Chapter 19 - The Red Foyer
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When the hydraulic steel door of the panic room swung open and Lucian walked back down the grand marble staircase of the Lake Forest estate, he didn't look like a wounded man.
He had buttoned a fresh black cashmere overcoat over his bandaged ribs, concealing the white gauze completely. His right hand rested on the grip of his pistol, and his left arm was wrapped securely around Clara’s waist, keeping her right beside him as they descended into the ruins of the foyer.
The entrance hall that had been so silent yesterday afternoon now looked like a battlefield.
Shattered crystal from the chandelier glittered across the black-and-white marble tiles like broken ice. Cold wind blew straight through the bullet-riddled front doors. Twenty of Enzo Castiglione’s soldiers and Roman’s estate guards stood in a tight semicircle with their rifles raised.
In the center of the blood-stained floor, right beside the console table where Clara’s black suitcase had stood twenty-four hours ago, Don Lorenzo Bellini and Marcus Sterling Jr. knelt on the cold marble with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
Marcus had a split lip and a swollen eye, trembling violently as he looked up at his cousin on the stairs. Don Lorenzo, at sixty-eight, knelt with his fur-trimmed coat soaked in mud and blood from a bullet wound in his thigh, glaring up at Lucian with venomous hatred.
"You touch a hair on my head, Lucian," Don Lorenzo snarled, spitting blood onto the tiles, "and the entire five families in New York will descend on Chicago before your body hits the ground! I am the Chairman of the Commission!"
"You were the Chairman," Lucian corrected calmly, stopping on the bottom step and handing the laptop computer to Enzo Castiglione. "Until five minutes ago, when I transmitted my mother’s 2016 Vatican Bank audits and Thomas Henderson’s testimony to every capo in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia."
Enzo looked down at the screen, reading the forged narcotics manifests and the records of the sixty million dollars Lorenzo had stolen from the Commission’s own Midwest union funds before framing Richard Sterling.
Enzo’s face turned dark crimson with rage. He looked up from the laptop and spat straight into Don Lorenzo’s face.
"You murdered Richard and Eleanor to cover up your own skimming," Enzo roared, pulling his heavy silver forty-five from his belt, "and you had us burying our own boys in a fake war with St. Louis for ten years?!"
At that exact moment, Don Lorenzo’s encrypted satellite phone began ringing inside his coat pocket. Roman reached down, pulled the phone out, saw the caller ID reading NEW YORK COMMISSION - CASTELLANO, and put it on speakerphone for the entire foyer to hear.
"Lucian?" the gravelly voice of Don Castellano, the head of the Brooklyn syndicate, echoed through the hall. "We just received the Henderson files and the bank routing numbers. Lorenzo acted without the table’s knowledge ten years ago, and he stole from all of us. As of this minute, New York washes its hands of Lorenzo Bellini and Marcus Sterling. The Midwest seat on the Commission belongs solely to you, Lucian. Clean your house however you see fit."
The line clicked dead.
Every trace of arrogance vanished from Don Lorenzo’s face as he stared at the silent phone in Roman’s hand. Beside him, Marcus began weeping hysterically, lunging forward on his knees toward the stairs.
"Lucian, please! We're blood! Victor told me you were already dead—"
"You brought forty gunmen into my home," Lucian interrupted softly, his silver-gray eyes dropping to Clara’s bruised wrist beside him, "and you broke the skylight over the woman I love."
Lucian turned Clara gently toward his chest, shielding her eyes against his black cashmere shoulder and covering her ears with one warm palm as he nodded once toward Enzo and Roman.
May you like
"Take them out to the boat dock," Lucian ordered quietly. "And put them under the ice where they belong."
While Enzo’s men dragged the two screaming traitors out through the back courtyard toward the frozen lake, Lucian lifted Clara off her feet and carried her away from the shattered foyer, up the private stairs to the untouched warmth of the master wing.
