Chapter 31 Interrogation
The air in the warehouse smells like rust and regret. Dante Moretti stood perfectly still in the shade, his dark eyes tracking the scene before him as calm as a surgeon monitoring a procedure. The only light came from a single, bare bulb hanging over a metal chair, where a man named Leo sat sweating through his low quality suit.
“One more time, Leo,” Dante said. His voice wasn’t loud, It didn’t need to be in the vast silence of the empty warehouse.
On either side of the chair stood two of Dante’s men. Silas built like a retired linebacker, his knuckles were already raw and Mateo younger, sharper, with eyes that missed nothing. They were extensions of Dante’s will waiting for the slightest snap of a finger.
Leo shuddered, a wet sound catching in his throat. “I don’t know anything, Mr. Moretti, I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“Your mother is alive Leo,” Dante corrected, stepping slowly into the edge of the light. He kept his hands in the pockets of his tailored wool coat. “She lives in that little bungalow on Archer Avenue, you always make sure to pay a visit every Sunday and it is a must.”
The color drained from Leo’s face, leaving it the grey of old dishwater. Dante thought, It smells like sour breath and cheap cologne.
“Please,” Leo whispered.
“The DeLucas hit three of our routes,” Dante continued circling the chair, his Italian leather shoes clicking softly on the concrete,“Two of my soldiers are in the morgue. They had families who required an answer. You were the logistics coordinator and the routes were your secret, now they have Vincent DeLuca’s secret. So,” He stopped directly in front of Leo, looking down at him. “You gave them up for money?”
“It wasn’t like that!” Leo’s voice cracked.
“Then what was it like?” Dante’s question hung in the cold air.
Silas shifted his weight, the rustle of his jacket was loud, Leo flinched at the sound, Dante watched the man’s eyes—darting, desperate, looking for an exit that didn’t exist. He saw the truth there, swimming in a sea of panic but he needed to hear it and the family needed to hear it.
“I… I gambled,” Leo spoke out, tears mixing with the sweat on his cheeks. “I owed the wrong people, not the DeLucas, but… they found out and they said they’d clear my debt. Just for the routes, they said no one would get hurt!”
Dante felt a familiar coldness settle in his gut and he gave a slight and almost an unnoticeable nod to Silas.
It wasn’t staged ,Silas didn’t wind up. He just drove his fist into Leo’s side, a precise, brutal shot to the kidneys. The sound was a dull, meaty thump, Leo screamed in a high-pitch that echoed off the distant ceiling and he would have doubled over if the ropes weren’t holding him upright.
Dante waited for the scream to fade into choked sobs and he squatted bringing himself to an eye-level with the trembling man. He could perceive the harsh smell of urine mixing with the other scents of fear.
“Who contacted you, Leo? A name.”
“I will don’t have a name but a burner phone and I heard… a voice…”
“A voice,” Dante repeated flatly. He reached out, not roughly, and turned Leo’s face toward the light with a gloved hand. He saw the burst blood vessels in his eyes, the snot running over his lips. “Man? Woman?”
“A man, calm and cold, like…” Leo’s eyes flashed to Dante’s face ,“He knew everything, my daughter’s school and my mother’s tulips.”
Dante thought, this wasn’t a lucky grab, this was targeted. Someone on their side is very good.
“You gave my family’s blood for a clean slate,” Dante said, his voice dropping lower, a private kind of death. “Do you understand what that costs?”
Before Leo could form another plea, the sharp buzz of Dante’s encrypted phone cut through the heavy air. He straightened up, pulling the sleek black device from his inner pocket. The screen flashed, FATHER!!
He turned his back on the scene, walking a few paces into the darkness, “Yes.”
“The house, now.” Don Salvatore Moretti’s voice was a hoarse scrape, strained thin and Dante could hear the wet, labored breathing underneath the words, the cancer was eating him faster now.
“Now, Dante” A cough rattled down the line, harsh and painful. “The DeLuca whore’s son just made his move on the docks and it's starting, Come home.”
The line went dead. Dante slipped the phone back into his pocket, the cold in his gut hardened into ice and he turned back to the pool of light.
Leo was weeping openly now .“Mr. Moretti, please… I’m sorry…”
Dante looked at Silas. “Get it finished, then take him to the river, make it quiet.”
“NO! NO! I’ll do anything! Please, don’t—”
Dante was already walking toward the warehouse’s side door, Leo’s cries fading behind him and the order was given, It would be done. Loyalty demanded a price, and betrayal demanded a heavier one and this was the arithmetic of his world.
Mateo fell beside him, opening the heavy metal door. The Chicago night air hit Dante’s face washing away the stench of the warehouse and his black SUV sat idling at the curb, exhaust fogging in the yellow glow of a streetlight.
“Trouble?” Mateo asked, his young face serious.
“The old man,” Dante said, sliding into the back seat, “And the war just got hotter.”
Mateo took the driver’s seat and pulled into the empty street. Dante stared out the window at the passing industrial blur, but he didn’t see it. He saw Leo’s face, Calm, Cold and The DeLucas had a new weapon. This wasn’t just muscle but this was strategy.
The Moretti estate rose from the North Shore darkness like a fortress of old money and older secrets. Lights blazed in the downstairs windows and Dante entered through the side the smell of old leather books and expensive cigar smoke immediately enveloping him. It was the smell of his childhood and the smell of power.
