Chapter 2 - The Breath from the Cistern
The wind howled through the cracked iron gates of the mausoleum like a banshee,
but inside the stone tomb, the silence was absolute.
Nobody moved. Six hardened killers with assault rifles slung across their
tactical vests stood frozen, their flashlights trained on the iron grate in the
floor.
Tap. Tap.
The faint, metallic scrape echoed again from the black pit below.
Lorenzo didn't waste another breath on his cousin. He dropped his flashlight,
threw off his soaked suit jacket, and fell to his knees before the iron drainage
grate.
“Mother!” Lorenzo roared into the darkness, his voice cracking with an agonizing
mixture of fury and desperation. “Hold on! I’m here!”
“Lorenzo...” the voice came back, paper-thin, rasping through dry vocal cords.
“The water... it’s rising...”
The bayou floodwaters were backing up through the plantation’s drainage pipes.
If the hurricane pushed another two feet of river water into the drainage basin,
the underground cistern would become an inescapable watery grave within fifteen
minutes.
“Matteo! The hydraulic spreaders! Now!” Lorenzo bellowed.
Matteo didn't wait. He barked orders into his radio, and two enforcers sprinted
from the service van parked on the cemetery path carrying heavy rescue jaws and
hydraulic pumps.
The gasoline engine of the pump sputtered to life outside the crypt. Matteo
jammed the hardened steel tips of the spreader between the century-old
wrought-iron bars of the cistern grate.
SCREEECH.
The rusted iron groaned, bent, and sheared off with the force of an artillery
shell.
Lorenzo didn't wait for the dust to settle. He snatched a waterproof tactical
flashlight from Matteo’s belt, swung his legs over the lip of the concrete
shaft, and dropped eight feet into the murky, swirling water below.
“Boss!” Matteo shouted, leaning over the opening.
“Stand by with the medical gurney!” Lorenzo’s voice echoed up from the cistern,
echoing through the pipes.
I dropped to my knees beside the opening, my hands scraping against the jagged
iron remnants. The smell rising from the shaft was nauseating—damp limestone,
stagnant storm run-off, and the sweet, sickly stench of decomposing lilies.
Down in the beam of the flashlight, the water was waist-deep on Lorenzo.
Huddled on a narrow concrete ledge built into the brick foundation, barely six
inches above the rising brown water, was Donna Maria Moretti.
She was wrapped in a moldering black funeral shroud, her silver hair matted with
grime and blood. Her fingers were raw, the nails torn down to the quick where
she had desperately clawed at the ventilation shaft. In her frail, trembling
lap, she clutched an empty plastic gallon jug that had once held embalming
fluid—cut open to catch rainwater dripping from the ceiling.
She had survived three weeks in total darkness, subsisting on stagnant
condensation and scraps of food Baron had dropped through the drainage grate
above.
“Maria...” Lorenzo’s voice broke completely.
He waded through the rushing current, lifting his mother’s frail, eighty-pound
body into his massive arms. She wept—a soundless, shuddering sob against his
soaked chest.
“My boy...” she wheezed into his neck. “I heard your boots above the stone...
every night I prayed you would hear me...”
“I have you, Mother,” Lorenzo choked out, his silver eyes blazing with tears. “I
swear to God, you will never be in the dark again.”
He reached the base of the shaft and lifted her upward. “Matteo! Take her!
Gently, damn you!”
Matteo and I reached down together. My hands found Donna Maria’s cold,
paper-thin wrists. Her skin felt like frozen parchment, her pulse thready and
erratic, but her grip—the instinctive grip of a woman who had ruled the Southern
Syndicate alongside her husband for forty years—clamped around my forearm with
surprising ferocity.
We pulled her up into the crypt, laying her gently onto a pile of dry tactical
jackets Matteo had stripped from his men.
Baron limped forward, whining softly, pressing his wet snout against Donna
Maria’s bruised cheek.
The old woman weakly lifted one bloody finger, touching the scarred patch over
the dog’s blind ear. “Good boy... my brave soldier... you brought him...”
Baron curled his shivering body tightly around her legs, providing what little
warmth his failing heart could muster.
Lorenzo hauled himself out of the cistern, water cascading from his clothes. He
stood over his mother for three seconds, his jaw clenched so hard a vein
throbbed violently in his forehead.
Then he turned around.
Bianca had backed out of the crypt into the driving rain, her eyes wild, her
hands raised in front of her chest as if she could ward off the storm itself.
She turned to run toward the cypress trees.
“Matteo,” Lorenzo said softly.
Matteo raised his sidearm and fired a single round into the limestone gravel
three inches in front of Bianca’s designer heels.
Bianca shrieked, collapsing into the mud on her stomach.
Lorenzo walked out of the crypt into the torrential downpour. He didn't rush. He
moved with the slow, terrifying certainty of an avalanche.
He reached down, grabbed Bianca by the knot of her pearls, and hauled her to her
feet with one arm. The black South Sea pearls snapped, scattering across the
flooded gravel like drops of black oil.
May you like
“The chalice, Bianca,” Lorenzo whispered, his face inches from hers. “What was
in the chalice?”
