Chapter 4 - ASHES OF THE PAST
By four in the morning, sleep was an impossible luxury.
Dante had provided me with a secure suite in the west wing of the penthouse. After washing away the scent of the Drake Hotel and changing into a simple black cashmere sweater and tailored trousers Dante’s staff had procured, I returned to the strategy room.
Dante was standing over an interactive architectural blueprint of the Chicago South Port Terminal.
"Roman just dispatched his elite hit squad to the Drake to search the suites," Dante said without looking up from the screen. "He thinks you left your father’s personal safe deposit keys behind."
"He's an idiot," I said, walking to his side. "My father never kept keys. He was paranoid about physical duplication after the 2018 cartel wars. Everything is biometric, tied to my vocal print and retinal structure at the Federal Reserve vault on LaSalle Street."
Dante looked up, a rare, genuine smirk playing on his lips. "I like you angry, Evelyn. It suits you far better than the silent, obedient wife act you put on at charity galas."
"I was surviving, Dante."
"I know," he said softly, and the humor vanished from his face, replaced by a quiet, protective intensity that made my pulse jump. "And you survived beautifully. But survival is over. Starting today, you dictate terms."
He tapped a key, bringing up the financial network of Castellano Enterprises.
"Roman has three leveraged loans coming due at noon today," Dante explained, his shoulder brushing mine as he leaned over the table. "He used your father’s shipping contracts as collateral with the Outfit’s High Council. If the contracts are declared void due to a change in ownership, the Council will freeze his operating liquidity within sixty minutes."
"He will come after me with everything he has left," I stated, knowing Roman’s psychology intimately. "He won't let the Council see him bleed. He’ll try to eliminate me before the noon meeting so he can claim the inheritance as a grieving widower."
"Let him try," Dante said, his jaw setting into iron. "He’ll have to go through the entire Vale syndicate first."
"No," I countered, looking Dante dead in the eye. "Not just you. If I hide behind you, the High Council will see me as your puppet instead of Roman’s prisoner. I need to walk into the LaSalle vault myself. I need to claim the Moretti assets with my own hands."
Dante stared at me for a long, silent moment. I expected him to refuse—to act like every other mafia patriarch who viewed women as fragile assets to be locked away in gold-plated bunkers.
Instead, his gray eyes flashed with profound respect.
"Then we move at dawn," Dante said, pulling a custom matte-black Sig Sauer 9mm from a desk drawer and setting it gently before me. "Do you remember how to use this?"
I picked up the weapon, felt the familiar weight of the cold steel, racked the slide with a clean, practiced click, and engaged the safety. "My father taught me before I knew how to drive."
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"Good," Dante murmured, his voice dropping an octave as he stepped closer, his gaze sweeping over my face. "Because when we step out onto those streets today, Evelyn, we aren't just surviving. We're hunting."
*