His cousin, Gabriella, was pacing by the cold fireplace. She turned as he entered ,her platinum bob swinging sharply. Even in the middle of the night, she looked flawless put together in a cream-colored silk blouse and tailored trousers, but her blue eyes were chips of ice.
“He’s worse,” she said without greeting. “The doctor left an hour ago and he's waiting for you in the library.”
“Marco DeLuca,” she spat the name. “He hit a container shipment and two more of our guys are in the hospital. One might lose an eye. It was a loud and stupid message.
“Marco is loud and stupid,” Dante said, shrugging off his coat, “That’s not what worries me.”
“No,” Gabriella agreed, crossing her arms. “What worries you is the brain behind him but The routes weren’t Marco’s work, And the dock hit was too perfectly timed right when our attention was on the warehouse district.” She stepped closer, her voice dropping, “Vincent has a new strategist and we need to find out who.”
Dante met her gaze, “Leo said, It was a blackmail but they knew everything about him.”
Gabriella’s perfectly sculpted eyebrow arched. She reached out straightening his already-straight tie, “Don’t keep him waiting, his temper is… fragile.”
The library was a tomb of knowledge no one ever read, floor-to-ceiling shelves, a ladder on a brass rail, and in the center behind a massive oak desk sat Don Salvatore Moretti. The man Dante remembered a bear of a man with a booming laugh and hands that could break bones was gone, In his chair sat a skeleton wrapped in thin, sallow skin. But the eyes… were still black.
“Dante,”
“Father,” Dante stopped before the desk, not sitting. He never sat unless invited.
“He’s being dealt with.”
“Good,” Sal leaned back the leather chair creaking ominously under his slight weight. A coughing fit seized him violently and deeply, He covered his mouth with a handkerchief. When it passed, Dante didn’t look at the dark stain left behind, They both pretended not to see it.
“The DeLucas,” Sal gasped, recovering his breath. “Vincent is getting bold, He smells my weakness but He thinks the pack is about to lose its alpha.” His dark eyes fixed on his son, “We need to remind him that we need to send a message so loud.”
“We hit back,” Dante said, his voice flat. “Harder, Marco’s clubs, Their bookmaking operation.”
“No,” Sal waved. “That is the noise, we need silence, We need a knife to the heart and not a hammer to the hand,” He leaned forward, his intensity filling the room despite his shrunken frame. “You will take something he loves and something he precious and you will hold it until he crawls back into his hole and gives me the ghost who is planning his moves.”
Dante felt a creep of unease, “What target?”
Sal’s lips stretched into a smirk that might have been a smile. “His daughter, Elena.”
The name hung in the room. Dante knew of her, of course, Vincent DeLuca’s only daughter. The art gallery curator, The one who stayed clean, out of the business, A civilian.
“She’s not involved,” Dante heard himself say.
“Everyone is involved!” Sal slammed his fist on the desk, the sudden force shocking from his fragile body. A glass paperweight jumped, “She is his heart! You take her, bring her to the safe house and keep her, tell Vincent he gets her back when he pulls his dogs off our territory and hands over his new strategist. No negotiations, No compromises.”
Dante stood perfectly to kidnap a woman and it was messy. It was personal in a way that the syndicate hits were not but It drew a different kind of attention.
“You hesitate?” Sal’s eyes narrowed.
“No,” Dante said automatically, the loyal soldier, The heir. “It will be done.”
“See that it is.” Sal slumped back, the burst of energy spent. “Use whatever men you need but you have to handle it personally, This message… it needs your signature, Dante, Let Vincent see who is waiting for him and when I am gone, Let him see the future.”
The weight of the order settled on Dante’s shoulders, This wasn’t interrogating a traitor or breaking knees, This was snatching a woman from her life, a pawn in a game she didn’t play.
“When?” Dante asked.
“Now, Tonight. Start the watch and find the pattern. She’s a creature of habit, they say and take her quietly but make no mistakes.” Sal closed his eyes, dismissing him. “I am tired, Go.”
Dante left the library, the old man’s wet breathing following him out of the door. Gabriella was waiting in the hall, leaning against the wall.
“Well?” she asked.
“He wants a daughter, Elena DeLuca.”
Gabriella let out a low whistle, “That’s not a message that’s a declaration of total war.”
“It is what it is,” Dante said, his mind already shifting to logistics, to timelines and the cold mechanics of the task.
“Be careful, Dante,” Gabriella said, her voice unexpectedly soft, “Women… They're not like men in a fight. They’re unpredictable and they get under your skin.”
Dante looked at his cousin, his closest confidant in this gilded cage of a family he thought of Leo’s broken sobs of his father’s decaying body of the unknown strategist on the other side who was picking them apart.
“She’s leveraged. Bree,” he said, his voice devoid of all emotion.”
He walked down the long, dark hallway toward the front door, his footsteps echoing on the marble. He had men to assemble, plans to make and a life to unravel but as he stepped back out into the Chicago night, the image that flashed in his mind wasn’t of logistics or blueprints.
It was of a woman he’d never met, A woman with her father’s green eyes who liked art and tulips and Sunday dinners a woman who was now a target.
And as his car pulled away from the estate, the ghost of his father’s words whispering in his ear, the first cold knot of something—something that wasn’t part of the plan—tightened in his chest.
Let him see the future.