Chapter 7 - THE BRASS KEY
The image of my father’s desecrated grave burned into my mind. The grief that had haunted me for years instantly flash-froze into pure, unadulterated fury.
Alexei hadn't dug up the grave out of spite. He was looking for the original police dashcam footage—the tape that proved the Moretti and Volkov families had conspired on the docks twenty years ago. My father had hidden it as an insurance policy.
“He thinks my dad buried the tape with him,” I said, showing the phone to Dante. My voice was eerily calm.
Dante’s eyes darkened with rage. “I will kill him. You stay here. Marco has the perimeter locked down.”
“No,” I said, stepping into his path. “He was my father. You don't get to fight this war without me.”
Dante looked at my bandaged shoulder, at the pale exhaustion in my face, and then down at the silver chain hanging around my neck. Threaded on it was my father’s old brass house key. I gripped the key tightly, my knuckles turning white.
Dante saw the fire in my eyes. He nodded once. “We hunt them together.”
Within twenty minutes, Dante’s intelligence network located Alexei’s burner phone signal. It was transmitting from an abandoned shipping yard on the south side.
We drove in a convoy of three black SUVs, the rain returning to batter the windshields. In the back seat, I sat silently, my mind racing. Where would my dad hide a tape? Not in a casket. Not in a bank vault. He hid things in plain sight.
Suddenly, I gasped. The shoebox. The oversized gray police jacket in my closet at the estate. He had specifically told me to keep it because the lining was "special."
“Dante,” I grabbed his arm. “The tape is at the estate. In my father's jacket.”
“Then we will retrieve it after we end Volkov,” Dante said, checking the magazine of his pistol.
We arrived at the shipyard. The massive metal containers formed a maze of rust and shadows. Dante’s men fanned out, moving silently through the rain. Dante kept me directly behind him, his body a shield.
As we rounded a corner into a clearing lit by floodlights, we stopped.
Alexei stood in the center, flanked by ten heavily armed mercenaries. But he wasn't alone. Tied to a wooden chair in the middle of a massive puddle of gasoline was Isabella. Her expensive blonde hair was plastered to her face, and her eyes were wide with genuine terror. She had outlived her usefulness to the Russians.
Around her wrist, she was wearing a delicate silver bracelet.
It was my mother’s bracelet. The one that went missing from police evidence twenty years ago. Isabella had taken it as a trophy to mock me.
“Dante!” Alexei yelled over the rain, holding up a silver lighter. “Welcome to the end of the Moretti line. Give me the tape, sign over the port authorities, or your beautiful ex-fiancée burns, and your new one gets a bullet.”
“You dug up a dead man’s grave for a ghost, Alexei!” Dante yelled back, his gun aimed perfectly at the Russian’s chest. “You’ve already lost.”
“I don't lose!” Alexei ignited the lighter. The flame flickered in the wind.
Isabella screamed.
I didn't think. I stepped out from behind Dante.
“You want the tape?” I shouted, my voice cutting through the storm. I held up my cell phone, the screen glowing brightly in the dark. “I found it! And right now, it’s uploading to the FBI field office server. You have about sixty seconds before every federal agent in Chicago knows your name!”
Alexei froze. His eyes darted to my phone.
May you like
It was a complete bluff.
But in that one second of hesitation, Dante pulled the trigger.
