Chapter 7 - Blood in the Sanctuary
The chapel smelled of dry rot, damp mold, and cheap tobacco. Rows of decayed oak pews lined the center aisle, leading up to an altar stripped of its cross. In its place, tied to a wooden dining chair with heavy nylon cord, sat a small four-year-old boy. Leo’s face was smeared with dirt and tear tracks, his wide brown eyes—carbon copies of Julian’s—darting frantically between the armed men standing around him.
Sitting in a folding chair before the altar was an elderly man dressed in a camel-hair coat, leaning heavily on a silver-headed cane. Antonio Julian—the patriarch who had ruled the port docks for forty years.
The chapel doors groaned open, revealing Julian silhouetted against the storm outside. He walked in alone, hands raised loosely at shoulder height, his white shirt sodden and stained with grime.
“Grandfather,” Julian said, his voice ringing through the hollow nave.
Antonio chuckled, a thin, rattling sound. “You look like a drowned rat, Julian. All that arrogance, washed away by a pretty blonde whore and a bastard child.”
Leo whimpered at the sound of the old man’s voice, his small shoulders shaking against the bindings. Julian’s gaze flicked to his son for a fraction of a second. The boy had no visible bruises; he was intact. That was all Julian needed to confirm.
“You broke the council's pact, Antonio,” Julian said, slowly taking three paces forward down the center aisle. Vance closed the chapel doors behind him, sliding a heavy iron bar into place. Four cartel gunmen flanked the walls, assault weapons at the low-ready. “Families are off-limits. You wrote that rule yourself thirty years ago when you put the Moretti clan in the ground.”
“Rules are for men who still have time to build empires,” the old man spat, his rheumy eyes gleaming with bitter malice. “I am dying, Julian. Cancer is eating my spine. I won't leave my legacy to a boy who vanished into the woods because he caught feelings for an assistant district attorney’s daughter. Give Vance the ledger.”
Julian reached slowly into his jacket. “The ledger guarantees my survival. If I give it to you, Vance shoots me where I stand.”
May you like
“If you don't give it to me,” Antonio rasped, tapping his cane against the floorboards beneath Leo’s chair, “I have Vance slit the boy’s throat in front of you. You know me, nephew. Choose.”
Julian stared at his uncle, his expression hardening into an unreadable mask of ice. Slowly, deliberately, he withdrew the leather-bound book and held it out in his palm.
