Chapter 6 - Confessions in the Dark
The cold salt air of Long Island rushed into the grand hall as the heavy oak doors swung wide open.
Panic-stricken guests scrambled for the exits. Politicians rushed past enforcers, tripping over expensive gowns and designer shoes in their desperate scramble to reach their waiting limousines. Within ten minutes, the grand hall was nearly empty, save for the Moretti inner circle and a few weary capos who knew better than to run.
Down in the subterranean vault room, Vanessa Hale sat alone.
The zip-ties had been removed from her wrists, but the heavy steel door remained locked. The only light came from the flickering overhead bulb.
The heavy lock clicked.
The steel door swung open, and Dante stepped into the room. He didn't look angry anymore. He looked tired. The weight of twenty years of misplaced guilt, compounded by the fresh horror of his brother’s murder, seemed to settle heavily onto his broad shoulders.
Vanessa looked up from the metal chair, her eyes bloodshot and desperate.
“Are you going to kill me, Dante?” she whispered. “Are you going to bury me down here with Leo?”
Dante walked slowly across the room. He didn't answer her immediately. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a heavy silver Zippo, taking a long, slow drag before exhaling a thin cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling.
“Killing you would be too easy, Vanessa,” Dante said quietly. “It would make you a martyr for a federal task force that’s already been disbanded as of twenty minutes ago, once our legal team leaked your entire encrypted drive to independent journalists across the country.”
Vanessa flinched. “You leaked it to the press?”
“To the press, to the state attorney general, and to every major news outlet from New York to Washington,” Dante replied evenly. “Your career, your father’s legacy, your federal contacts, your offshore accounts—everything you spent twenty years building to destroy us has been wiped out. By morning, you won't just be arrested; you’ll be a public disgrace, abandoned by the very government you served.”
“They’ll protect me!” she screamed, lunging forward. “I have state secrets! I have—”
“You have nothing,” Dante interrupted, his voice cutting through her hysteria like a razor. “You are a criminal who murdered an innocent man in cold blood. The federal government doesn't protect liabilities, Vanessa. They bury them.”
He turned toward the door.
“Dante!” she sobbed, clutching at the edge of the steel desk. “Please! We loved each other! Remember Paris? Remember the house in the Hamptons?”
Dante paused at the doorway without looking back.
“I loved a ghost you created,” Dante said. “My brother was real. And tomorrow morning, we are going to dig up his remains from beneath this concrete, give him a proper Catholic burial, and lay him to rest with the honor he deserved.”
He stepped out into the hallway and pulled the heavy steel door shut.
May you like
Clang.
The lock engaged.
