Chapter 3 - Beneath The Lake Forest Stone
The drive north out of Chicago took forty-five minutes, hugging the frozen shore of Lake Michigan before turning inland through wrought-iron gates that looked heavy enough to stop a tank.
The Conti estate in Lake Forest wasn't a house; it was a limestone compound wrapped in ancient oaks and manicured hedges that concealed motion sensors, cameras, and patrols moving with quiet efficiency. The main residence rose like a French provincial chateau dropped into the Illinois snow, its slate roof sharp against the grey winter sky.
The Navigator didn't stop at the front portico. It dipped down a steep, heated concrete ramp that led beneath the rear terrace, sliding into an underground garage that smelled of fresh asphalt, high-octane gasoline, and old money.
The driver—a thick-necked man with a scar cutting through his left eyebrow who hadn't spoken a single word since I got into the car—killed the engine. He came around, opened my door, and gestured toward a heavy steel-reinforced door set into the stone foundation.
"This way, Miss Hastings," he said. His voice was flat, devoid of threat or courtesy. Just pure execution.
I stepped out onto the heated floor, keeping my duffel bag clutched tightly against my side. "Where is Mr. Conti?"
"Waiting in the vault."
The word vault did not soothe my rapidly deteriorating nervous system.
We walked through three sets of security doors—each one requiring a biometric scan or a mechanical key code that the driver punched in with deliberate care—before stepping down a spiral staircase into the belly of the estate.
The subterranean room was vast, climate-controlled, and lit by recessed LED panels that mimicked natural daylight. But it wasn't a wine cellar or a panic room. It looked like an archive crossed with a forensic laboratory. Long stainless-steel tables occupied the center of the room, covered in stacks of brittle documents, plastic evidence bags, and—my breath caught in my throat—dozens of black leather-bound journals with water-damaged spines.
My father’s notebooks.
Standing beside the central table, his charcoal overcoat draped over the back of a leather armchair, was Gabriel Conti.
He wasn't wearing a jacket now. His white dress shirt was rolled up to the elbows, revealing forearms corded with muscle and faint, jagged scars that told stories he would never write down for a newspaper. He was holding a cassette tape up to the light, turning it slowly between his fingers as if reading the magnetic ribbon itself.
"You’re late by four minutes, Emerson," he said without looking up. His voice resonated off the stone walls, deep and resonant in the enclosed space.
"Traffic on Lake Shore Drive is notoriously uncooperative with mafia abductions, Mr. Conti," I shot back, surprising myself with a sudden flare of adrenaline that pushed past the terror.
That made him stop.
He lowered the cassette tape, set it down on the steel table with a soft clack, and slowly turned his head to look at me. Up close, his pale gray eyes were even more unnerving than they had been under the dinosaur skeleton. They didn't blink. They searched me with the cold, meticulous detachment of a man evaluating a piece of cargo for structural flaws.
"You have your father’s sharp tongue," Gabriel observed, stepping around the table. He was taller than I realized—close to six-foot-four—and he carried himself with the heavy, unyielding gravity of a predator who didn't need to stalk because the world came to him. "Tell me, does it run in the family, or did you pick it up while living in the hills outside Corleone under an assumed name?"
My blood ran cold. "I didn't use an assumed name."
"No," he agreed softly, closing the distance between us until I could smell the faint, clean scent of cedar and dark espresso on his skin. "You just made sure your university registration papers listed your mother’s maiden name instead of your father’s, and you scrubbed every digital footprint linking Thomas Hastings' daughter to the village where my family’s oldest rivals used to bury their dead."
"I was a twenty-one-year-old linguistics student trying to finish a thesis without getting caught in a family feud I didn't start," I snapped, my chin lifting despite the warning bells screaming in my head. "If you brought me here to interrogate me about my undergraduate years, you could have saved yourself the trouble of the cashier's check. My father’s mind is gone, Mr. Conti. He doesn't remember what he wrote in those books, and neither do I."
Gabriel didn't get angry. He didn't raise his voice. Instead, a very faint, grim shadow of a smile touched the corner of his hard mouth.
May you like
"I didn't bring you here to talk about your thesis, Emerson," he said, turning back to the table and tapping a finger against the top black leather journal—the one with my father’s messy, hurried handwriting scrawled across the cover. "I brought you here because someone is trying to use those notebooks to tear my family apart from the inside. And you are the only person on earth who can read the code your father used to hide the names."
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