Chapter 6 - Room 12
Sarah woke to the sound of a car door slamming.
She was inside a guarded safe house on the outskirts of Chicago. Eleanor slept in the next room, exhausted after a doctor checked her blood pressure.
Marco stood outside the bedroom.
“Where's Lorenzo?” Sarah asked.
“Handling something.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the only one you're getting.”
She pushed past him and found a phone on the kitchen counter.
There were three missed calls from Lorenzo.
The last message read:
STAY WHERE YOU ARE. I'M COMING BACK. DON'T TRUST ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE.
Sarah read it twice.
Then she noticed the photograph attached to Giovanni's message on the screen.
The bloodied woman was not Rebecca.
It was Eleanor.
Sarah's grandmother had been photographed in the safe house.
She ran to the bedroom.
The bed was empty.
The back door stood open.
A guard lay unconscious outside.
Sarah's stomach dropped.
“Marco!”
He rushed in.
When he saw the empty bed, the color drained from his face.
“Lock the perimeter!”
Sarah grabbed her coat.
“I'm coming with you.”
“No.”
“She raised me. I'm not sitting here while you search for her.”
Marco hesitated.
Then he handed her a small radio.
“Stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run.”
They found Lorenzo at the Obsidian, standing over a map of the old warehouse district.
He looked up when Sarah entered.
“Where is Eleanor?”
“Taken.”
He closed his eyes for one second.
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize. Find her.”
He turned the map toward her.
The address was marked in red.
Sarah recognized the building.
It had appeared in her mother's photograph.
Room 12 was part of an abandoned medical facility where the Valenti organization had once treated injured members in secret.
“I've seen this place,” she said.
“Where?”
“In my mother's things. She kept a sketch of the floor plan.”
Lorenzo looked at her.
“Can you remember it?”
“Not all of it.”
She drew a rough outline on the back of a receipt, marking a service corridor behind the examination rooms.
“There's another entrance here. If the building hasn't changed, it leads to the old basement.”
Lorenzo studied the drawing.
“Stay with Marco.”
“No.”
“Sarah—”
“Someone took my grandmother because they believe I have something they need. If I stay behind, they'll keep using her to control me.”
Lorenzo's jaw tightened.
For a moment, she thought he would order her locked inside the building.
Instead, he handed her a flashlight.
“Then you follow my instructions.”
At 11:42 p.m., four black vehicles approached the warehouse.
The building was dark except for a single light in the second-floor window.
Lorenzo entered through the front with Marco and two guards. Sarah slipped through the service entrance, using the floor plan to navigate the basement.
She found the stairs.
Then the corridor.
Then a steel door marked ROOM 12.
Voices came from the other side.
Eleanor was crying.
Sarah raised her hand to knock.
A voice stopped her.
“She's early.”
A man's voice.
Familiar.
She pressed herself against the wall.
The door opened.
Giovanni stepped out.
He held a pistol in one hand and a key in the other.
“Bring her upstairs,” he told someone inside. “Anthony wants to see his daughter.”
Sarah's breath caught.
A second figure emerged from the room.
An older man with silver hair, a black overcoat, and a face she had seen in dozens of old photographs.
Anthony Valenti.
Lorenzo's supposedly dead father.
Sarah retreated into the darkness.
Anthony paused.
He turned toward her hiding place.
Then he smiled.
“Come out, sweetheart.”
His voice was gentle.
May you like
Almost affectionate.
“I've waited twenty-three years to meet you.”
