Chapter 2 - THE SILVER LOCKET

“Marco! Look at me!” I roared, pressing all my weight onto his wound.

His chest barely moved. The blood was pooling on the marble floor, a dark mirror reflecting the absolute chaos my life had become in the span of thirty minutes.

“We have to move him,” my mother said, her voice suddenly devoid of tears. She shifted into the ruthless matriarch she had once been. “Kane’s men will be coming back to sweep the restaurant. They leave no witnesses.”

“He needs an ambulance!” I shot back.

“An ambulance means a hospital, and a hospital means Kane’s surgeons,” she snapped, grabbing Marco’s other arm. “There is a secure safe house three blocks from here. An old mob clinic. Help me lift him.”

Together, we dragged my unconscious brother through the back service exit of the restaurant. The Chicago night air was freezing, the wind howling off the lake, stinging the blood on my hands. We loaded Marco into the back of my armored SUV parked in the alley.

I drove like a madman, my eyes darting to the rearview mirror every three seconds.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, the silence in the car choking me. “Five years, Mom. Marco knew for five years. Why was I kept in the dark?”

“Because you are exactly like your father,” she said, looking out the window into the dark city streets.

The words cut deeper than any knife.

“You are ruthless, Santiago. You are powerful. If you had known Elena existed, you would have brought her into your world. You would have used her, protected her with violence, and drawn a target on her back. Marco was different. Marco knew how to stay in the shadows.”

I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. She wasn’t entirely wrong. But it still stung.

We arrived at a rundown, abandoned pharmacy in the South Side. I carried Marco inside, kicking open the secret door in the back office that led to a fully equipped, sterilized underground clinic.

I laid Marco on the steel operating table. My mother immediately went to work. She wasn’t a doctor, but twenty years married to the mob meant she knew how to pack a gunshot wound.

“Keep pressure here,” she ordered, handing me a stack of gauze.

While she prepped a blood transfusion from the clinic’s cold storage, I looked down at my bloody hands. I realized I was still holding the silver locket Marco had given me.

I wiped the blood off the tarnished silver using my jacket sleeve.

It was a beautiful, antique piece. There was a small latch on the side.

I popped it open, expecting to see a picture of my mother, or perhaps Elena as a baby.

Instead, there was no picture at all.

The inside of the locket had been hollowed out. Nestled in the center was a tiny, black micro-SD card.

“Mom,” I said quietly.

She looked over her shoulder, her hands covered in Marco’s blood.

I pulled the micro-SD card out. “Where is a laptop?”

“In the desk in the corner,” she said, turning back to Marco’s wound.

I walked over to the dusty metal desk, booted up the old laptop, and slid the SD card into the reader.

A single file appeared on the screen. It was a video file, labeled simply: TRUTH.

I clicked it.

The screen flickered to life. It was a live feed, not a recording.

My heart stopped.

I was looking at a dark, damp room. It looked like an old basement, with brick walls and exposed pipes.

Sitting in the center of the room, tied to a heavy wooden chair, was the waitress. My sister. Elena.

She was bruised, her lip bleeding, her uniform torn. But she was alive.

Then, the camera panned slightly.

Sitting on the floor beside her chair, clutching her leg, was a little boy.

He couldn’t have been more than six years old. He had dark, messy hair and terrified, wide eyes. He was clutching a small, stuffed bear.

“Mom,” I whispered, unable to look away from the screen. “Come here.”

She rushed over, wiping her hands on a towel. When she saw the screen, she let out a shattered gasp.

“Leo,” she sobbed, reaching out to touch the monitor.

“Who is Leo?” I demanded.

“Elena’s son,” my mother wept. “Your nephew. Kane has them both.”

Suddenly, the live feed glitched. A man’s face stepped into the frame, blocking Elena and the boy.

It was Dr. Elias Kane.

He looked directly into the camera, smiling a cold, clinical smile.

“Hello, Santiago,” Kane’s voice crackled through the laptop speakers. “I see you found your sister’s little insurance policy. Such a clever girl. She hid this camera in the room before she surrendered to my men. She hoped you would find the locket.”

“You’re a dead man, Kane,” I growled at the screen, even though he couldn’t hear me.

“I want the ledger, Santiago,” Kane said smoothly. “Your mother knows where it is. Bring it to the old rail yard on 4th Street in exactly one hour. If you don’t…”

Kane stepped aside, revealing Leo crying as he held onto his mother’s leg.

“…I will start dissecting your family tree, branch by branch.”

The screen went black.

I slammed my fist into the metal desk, leaving a massive dent in the steel.

“The ledger,” I said, turning to my mother. “You told me you didn’t have it.”

“I lied,” she said, her eyes hard and resolute. “I’ve always had it. It’s the only reason Kane kept me alive all these years.”

“Then we give it to him,” I said, checking my weapon. “We make the trade.”

“No,” my mother said, shaking her head. “The live feed, Santiago. Did you hear the background noise?”

I frowned, replaying the last ten seconds of the video in my mind.

Beneath Kane’s voice, there was a steady, rhythmic humming sound. A low vibration.

“It sounded like a train,” I said.

“Exactly,” she replied. “Kane said to meet him at the old rail yard on 4th Street. But the rail yard hasn’t had active trains running through it in twenty years.”

My eyes widened. She was right. The city shut down those tracks before I was a teenager.

“The feed is local,” I realized, my blood running cold. “He isn’t at the rail yard. He’s somewhere with active transit lines.”