Chapter 5 - THE APARTMENT
The black SUV tore through the quiet, icy streets of Chicago’s South Side, blowing through red lights without slowing down.
Luca sat in the passenger seat, his eyes fixed on the rain-slicked asphalt. The heavy weight of the Glock in his shoulder holster felt both foreign and devastatingly familiar. For ten years, he had built a life of boardrooms, logistics, and legal contracts, desperate to outrun the bloody legacy his father had left behind.
Tonight, the legacy had caught him. And it had taken Hannah.
“Two minutes out,” Daniel said from the driver’s seat, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Boss, if Marcus Bellini orchestrated this, he’s not going to leave Hannah at her apartment. It’s a trap.”
“I know it’s a trap,” Luca said, his jaw tight. “But Bellini didn’t leave that business card just to taunt me. He wants me to find something at her apartment. Something Mary Collins hid.”
The SUV skidded to a halt in front of a dilapidated, brick walk-up building. The street lamp out front was shattered, casting the narrow alleyway into deep shadow.
Luca stepped out of the car, the freezing wind biting through his suit.
He didn’t wait for Daniel. He pushed through the broken front door of the building and took the narrow, squeaking stairs two at a time to the third floor.
Apartment 3B.
The door was already open. The deadbolt had been violently kicked in, the wood splintered around the frame.
Luca drew his weapon and stepped inside, sweeping the room.
The small, cramped apartment had been completely torn apart. The worn sofa was slashed open, stuffing spilling onto the cheap linoleum floor. The kitchen cabinets were ripped from their hinges, plates and cups shattered everywhere. Every drawer had been emptied, every floorboard tested.
It looked like a hurricane had ripped through the tiny space.
“Clear,” Daniel called out from the small bedroom. “Nobody’s here. Not Hannah, not Bellini’s men.”
Luca holstered his gun and stood in the center of the living room, staring at the destruction.
“They were looking for something specific,” Luca muttered, walking toward a small wooden bookshelf that had been toppled over. “If Mary Collins was my father’s enforcer, she wouldn’t have just walked away with a pocket watch. She would have kept leverage. Insurance. Something to keep Bellini from hunting her.”
“And Bellini thinks she left it here for Hannah to find,” Daniel realized.
Luca began sifting through the debris. He picked up a framed photograph that had been smashed on the floor. It was a picture of Hannah and her mother, smiling at a cheap diner booth. They looked so happy. So fiercely protective of one another.
A heavy wave of guilt washed over Luca. Hannah had been fighting a war she didn’t even know she was in, armed with nothing but a maid’s uniform and a broken pie dish.
“Boss,” Daniel called out from the bedroom again. “You need to see this.”
Luca dropped the photo and quickly walked into the bedroom.
Daniel was kneeling beside Hannah’s small, unmade bed. He was shining his tactical flashlight onto the faded floral wallpaper behind the headboard.
The wallpaper had been aggressively peeled back, revealing the old plaster beneath.
Carved roughly into the plaster, as if etched with a kitchen knife years ago, were a series of numbers.
41 - 87 - 99 - 02
“Safe combination?” Daniel guessed.
“No,” Luca said, stepping closer. He recognized the cadence of the numbers. “It’s a routing coordinate. But it’s missing the terminal digit.”
“A bank route?”
“A syndicate route,” Luca corrected, his voice hardening. “My father used this format to move untraceable assets through the shipping ports. Mary Collins knew the network. She hid something in one of our old shipping containers at the docks.”
Suddenly, the floorboards in the hallway creaked.
It was a microscopic sound, barely audible over the wind rattling the thin apartment windows. But Daniel and Luca both froze.
Daniel instantly killed the flashlight, plunging the bedroom into darkness.
Luca drew his weapon, moving silently to press his back against the bedroom doorframe.
Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, and moving slowly through the debris of the living room.
“Check the kitchen,” a gruff, unfamiliar voice whispered.
“I already did,” a second voice replied. “Bellini said to burn it down when we’re done. Make it look like a gas leak.”
Luca locked eyes with Daniel in the dark. Daniel gave a sharp nod.
Luca didn’t wait for them to find the bedroom.
He stepped out of the doorway, his weapon raised, the moonlight from the window illuminating two large men holding suppressed automatic weapons and a red gasoline canister.
“Drop them,” Luca commanded, his voice slicing through the silence like a blade.
The two men spun around, their eyes wide with shock. They hadn’t expected Luca Moretti, the billionaire logistics CEO, to be standing in a slum apartment holding a Glock with perfect tactical form.
For a split second, they hesitated.
That was their first mistake.
The man holding the gasoline canister reached for his weapon.
Luca fired twice. The suppressed thwip-thwip of his gun was deafening in the small room. The man dropped instantly, clutching his shattered knee, screaming in agony.
The second man raised his rifle, but Daniel moved like a shadow, tackling him from the side and slamming his head brutally into the drywall. The man crumpled, unconscious before he hit the floor.
Luca walked over to the man bleeding on the floor, kicking his weapon away.
He aimed the barrel of his Glock directly between the man’s eyes.
“Where is Hannah Collins?” Luca asked quietly.
The man spat a glob of blood onto the linoleum, laughing through the pain. “You’re too late, Moretti. Vanessa has the girl. They’re at the rail yards.”
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Luca’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Why the rail yards?”
“Because Bellini figured out what Mary Collins hid,” the man wheezed, grinning wickedly. “It wasn’t in a shipping container. It was in a train car. And your little maid is going to open it for them, right before they put a bullet in her head.”
