Chapter 7 - The Mastermind Unmasked
The freezing rain had turned to sleet by the time I reached 24th Street.
I wore an oversized oilskin coat and a flat cap I had borrowed from Dr. Vance's closet. The streets of the old working-class district were virtually empty at three in the morning, save for the occasional city plow scraping the slush from the asphalt.
At the corner sat *Fenomore & Sons Jewelers*.
The neon sign in the window—a delicate gold pocket watch—flickered weakly.
My heart hammered against my ribs. Parked fifty yards down the block, beneath the amber glow of a flickering streetlight, sat a nondescript black sedan. Its engine was idling, exhaust pluming white into the freezing air.
Kellen’s lookouts.
I didn't take the front door.
I slipped down the narrow pedestrian gangway between my shop and the adjacent bakery. The brick walls were coated in black ice. At the rear of the shop, five feet off the ground, was an old coal-chute window that my grandfather had fitted with a hidden spring latch decades ago.
I pulled out my pocket knife, slipped the blade into the wooden seam, and tripped the latch.
The small window swung open with a muffled groan.
I hoisted myself through the opening, dropping quietly onto the wooden floorboards of the back storage room. The familiar scent of lemon oil, polishing compound, and old parchment washed over me, wrapping around my fraying nerves like a warm blanket.
*I'm home.*
I didn't turn on any lights. Using the faint glow of the streetlights filtering through the front display windows, I moved silently into the main workshop.
There sat my grandfather’s massive, eight-hundred-pound cast-iron anvil, bolted to an aged oak timber anchored directly into the foundation.
I dropped to my knees.
On the underside of the oak timber, hidden behind an electrical junction box, was a tiny copper screw. I turned it three clicks clockwise, then pushed inward.
A pneumatic *hiss* sounded beneath the floorboards.
A rectangular section of the oak flooring popped up an inch.
Inside lay an old, brass-cornered ledger bound in weathered brown calfskin. Beside it sat a velvet-lined wooden box containing three tiny glass vials filled with a clear, amber liquid—the neutralizing chelating agent my grandfather had prepared nine years ago in secret, just in case the monsters came back.
"Forgive me, Peter," I whispered, pulling the ledger and the vials into my coat.
"Looking for this, little bird?"
A flashlight beam suddenly exploded in my face, blinding me completely.
I scrambled backward, knocking over a tray of brass watch springs that scattered across the floor like metallic rain.
Standing in the doorway of the showroom was Kellen Price.
He looked monstrous. His face was swollen and purple, the white splints across his broken nose caked in dried blood. In his right hand, he held a silenced automatic pistol; in his left, a heavy crowbar.
Behind him stood two large men in dark overcoats.
"You really thought you could slip past my boys?" Kellen sneered, walking slowly toward me, the beam of the flashlight locked onto the ledger clutched against my chest. "Dramore is dead. The clinic on 18th was raided twenty minutes ago."
The air left my lungs. "You're lying."
"Am I?" Kellen laughed, a wet, rattling sound through his broken nose. "Dr. Vance is taking a permanent swim in the Chicago River. And your precious boss? We dragged his corpse out to the incinerator. You have nothing left, Rosie."
Tears burned my eyes, but beneath the grief, a white-hot, diamond-hard fury sparked to life.
"You're a coward, Kellen," I spat, refusing to cower. "You couldn't beat him when he had two working hands. You had to poison him from the shadows for nine years. And you still couldn't look him in the eye when you pulled the trigger."
Kellen’s smile vanished. His jaw twitched with savage rage.
He stepped forward, raising the pistol to point directly between my eyes.
"Hand over the book and the vials. Then maybe I'll make your death quick."
"No," I whispered.
"I won't ask twice, you little—"
A deafening crash shattered the front display window.
The glass didn't just break; the entire front storefront of *Fenomore & Sons* exploded inward in a shower of brick, tempered glass, and splintered oak.
A massive, armored black vehicle—the same SUV Orson had hidden earlier—slammed directly into the showroom, crushing Kellen’s two mercenaries beneath its front bumper against the display cases.
The driver’s door kicked open.
Stepping through the cloud of smoke and sparkling glass came Orson Dramore.
He wasn't dead.
He had torn the IV tubes from his arms. His dress shirt was ripped, soaked in sweat and rain, his face deadly pale. In his left hand, he held a heavy tactical combat shotgun.
And for the first time in nine years, his right hand was bare.
The blackened, inflamed skin of his wrist was wrapped tightly in bloodstained surgical gauze, but his gray eyes burned with a terrifying, apocalyptic fury.
"Get away from her," Orson roared.
Kellen spun around, firing three wild shots through the smoke.
Orson didn't flinch. He advanced like an unstoppable force of nature, racking the shotgun with his left arm against his knee and firing. The heavy buckshot caught Kellen in the shoulder, lifting the traitor off his feet and slamming him into the back wall of my grandfather’s workshop.
Kellen’s gun clattered away into the debris. He fell to his knees, clutching his mangled shoulder, screaming in agony.
Orson didn't fire again. He stepped over the wreckage, his massive frame towering over Kellen like an avenging god.
"Orson... please..." Kellen wheezed, his eyes bulging in pure terror. "Moretti made me do it! He had a contract on my family! He supplied the bullets!"
"I know," Orson said coldly.
He didn't raise the shotgun. Instead, he stepped into the light, looking at me.
"Rosie," he asked, his voice softening by degrees. "Did he touch you?"
"No," I whispered, clutching the ledger. "Orson... Vance said you were dead—"
"Julian managed to hide in the crawlspace before they breached," Orson said, his breath hitching as a fresh wave of fever made him sway slightly. "He called my private burner. I took the reserve car."
He looked down at Kellen, whose whimpering filled the ruined shop.
"Take his radio," Orson commanded quietly.
I scrambled forward, snatching the tactical radio from Kellen’s vest.
Orson took it with his left hand and pressed the transmit button.
May you like
"Dante Moretti," Orson spoke into the microphone, his voice rolling like distant thunder across the Syndicate frequencies. "This is Orson Dramore. I have your dog. I have the ledger. And at midnight, I am coming for your throat."
***