Chapter 5 - The Traitor In The Coalition
"You're lying," I whispered, though the words sounded hollow even to me. The math was right there, staring me in the face: my father’s sudden disappearance from mainstream journalism in 2010, the mysterious grants that funded my college tuition and my years abroad, the sudden onset of his cognitive decline right as the federal investigations began to close in.
"My family doesn't lie, Emerson. We bury our secrets deep, but they always crawl back up into the light," Gabriel said. He reached out, his long fingers resting lightly on the edge of the open journal. "Your father didn't lose his mind to a random stroke. He was poisoned with a slow-acting neurotoxin designed to make his memory disintegrate piece by piece before he could hand over the decryption keys to the federal prosecutors... or to my rivals."
I stared at him, my chest heaving as the walls of the subterranean vault seemed to close in around us. "Poisoned? By whom?"
"That’s what we are going to find out," Gabriel said, his voice as cold and hard as the stone floor beneath us. "The same men who killed my brother Matteo are currently sitting on my board of directors. They control the docks, the labor unions, and half the municipal judges in Cook County. They think that with Matteo dead and me distracted by the boy’s safety, they can tear down the syndicate and rebuild it in their own image."
He pulled a heavy iron key from his pocket and unlocked a secure steel drawer built into the base of the archive table. Inside sat a stack of digital hard drives and a heavy, matte-black Sig Sauer pistol.
"They want the notebooks, Emerson," Gabriel continued, locking eyes with me. "And they know you’re the only person alive who can translate your father’s shorthand in real time. Which means as of right now, you are the most dangerous target in the city of Chicago."
Before I could process the sheer, terrifying weight of his words, the overhead lights in the vault flickered violently.
The hum of the climate-control system died.
Then came the heavy, sickening thud of an automatic blast door slamming shut somewhere up in the main garage, cutting off our primary exit.
Gabriel didn't panic. He didn't even blink. In one fluid motion, he snatched the pistol from the drawer, racked the slide with a sharp metallic snap, and shoved me behind his broad shoulders.
"Stay behind the steel pillar," he ordered, his voice dropping into a lethal, controlled register. "Do not move, do not breathe, and if the lights go out entirely, do not make a sound."
Sirens began to wail somewhere above us—not police sirens, but the high-pitched, piercing alarm of the estate's private security grid breaching.
Someone had bypassed the biometric scanners.
May you like
And they were coming down the spiral staircase.
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