Chapter 105 - The Iron Vault of Michigan Avenue
Forty-eight hours after the raid on the subterranean crypt, Chicago remained in a state of unprecedented paralysis.
The stock exchanges were halted. Seven sitting state senators, three supreme court judges, and forty-two executive board members across the Fortune 500 had been taken into federal custody under the Espionage and RICO Acts. The Sterling family had disintegrated completely; Victoria Sterling had been arrested attempting to board a private jet to Zurich under an assumed name, her high-society arrogance reduced to sobbing hysterics before international news cameras.
Yet atop the Moretti Tower, inside the fortress-like penthouse overlooking the snow-covered skyline of Michigan Avenue, the air was suffocatingly quiet.
Vincent Moretti sat at his mahogany desk, his ribs tightly bound beneath an immaculate black silk dress shirt, a cane resting against his chair. Though his body bore the brutal marks of torture and battle, his presence was once again that of an apex predator. Across the table sat Emma, dressed in clean, tailored woolen clothes, a warm cup of black tea untouched between her hands.
Between them lay a heavy titanium safety deposit box, salvaged by Marcus’s covert team from the deepest vault of the Sterling-Vance private bank before the feds could freeze the asset.
"This box was registered sixty years ago," Vincent said, sliding a bronze key across the wood toward her. "It belonged to Helena Ward. Your grandmother."
Emma swallowed, her heart hammering against her ribs. "You knew?"
"I suspected," Vincent replied honestly. "When my father formed the Vanguard forty years ago alongside Vance and Sterling, there was a fourth family. The founders who supplied the original capital, the sovereign land patents, and the industrial blueprint of modern Chicago. The Wards. But forty years ago, the Wards vanished. History wrote that their patriarch went mad, liquidated the estate, and died penniless."
"They murdered them," Emma whispered, the pieces falling into horrifying alignment. "Vance and Sterling murdered them. And my mother fled into the shadows, hiding in plain sight as a domestic servant."
"Yes," Vincent said softly. "And my father watched it happen. He didn't pull the trigger, but he stood by and inherited their empire. That is the debt the Morettis owe you, Emma. That is why from the very night you stepped into that banquet room to protect that old woman, you were never an employee to me. You were the rightful owner of this city."
Emma took the bronze key with trembling fingers. She inserted it into the vault box and turned it.
A heavy pneumatic hiss broke the silence. The lid unlocked, swinging upward to reveal the contents within.
There was no gold, no stacks of currency. Inside lay a leather-bound journal written in her mother's handwriting, an ancient seal stamped with a crowned falcon, and a singular, encrypted satellite drive bearing an insignia neither Emma nor Vincent had ever seen before: a golden ouroboros surrounding a Latin inscription: *Rex in Umbra*.
May you like
Emma opened the first page of her mother’s journal.
*To Emma: If you are reading this, the Moretti boy has either saved you, or he has delivered you to your executioners. Pray to God it is the former, for the Vanguard was never the head of the serpent. It was only the shield. The real masters are returning.*
