Chapter 5 - THE VAULT
"Silas, you're making a mistake," Dante said. His voice had lost all its warmth. It was flat. Lethal.
"Moretti knows the truth," Silas spat, keeping the gun trained on us. "He knows what Rosa stole. He knows about the Rosary."
The Rosary.
My mother had an antique silver rosary when I was a child. It was heavy, intricately carved, and she kept it locked in a tin box under her bed. When I was twelve, our apartment was robbed. The rosary disappeared.
A week later, for my thirteenth birthday, she gave me the teardrop locket I was wearing right now.
I had it melted down, Lena. Remade. Just for you.
"The Rosary is gone," I blurted out, gripping Leo tighter. "It was stolen years ago."
Silas laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. "It wasn't stolen, you stupid girl. It was the key to the Rosselli vault beneath the docks. The vault holding twenty million in untraceable bearer bonds. Your mother took the key to buy her freedom."
Dante moved so fast I barely saw it happen.
He didn't draw a weapon. He threw the heavy crystal decanter from the side table directly at Silas's face.
The glass shattered against Silas's forehead. The gun went off with a quiet thwip, the bullet tearing through the leather of my chair, inches from my shoulder.
Before Silas could recover, Dante was on him.
It was brutal and silent. Dante didn't fight like a gentleman; he fought like a man who had survived the streets. A sharp twist of a wrist, a sickening crack, and Silas dropped the gun. Dante drove his knee into Silas's ribs, sending the traitor crashing into the floorboards.
Dante pressed a heavy boot into Silas’s throat.
"Who told Moretti about the girl?" Dante demanded.
Silas gurgled, spitting blood. "Julian... Julian told him."
Dante froze. The color drained from his face for the second time that night.
He kicked Silas in the head, knocking him unconscious, and turned back to me. His chest heaved.
"Julian is dead," Dante whispered, almost to himself. "My brother died ten years ago."
I was trembling so violently my teeth chattered. I looked down at the locket resting against my chest. The dent on the side.
Melted down. Remade.
With shaking fingers, I pressed my thumbnail into the tiny dent on the silver teardrop.
There was a tiny click.
The locket sprang open.
There was no picture inside. Instead, stamped directly into the silver metal, were a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, and a date.
September 20th.
Tomorrow.
May you like
Dante walked over, wiping blood from his knuckles with a silk handkerchief. He looked down at the open locket.
"Those coordinates," Dante said, his voice hollow. "That's St. Jude's. The abandoned church in the South End. The church where Gabriel was baptized."
