Chapter 2 - GHOSTS OF THE SYNDICATE
Z
The air in the drawing room grew thick, heavy with the suffocating scent of copper, gunpowder, and an impending doom that felt entirely inescapable. The man standing in the doorway was a phantom, a walking impossibility that had somehow manifested in the flesh. I didn’t know his face, but the reaction he pulled from the most powerful men in the room told me everything I needed to know. Vincent Costanza, a man whose composure was the stuff of underworld legend, looked as though someone had just driven an ice pick straight through his heart. His breathing hitched, the hand pressing the dish towel to his bleeding shoulder trembling violently, not from the physical agony of a gunshot wound, but from a psychological shock that shattered his stoic facade into a million irreparable pieces.
"Julian," Vincent choked out, the name tearing from his throat like barbed wire. It was a name I had only heard whispered in the darkest corners of the estate, usually by older guards who crossed themselves immediately after saying it. Julian Costanza. The older brother. The heir apparent to the Costanza empire who had supposedly been incinerated in a brutal car bombing in Palermo five years ago. A closed-casket funeral. A mourning period that plunged Boston’s underworld into a river of blood as Vincent took the throne. Yet here he was, wearing an impeccably tailored charcoal suit, untouched by fire, untouched by death, smiling with the casual arrogance of a man who held the strings to every puppet in the room.
Dante Rossi, still backing away with his hands raised, looked frantically between the dead men on the floor, the bleeding boss, and the resurrected ghost in the doorway. "Julian?" Dante stammered, his smooth, confident demeanor entirely vaporized. "We… we had a deal. You said if we took out Vincent, the east-side ports were ours. You said your men would stand down!" Dante’s voice pitched into a desperate, high-frequency panic. He was realizing, seconds too late, that he wasn’t a player in this grand game of chess; he was merely a sacrificial pawn.
Julian’s smile didn’t falter, but his dark eyes locked onto Dante with a predatory gleam. "I did say that, Dante. But I also said that Boston requires a specific type of leadership. One unburdened by the incompetence of the Rossi family." Without blinking, Julian raised a suppressed pistol he had been holding loosely at his side. He didn’t even fully extend his arm. A quiet, deadly pfft echoed through the massive room, and Dante dropped to his knees, a dark crimson flower blossoming right between his eyes, before his face hit the Persian rug with a sickening thud.
I didn't scream. I didn't gasp. My father had taught me that in moments of extreme violence, the brain has two choices: freeze and die, or calculate and survive. My brain was already in overdrive. I counted the bodies, the distances, the weapons, and the exits. Julian had two men flanking him in the hallway. I had the revolver I had stripped from Leo’s dead partner, which held exactly four bullets left. Vincent was severely injured, losing blood fast, and entirely incapable of outrunning a trained hit squad.
"Well," Julian said, stepping over Dante’s corpse with a look of mild disgust, his gaze finally shifting to me. "This is a fascinating complication. I paid off the guards, I disabled the perimeter alarms, I even had the loyalists sent to the docks on a fake shipment run. But nobody mentioned the maid. Who the hell are you?"
"Nobody," I said, my voice eerily calm, my grip tightening on the heavy steel of the revolver. I stayed crouched behind the overturned mahogany chair, keeping Vincent completely shielded by my own body and the thick wood.
"A nobody with a perfectly executed weaver stance who just flatlined two seasoned enforcers," Julian mused, taking a slow step into the room. "Vincent, little brother, you always did have a strange taste in domestic help. It’s a pity she has to die with you."
He raised his gun, and I knew we had less than a second. But Julian didn’t know the house the way I did. He didn’t know that right above him hung a massive, three-hundred-pound crystal chandelier, and he certainly didn’t know that the structural anchor holding it to the ceiling was directly in my line of sight. I didn't aim at Julian; I aimed upward. I squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession. The heavy caliber bullets shattered the brass mounting and severed the thick chain.
The chandelier plummeted like a meteor of glass and steel. It didn't hit Julian directly, but it crashed into the floor mere inches from him with a deafening, explosive roar, sending thousands of razor-sharp crystal shards exploding outward like a fragmentation grenade. Julian and his men threw their arms over their faces, crying out as the glass sliced through their skin and suits.
"Move!" I grabbed Vincent by the lapels of his ruined jacket, hauling him to his feet with a strength born entirely of pure, unfiltered adrenaline. He groaned, stumbling, but his survival instinct kicked in. I didn't take him toward the grand foyer; I dragged him toward the heavy oak panels behind his desk. It was the servants' passage, a hidden corridor meant to allow the staff to move unseen, heavily soundproofed and entirely invisible unless you knew exactly which decorative molding to push. I slammed my palm against the wood, shoved Vincent into the dark, narrow tunnel, and followed him inside, pulling the heavy door shut just as the sound of suppressed gunfire shredded the wall where we had been standing a millisecond before.
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We were plunged into pitch darkness. The air was stale and smelled of dust and old wood. Vincent leaned heavily against me, his breath ragged, his blood warm and sticky against my neck as his arm hung over my shoulder. "You're... you're not a maid," he rasped, coughing weakly in the dark.
"Keep moving, Mr. Costanza," I whispered, practically carrying him down the narrow stairs. "Or we'll both be ghosts by midnight."
