Chapter 56
LUCIAN
Fury hums under my skin like a live wire.
I’m a coiled animal, pacing the length of the room on feet that don’t feel like mine, teeth bared.
Nadia’s gone. Kellerman - the man she trusted - is gone, too.
He left his shift without a word, shoved her into a suitcase like garbage, and drove off into the dark.
There’s no other explanation. Nothing else makes sense.
Mason peels off the walls, shoulders set, voice low and flat. “Lucky’s got a kid scraping tolls and cams. If Kellerman hits a booth, we get a vector. We’re not flying blind here.”
“Hours,” I spit. The word tears from me like a blade. “She’s been gone for hours. She’s out there somewhere, and we don’t even know if she’s breathing.”
The words hit the room like a grenade. I stalk the floor, every step a small explosion.
“If that bastard so much as breathes in her direction,” I say, and my voice is hoarse, raspy, “there won’t be parts left of him to bury.
” I drive my fist into the table. Wood cracks.
It tastes like something holy and animal at the same time.
Mason’s hands clamp me before I can move. “Calm down,” he snaps. “You lose your head now, and we won’t be able to find her.” His grip is iron. “We will find her.”
Scar sits at the head of the table like a monument to patience, scotch untouched, eyes the slow burn of coals. His calm is a blade that grates against whatever is left of me. I want him to roar. I want him to tear the city open. He only nods, small and certain.
“We’ll get her back, Jude,” he says. “Then you’ll get your vengeance.”
The promise sears my gut. My breath thins to a wire. “If he touches one hair on her,” I whisper, not a threat but a law I’ll enforce with blood, “I’ll roast him on a spit and invite the whole city to watch.”
Scar’s phone cuts through the room. He looks at the screen like he’s been expecting the call, then answers with one clipped syllable. “Gatti.”
He flips it to speaker. The walls lean in.
A smooth, oily voice glides through the speaker. “Scar Gatti. You’ve been trying to reach me.”
Scar wastes no time. “Senator Graves. It’s about fucking time you called.”
“I’m sure you can appreciate my schedule,” the senator purrs, voice smooth. The words drip entitlement - polite on the surface, hungry underneath - like a man who treats lives as interruptions to be stamped and filed.
“Then this won’t take long,” Scar informs him. “One of my people is missing. Doctor Nadia Reed. I believe she’s in the custody of Chief Kellerman and I want her back. Today.”
A measured pause on the line - the slow, practiced pause of a guilty man deciding which way to direct the conversation. “And this concerns me how?”
Scar’s tone freezes. “Don’t insult me, senator. You and Kellerman are in each other’s pockets. Either you bring her back unharmed, or I paint the city with everything I have on you.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Gatti.”
“Whether you do or not is none of my concern. You have access to Kellerman. Either you facilitate the doctor’s return, or I’ll hold you complicit in this.”
The senator pauses, as though weighing his options. It feels like he knows he’s at the end of the road. “And if I refuse?”
“If you refuse, I will bury you.”
“You seem to forget who you’re dealing with,” the senator says, and the civility curdles into something sharp and cold.
His voice loses the velvety patina and comes out like a blade: patient, practiced, and utterly sure of its power.
“I move men, Mr. Gatti. I close investigations. I open doors that would otherwise stay closed for a lifetime.” The threat isn’t shouted - it’s worn like a scent, intimate and inescapable - and for the first time his true colors show.
He’s hungry, entitled, dangerous, and he thinks he has the upper hand in this situation.
Scar’s smile is slow and ugly, even though the senator cannot see it through the phone. “Not this man. You cannot control Scar Gatti. You can try, but make no mistake - I will put you on your knees the same way I have so many others before you.”
“Threats don’t become you, Gatti…”
“You have thirty minutes to bring me Nadia Reed or send me a location,” Scar shoots, reaching for the phone. “Or the next person you hear from will be Dante Accardi.”
Dante Accardi. They call him The Saint - irony at its finest. Once, he wore the collar of a priest, soft-spoken and holy, a man who could make confession sound like absolution.
Now, he runs Seattle like it’s a pulpit built on bones.
The five families bend to him, not because they want to, but because no one else has the spine to stand against him.
His sermons are written in blood; his commandments enforced with bullets.
Dante doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. He looks at you with those cold, slate-gray eyes, and suddenly you understand the hierarchy of heaven and hell.
He built his empire out of chaos and revenge, one bloody victory at a time, until the city learned to move when he did.
The press calls him untouchable. The men under him call him merciful - but only because they’ve seen what happens when you’re not.
Dante doesn’t forgive betrayal. He doesn’t warn twice.
He makes examples out of those who forget where their loyalty lies, and the message always lands the same way: no one crosses The Saint and lives to confess it.
And the Gatti family? They’re his chosen. His enforcers. The sword of his so-called gospel.
If Scar calls him - if The Saint gets involved - Graves will be begging for a burial deep enough to hide what’s left of him.
Mason breaks the silence, voice low and grim. “You think that’s enough with a man like Graves?”
Scar leans back, the leather creaking under him, eyes narrowing with that quiet, deadly focus that always comes before something biblical. He swirls the scotch once, watching the amber catch the light like it’s prophecy.
“Enough?” he murmurs, a faint smile cutting through the dark. “No. But it’s the beginning of the end for him.”
Outside, thunder rolls - closer this time, a deep, crawling sound that rattles the windows. The storm’s coming, heavy and mean. And somewhere out there, Graves just signed his own obituary.