Chapter 2 - THE GHOST OF THE PAST
The silver key felt heavier than lead in my palm. My thumb traced the jagged edges of the crest—a wolf entangled with a serpent. The Romano family. They had been eradicated, or so I had made the underworld believe when I was twenty-two, standing in the ashes of the warehouse where my father had been executed. Someone had survived. And they had used Elena to send me a message.
“Marco,” I barked, my voice echoing off the sterile walls of the hospital corridor. He was at my side in a fraction of a second, his hand resting instinctively over the bulge of the holster beneath his jacket. “Lock down the entire floor. No one comes in or out without my explicit authorization. If a nurse wants to check her IV, you check the nurse. If a doctor wants to check her vitals, you stand by with a gun to his spine. Am I understood?”
“Consider it done, Boss,” Marco said, his dark eyes scanning the perimeter. He gestured to two of our heavily armed men, who immediately took up positions flanking the double doors of the recovery room.
I pushed past the surgeon and entered the room. The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor was the only sound piercing the heavy silence. Elena lay on the stark white bed, her skin frighteningly pale against the cotton sheets. Tubes snaked across her arms, and a thick bandage peeked out from the collar of her hospital gown. This woman, who had breathed life back into my nephew, was now hovering on the edge of death because of me. A dangerous, unfamiliar ache twisted in my chest. I pulled a chair to her bedside and sat, refusing to look away from the steady rise and fall of her chest.
An hour later, my phone vibrated. It was Marco. “The John Doe who took the bullets for her just woke up. He’s in ICU Room 4. You need to see this, Leo.”
I left three men with Elena and stalked down the hallway. When I pushed open the door to Room 4, a battered man covered in gauze looked up at me. His face was bruised, but I recognized the jagged scar crossing his left brow. Dante Romano. The youngest son of the family I thought I had buried.
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“You’re supposed to be a corpse,” I said softly, stepping into the dim light.
Dante coughed, a wet, rattling sound. “And you’re supposed to be untouchable, Morelli. But my brother… my brother is alive. And he’s coming for everything you love.” He let out a dark, blood-stained chuckle. “He saw you looking at the nurse. He knows she’s your weakness. I tried to stop the hit… I don't want this war. But it’s already begun. That key… it opens a vault at the Sovereign Bank. The truth about your father’s murder is inside. The Romanos didn’t pull the trigger, Leo. Your own blood did.”
