Chapter 33 - Descent into Palermo
The rain in Palermo was warm, heavy, and tasted of salt and diesel fuel.
Elena stood under the rusted awning of an abandoned shipyard on the southern docks, her eyes hidden beneath the brim of a black cap. Aurelia had been safely transported six hours ago to an impenetrable mountain convent in Switzerland under the protection of Mateo's most ruthless lieutenants—men who answered only to Elena's late father and cared nothing for mafia politics. Knowing her daughter was safe had turned the fear inside Elena into pure, unadulterated venom.
Behind her, five men checked their magazines in silence. Mateo, a towering man with gray-streaked hair and scars carved across his throat, stepped up beside her.
"The transponder signal went dead forty minutes ago beneath the Catacombe dei Cappuccini," Mateo muttered, pulling up an architectural map on a rugged tablet. "Those catacombs span miles of subterranean limestone. Lucian’s people have sealed the public entrances. The local authorities have been bribed or threatened to stay five blocks away."
"He thinks I’ll walk through the front door like a sacrificial lamb," Elena said, adjusting the combat harness over her kevlar vest. "He expects an emotional, grieving widow offering up her child in exchange for her husband."
"And what will he get instead?" Mateo asked with a faint, lethal grin.
"Total annihilation."
Elena pulled up the schematics she had retrieved from Adrien’s private offshore database. "Adrien didn't just map Palermo’s catacombs; he bought the sewage and aqueduct rights beneath the western crypts ten years ago. There is an auxiliary drainage valve right beneath the altar of the Black Madonna. We breach from below."
"If we blow that aqueduct wall, the entire sector will cave in," Mateo warned.
"Then Lucian had better learn how to breathe under rubble," Elena replied without a trace of mercy.
The team moved like phantoms through the labyrinthine alleyways of the old quarter, where laundry hung limp in the torrential downpour and the shadows were thick with unspoken violence. Elena felt Adrien’s absence like a missing limb. For five years, their marriage had been a battlefield of secrets, misunderstandings, jealousy, and fierce, intoxicating passion. When he had said *"Keep her"* five years ago, she had believed he had discarded her heart for another woman. She had spent years learning how to hate him, only to discover that every cruelty, every distance he had maintained, was a shield constructed to keep her from the reach of the true monster.
And now that monster was carving into Adrien’s flesh.
They reached the rusted iron grate leading into the subterranean aqueducts. Mateo severed the padlock with hydraulic cutters. One by one, Elena and her squad dropped into the stinking, subterranean darkness, their boots splashing through centuries-old silt.
Above them, the church bells of Palermo began to toll, signaling midnight.
May you like
The winter solstice had arrived.
***
