Chapter 7 - ASHES AND SILVER
The crypt erupted into blinding white fog and thunder.
The instant the pressurized tear-gas jets blasted Lucas and Dante backward off their feet, Ethan moved like a striking viper.
He swept my legs behind the thick marble altar tomb, rolling me behind solid stone protection while drawing his concealed pistol from his waistband in a single fluid motion.
BANG! BANG!
Two of Dante’s gunmen by the left pillar went down before they could even raise their submachine guns through the swirling smoke. From the upper sacristy steps, Russo and two of Ethan’s tactical guards opened fire with suppressed carbines, pinning the remaining harbor crew behind the limestone arches.
Coughing through the acrid gas, I crawled four feet across the stone floor toward Victoria, who was gagging and struggling to roll away from the steel vault door as orange sparks began to hiss behind the inner seam of the safe.
Using a jagged shard of broken marble from the pillar base, I sawed frantically through the plastic zip-tie around Victoria’s bleeding wrists.
“Claire—” Victoria choked, her eyes streaming from the gas as she clutched my arm. “Why are you helping me? After what I did to you—”
“Because Noah and Sophie don't need to watch another person die tonight!” I coughed, hauling the sixty-five-year-old woman behind the marble sarcophagus just as a stray nine-millimeter round chipped the stone above our heads.
Across the smoke-filled vault room, Dante Marcello scrambled toward the rear drainage tunnel, dragging a blinded, coughing Lucas by the collar as a human shield while firing wildly toward Ethan’s position.
Then Dante saw the dropped blue tablet and the ledger case lying beside the vault console. Greed overrode survival. He shoved Lucas hard against the scorching steel vault door and lunged for the open canvas sack of unregistered diamond certificates sitting on the side table.
“Dante, don't touch the secondary latch!” Lucas screamed, pressing his blistered hands against his eyes. “The white phosphorus charge inside the wall—”
Dante yanked the auxiliary handle anyway.
A muffled, superheated WHOOMP detonated inside the steel wall cavity—not outward into the room, as the reinforced vault door was engineered to contain the blast, but venting a jet of two-thousand-degree flame straight through the keyhole slot and across Dante Marcello’s chest and arm.
Dante howled in agony, dropping his .45 onto the flagstones as Russo and Ethan’s guards tackled him into the shallow stone baptismal drainage trench, extinguishing his smoking coat while snapping steel cuffs onto his wrists.
Through the clearing haze, Ethan strode across the crypt, his tuxedo jacket gone, his white shirt torn at the shoulder where a bullet had grazed his skin, his pistol trained squarely on Lucas Vance.
Lucas sat slumped against the base of the stone wall, his face gray with soot, blood trickling from his temple where Dante had pistol-whipped him in the scramble.
“Go ahead, Ethan,” Lucas rasped, looking past the barrel of the gun toward me. “You’ve got every right. Just… check the encrypted partition on that blue tablet before you hand it to the feds.”
“Why?” I asked, stepping out from behind the marble tomb with my hands shaking against the ballistic vest Ethan had strapped around me. “So we can find another trap?”
“No,” Lucas whispered, coughing up blood onto his lapel as Russo kicked his sidearm away. “Because the thirty million I was trying to steal tonight was in the primary vault. The encrypted folder on that tablet isn't money, Claire. It’s the unedited wiretap recordings your father made for the Justice Department in 2016—proving that Ethan’s father was murdered by Dante Marcello, and that your father was never a traitor to either side.”
Ethan lowered his pistol half an inch, his chest heaving as sirens wailed in the street outside the church.
Wait.
Those weren't gang reinforcements.
Blue and red strobe lights flashed through the high stained-glass windows of the crypt as a dozen Chicago Police SWAT officers and FBI Organized Crime agents swarmed down the stone stairs with rifles raised.
“FBI! Drop your weapons! Hands in the air!”
Ethan slowly engaged the safety on his pistol and set it on top of the marble sarcophagus, raising his hands calmly while stepping directly between the federal rifles and me.
Special Agent Miller—my late father’s former partner from the Chicago field office—walked down the center steps, looking from the smoking vault door to Dante Marcello writhing in handcuffs, and finally to Ethan and me.
“Well, Mr. Sullivan,” Agent Miller said dryly, gesturing for the paramedics to attend to Lucas and Dante. “When your attorney called in an anonymous kidnapping and extortion tip twenty minutes ago with live GPS coordinates to this crypt, we didn't expect to find the East Coast Syndicate’s chief courier caught red-handed blowing a vault.”
I turned slowly to look at Ethan.
“You called the FBI?” I breathed. “Your father spent forty years keeping federal agents out of Sullivan property!”
Ethan lowered his hands as Agent Miller holstered his weapon. He looked at me, a streak of soot across his sharp cheekbone, his gray eyes clearer than I had ever seen them.
“The offshore bearer bonds in that vault were the last dirty tether tying Sullivan Holdings to the Marcello crime family,” Ethan said quietly, so only I could hear him over the bustle of the medics. “With the contents of that safe burned to ash and Dante Marcello going to federal supermax for attempted murder and kidnapping… the Outfit’s hold on my company dies tonight. I told you in the car, Claire. Everything changes.”
My heart swelled so hard in my chest I could barely breathe. He had willingly let three hundred million dollars of untraceable Syndicate leverage burn—and invited the FBI into his own family crypt—so that no gangster on earth could ever hold a shadow over our children again.
Then Russo came running down the sacristy stairs from the alley, his face pale beneath his tactical gear.
“Boss!” Russo shouted, holding up the encrypted satellite phone from the Maybach. “The twins are safe inside the armored truck—nobody breached the doors! But Genevieve Marcello was waiting in a town car two blocks away when the feds rolled up!”
May you like
My blood froze. “What did she do?”
“She didn't attack the truck,” Russo panted, handing the phone to Ethan. “She just broadcast the unredacted hospital birth certificates Lucas had in his hotel room to every major news network and the State’s Attorney’s child welfare division—claiming that Claire abducted the heirs of Sullivan Holdings ten years ago using forged social security numbers, and demanding an emergency federal freeze on both of you!”
