Chapter 9 - The Altar of Blood
Consciousness returned in jagged, burning fragments.
The air was freezing, smelling of damp limestone, industrial motor oil, and old river water.
I was tied to a heavy wooden chair in the center of an abandoned industrial warehouse along the Calumet River. My white wool coat was torn at the shoulder, my bare ankles tied with plastic zip-ties to the chair legs.
Standing twenty feet away, warming his hands over a flaming oil drum, was Sal Bertinelli.
At sixty-two, the New York don looked like a bloated vulture—wearing an expensive sheepskin coat over a tailored suit, his thinning gray hair slicked back with pomade. Behind him stood six armed mercenaries with tactical rifles.
“She’s awake,” one of the guards muttered.
Bertinelli turned around, a sickening, predatory grin spreading across his jowly face. He walked over, his heavy boots echoing off the concrete floor, stopping two feet from my chair.
“The little South End waitress,” Bertinelli chuckled, his voice raspy from forty years of cheap cigars. “You cost me fifty million dollars in port assets, sweetheart. Salvatore burned my Newark terminals to the ground because of you.”
I lifted my head, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the toe of his leather boot. “And he’s going to burn you next.”
Bertinelli didn't flinch. He merely reached out, his greasy fingers snatching the platinum diamond ring off my left finger with a vicious twist that nearly dislocated my knuckle.
“He isn't burning anyone, girl,” Bertinelli sneered, holding the ring up to the firelight. “Salvatore is walking into this terminal alone in ten minutes. We told him that if he brings a single car, a single guard, or alerts the local precincts, we put two bullets through your mother’s ventilator at St. Jude’s and feed you to the river barges.”
My blood ran cold. “My mother—”
“We have three men inside the hospital right now,” Bertinelli smiled. “The old man had to make a choice. His empire... or his little bird.”
The heavy corrugated metal door of the warehouse began to groan.
The rusted chain-link pulleys screamed as the exterior door was slowly pushed open from the outside.
A solitary figure stepped through the freezing gray mist of the Chicago afternoon.
Salvatore Constantino.
He wore no overcoat. He wore only a charcoal suit, drenched in freezing rain and melting snow, his white shirt open at the collar. He carried no weapon in his hands. His arms hung loosely at his sides as he walked down the center aisle of the cavernous warehouse, his boots stepping over rusted iron chains with the slow, measured pace of a man walking toward his own execution.
“Salvatore, no!” I screamed, struggling frantically against the plastic ties, the zip-ties cutting into my wrists until blood ran down my fingers. “It’s a trap! They’re going to kill you!”
Salvatore didn't look at Bertinelli. He didn't look at the six rifles aimed directly at his chest.
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His slate-gray eyes found mine through the smoke and the shadows.
“Be quiet, little bird,” he said softly, his voice echoing off the corrugated iron walls with an impossible, serene calm. “I told you. What is mine is protected.”
