York—and your own uncle, Marcus Sterling, before he died! Your mother found out Lorenzo was using Sterling freighters to traffic federal contraband, and she gave the original bank routing proofs and audio recordings to her old accountant, Thomas Henderson, to hide!"
The air in the cellar seemed to vanish completely. For ten years, Lucian had waged a bloody vendetta against the Irish syndicate in St. Louis, believing they had butchered his parents on the opera house steps.
"Thomas disappeared under the name Hayes," Victor continued, laughing breathlessly as he watched the cold fury rise in Lucian’s silver eyes. "We hunted him for eight years until we finally found him working at a garage in Evanston. When he refused to tell Don Lorenzo where he hid your mother’s vault key, we laced his shop water with heavy metals until his kidneys rotted out! I paid his hospital bills and put his daughter inside your house because Lorenzo swore the girl had the key hidden in her belongings without even knowing what it was!"
Lucian grabbed the front of Victor’s bloodied shirt, hauling chair and man six inches off the concrete floor.
May you like
"And when you couldn't find it in her room after two years?" Lucian growled.
"Lorenzo decided yesterday that you were getting too close to Clara—and if she ever showed you her father’s keepsakes, you’d recognize your mother’s property!" Victor gasped, choking as Lucian’s grip tightened around his windpipe. "Lorenzo landed at Midway Airport on a private jet twenty minutes ago with forty Commission gunmen, Lucian! If I don't call him by ten o'clock to confirm you're dead, he’s coming here to burn this estate to the ground!"
