The mafia boss’s fiancée ordered me to throw away his father’s old Army jacket, but when Luca saw what fell from the pocket, he stopped the entire engagement dinner…

The storm had settled into a sullen, suffocating mist by the time the blacked-out SUVs cut their engines three blocks south of St. Jude’s Cathedral. The skyline was smothered in charcoal clouds, the faint hint of pre-dawn violet bleeding along the eastern horizon.

In the back of the armored van, the silence was suffocating. Luca sat across from me, methodically checking the chamber of his customized Kimber .45. Beside him lay the old Army jacket, Vito's Silver Star pinned securely to the weathered canvas over the heart. Next to it sat the leather briefcase.

"Dominic has five snipers on the surrounding rooftops," Luca said, his voice flat and tactical, masking the inferno raging beneath the surface. "They have thermal scopes, but the cathedral’s granite walls are three feet thick. Once I step inside the narthex, I’m blind. Clara, are you certain about the tunnel entrance?"

I looked down at the faded blueprint I had sketched from memory on the back of an evidence folder under the van’s dome light. "The old coal chute beneath the rectory garden leads directly into the lower ossuary. The door is secured by an old brass four-pin tumbler. My father always kept a mechanical bypass hidden behind the cornerstone marked with the Latin cross. If the Vanguard hasn't completely renovated the basement, Dominic's tactical squad can enter without making a sound."

Luca reached into his pocket and pulled out a slender, pearl-handled push dagger, sliding the sheath into my boot. "Take this. If anything—and I mean anything—feels wrong, you fall back to the perimeter. You do not play the hero. Understand?"

"Understood," I lied softly. If my father's life was on the line, there was no perimeter I wouldn't cross.

Luca leaned forward, capturing my lips with a sudden, bruising intensity. It wasn't the tender kiss of a fiancé; it was the desperate mark of a warrior claiming his ground before walking into the jaws of hell. "Dawn is in twenty minutes," he murmured against my mouth. "Stay behind Dominic."

He picked up the briefcase in one hand, the Army jacket draped over his arm, and stepped out into the mist, vanishing toward the towering, gothic silhouette of St. Jude’s like a wraith born of the shadows.

"Team B, with me," Dominic commanded in a low rasp over his comm-link.

I pulled my dark rain jacket tight and followed Dominic and four heavily armed men through the iron gates of the abandoned rectory garden. The wet grass deadened our footsteps. We waded through overgrown brambles until we reached the moss-covered foundation stones at the base of the eastern transept.

There, half-buried under rotting ivy, was the arched coal chute.

I knelt in the mud, running my fingers over the cold stone until I felt the raised carving of the Latin cross. Just as my father had told me when I was a child playing in his study, my fingertips found the loose mortar block to the left. I pulled it out with a quiet scrape. Inside lay an antique iron skeleton key, coated in grease.

"He never leaves anything to chance," I whispered, inserting the key into the heavy iron hatch.

With a muted click, the bolt slid back. Dominic exchanged a dark, appreciative glance with me, then flicked on his night-vision visor, drawing his silenced submachine gun.