Chapter 7 - The Broken Cedar
The third-floor hallway was lit only by the green glow of a malfunctioning exit sign.
I pressed my back against the water-stained wallpaper on the second-floor landing, counting each second by the hammering of my own pulse.
One. Two. Three.
From above came three muffled thwips—the sound of a suppressed pistol discharging into soft tissue.
There were no shouts.
No cinematic gunfire exchanges.
Just the heavy, wet thud of a man collapsing against drywall, followed by the clatter of a flashlight rolling across linoleum.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
I crept up the final five steps, my sneakers sticking to the grimy runner.
At the entrance of Apartment 3B, the scarred bodyguard named Frankie was pinned against my kitchen doorframe.
Mateo stood over him, his left knee pressed into the man’s throat, the barrel of his pistol jammed firmly under the man’s ear.
Frankie’s eyes were wide with terror, blood dripping from a broken nose across his leather jacket.
Behind them, sprawled across my tiny kitchen table, lay a second man with a dark hole centered between his eyebrows.
“Tell Dominic,” Mateo whispered in a voice so terrifyingly soft it seemed to freeze the blood in the room, “that his lease on the river terminals is canceled.”
Frankie tried to speak, but the pressure on his windpipe only allowed a wet rattle.
Mateo pulled the trigger without changing expression.
The muffled pop ended the struggle instantly.
Mateo stepped over the body, his polished shoes tracking thin streaks of crimson onto the floral linoleum my grandmother had bought on sale in 1989.
“Tessa,” he said, not looking back.
“Where is it?”
I stepped past the bodies, my stomach heaving, bile burning the back of my throat.
Six months of trauma rotations at Cook County had shown me death, but never execution.
Never cold, mechanical slaughter carried out by a man whose cologne smelled like church incense and winter rain.
I walked into my bedroom, where my life had been torn to pieces.
My textbooks were ripped down the spines, their anatomical diagrams scattered like autumn leaves across the floorboards.
My thin mattress had been sliced open with box cutters, yellow foam spilling out like entrails.
My closet was empty, every thrift-store sweater pulled from its hanger and stomped into the floorboards.
Beside the radiator, where the floorboards met the exterior brick wall, the wooden grate had been ripped off its screws.
The pine box sat on the floor, its cedar lid untouched, the carved proverb staring up at me through the shadows.
U sangu nun si po ammucciari.
Mateo knelt beside it, his hands hovering an inch above the dark grain without making contact.
“The lock,” he said.
I dropped to my knees beside him, my fingers reaching into the collar of my shirt.
Tucked behind my silver cross was a small, blackened iron key on a piece of braided fishing line.
My grandmother had placed it around my neck on the day I turned eighteen.
“When the serpent finds you, Tessa,” she had said in that drafty Wisconsin kitchen, “give him the key, but never let him take the bloodline.”
I pulled the string over my head and handed the iron key to Mateo.
He looked at the key, then up at my face.
For the first time, his gray eyes showed something resembling hesitation.
“If you open this,” he murmured, “you can never go back to being a nurse on 18th Street.”
“You are already holding a gun in my kitchen, Mateo,” I said, my voice steady despite the tears burning my eyes.
“My life was over the second you ordered rare steak at Table Four.”
Mateo inserted the key into the hidden keyhole beneath the serpent’s carved eye.
He turned it counterclockwise once, paused until a tiny mechanical click echoed inside the wood, then turned it clockwise twice.
The lid swung open with a soft sigh of cedar oil.
Inside, resting on a bed of faded burgundy velvet, sat a thick, leather-bound volume tied with a strip of cured pigskin.
Beside it lay an antique platinum signet ring bearing the crest of a falcon perched on an olive branch.
The official seal of the Vitiello family’s founding line.
Mateo picked up the book with both hands, treating the fragile leather like sacred scripture.
He untied the cord and opened the first page, his eyes scanning the handwritten Italian script written in fading black ink.
His face went completely pale.
“Mateo?” I whispered, leaning closer.
“What is it?”
He didn't answer.
He turned three pages, his jaw clenching so hard the muscle looked ready to tear through the skin.
“Salvatore didn't tell you the whole truth at the house,” Mateo said, his voice hollow.
“What didn't he tell me?”
Mateo looked up from the book, his eyes dark with a fury so deep it seemed older than both of us.
“Chiara wasn't just Salvatore’s sister.”
“She was the sole legal heir named in the 1965 charter before my grandfather went to prison.”
“Salvatore didn't take the throne by succession.”
“He took it by default because Chiara vanished.”
He pointed to the final signature at the bottom of the page, where a faded red wax seal bore the imprint of the falcon ring.
“Every dock, every warehouse, every offshore trust from Chicago to Palermo doesn't belong to Salvatore.”
“And it doesn't belong to me.”
He closed the book slowly, his fingers tracing the cracked leather binding.
“It belongs to the firstborn child of Chiara De Luca’s blood.”
May you like
He looked at me.
“It belongs to you, Tessa.”
