Chapter 4 - The Account Settled in Blood
At ten o'clock that evening, a driving snowstorm hit Chicago.
Heavy, white flakes fell horizontally across the city, whipped by thirty-mile-per-hour winds blowing off Lake Michigan. The streets were nearly deserted, gray slush turning into hard, treacherous ice beneath the streetlights.
In the master guest suite of the penthouse, Laura was fast asleep.
The combination of warm food, medical pain relievers, clean silk sheets, and the profound, overwhelming exhaustion of twenty-five years of trauma had finally claimed her. Major was curled up on the rug at the foot of her king-sized bed, his nose tucked beneath his tail, snoring softly.
Cassian stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at her peaceful, sleeping face.
She looked small beneath the massive down comforter, but her breathing was deep and rhythmic. The dark, terrifying shadows beneath her eyes seemed slightly less prominent in the soft glow of the nightlight.
Cassian pulled the bedroom door shut with absolute silence.
He walked into the foyer, where Milo was waiting, holding Cassian’s heavy black trench coat and dark leather gloves.
"Is everything prepared at the warehouse?" Cassian asked, slipping his arms into the coat.
"Yes, Boss," Milo replied. "Stefan has them secured in the lower basement level. No noise, no witnesses."
"Good. Elena will stay here with two armed guards outside the penthouse door. If Laura wakes up, she is not to leave this floor."
"Understood, Cassian."
Ten minutes later, Cassian’s black armored SUV pulled out of the underground garage, slicing through the blinding snowstorm toward the industrial wasteland of South Chicago.
The cold-storage warehouse had been abandoned for fifteen years. It sat near the edge of the Calumet River, surrounded by rusted shipping containers, overgrown weeds, and broken concrete. Inside, the air was bitter cold, smelling of old ammonia, rust, and damp earth.
Cassian walked down the concrete stairs into the subterranean basement level.
A single overhead halogen lamp swung from an exposed iron beam, casting harsh, yellow light over the concrete floor.
Tied to two heavy steel chairs in the center of the room were Martha Vance and her brother, Donald Vance.
Donald was a thick, balding man in his late fifties, wearing a leather jacket, his face bruised and bloody from a brief struggle with Stefan’s men. Martha was sobbing hysterically, her gray wool coat stained with mud, her bun completely unraveled, dark grey hair hanging in wild strands around her face.
Four of Cassian’s men stood in the shadows around the room, their hands tucked into their coats, completely motionless.
When the heavy iron door slammed shut and Cassian stepped into the light, Martha let out a high-pitched, desperate shriek.
"Please! Please, mister! We didn't do anything! Take whatever you want! Take the diner! Take the house! Just don't kill us!"
Donald Vance, despite his bruises, tried to maintain his tough-cop posture. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the concrete floor, glaring at Cassian through swollen eyes.
"Do you know who the hell I am, you mob bastard?" Donald rasped, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "I served twenty-eight years in the 10th District! I have friends in the state attorney's office! You touch us, and the entire department will hunt you down like a dog!"
Cassian didn't answer immediately.
He slowly pulled off his leather gloves, finger by finger, folding them neatly and placing them into his coat pocket. He pulled a wooden chair from the shadows, placed it four feet directly in front of Donald Vance, and sat down.
He leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, his cold river-ice eyes fixing on Donald’s face.
"Your friends in the state attorney's office," Cassian began softly, his voice echoing in the freezing basement, "are currently reviewing thirty-two boxes of digital evidence delivered to their home addresses an hour ago."
Donald froze, his jaw tightening. "What... what evidence?"
"The illegal extortion payments you took from local bookmakers between 2012 and 2019," Cassian listed calmly. "The evidence tampering in the O'Malley homicide case. The three unregistered off-shore accounts in Nassau registered under your wife's maiden name."
Donald’s face drained of color, turning an ash-gray that rivaled the concrete floor. "How... how did you get those?"
"I am Cassian Ror," Cassian said flatly, as if stating that the sky was blue. "I own this city's underworld, Donald. You were a low-level precinct sergeant who took five-hundred-dollar payoffs to ignore domestic abuse calls. You are nothing."
Cassian shifted his gaze to Martha.
She shrank back against her chair, trembling so violently the steel frame rattled against the floor.
"And you," Cassian continued, his voice dropping into a tone so icy, so dark that even Milo took a subtle step back in the shadows. "For ten years, you locked a motherless girl in a basement storage room. You worked her eighteen hours a day. You beat her with a plastic line until her back was a lattice of keloid scars."
"She was a thief!" Martha screamed defensively, her eyes wild with panic. "She was lazy! She was a worthless, ungrateful brat!"
Cassian stood up slowly from his chair.
He walked over to a wooden table resting near the wall. Resting on the table was the double-over plastic clothesline that Milo had taken from Martha in the alley that morning.
Cassian picked it up. He wrapped the plastic line around his gloved knuckles.
Martha’s eyes went wide with pure, unadulterated terror. "No... no! Please! Don't! I'm an old woman!"
"You didn't show mercy to a starving sixteen-year-old girl," Cassian said, stepping up until he stood inches from her chair. "Why should I show mercy to you?"
"I'll sign anything!" Martha sobbed, urine visibly soaking through her trousers onto the concrete. "I'll sign the diner! I'll sign the house! I'll give her all the money! Just don't hurt me!"
Cassian looked down at the clothesline in his hand.
He didn't strike her.
To strike her with the whip would lower him to her level—a pathetic bully using violence against a helpless victim. Cassian Ror was not a street bully. He was an executioner of systems.
He tossed the plastic clothesline into the corner of the room, where it landed with a dry clack against the concrete.
"I am not going to beat you, Martha," Cassian said softly. "Physical pain passes. Scars heal. I am going to destroy everything you are."
He turned to Stefan.
"The diner?" Cassian asked.
"Demolition crews are arriving at seven tomorrow morning, Boss," Stefan replied promptly. "The Blue Anchor Diner will be leveled to the ground by noon. The land will be turned into a private community park dedicated to Leo Ror."
Martha let out a strangled, agonizing howl. That diner had been her pride, her status, her entire identity in Pilsen for thirty years.
"And her residential property?" Cassian continued.
"Foreclosed as of five o'clock today," Stefan reported. "Her personal belongings have been packed into three cardboard boxes and dropped off at the municipal homeless shelter on 14th Street."
"And Donald?"
"The state police internal affairs division has already issued an arrest warrant for Sergeant Donald Vance," Stefan said, holding up a phone screen. "They are currently waiting outside his house. His pension has been frozen by court order."
Donald bowed his head, letting out a dry, defeated groan. His career, his reputation, his money, his freedom—everything had been erased in a single evening.
Cassian looked down at the two broken figures tied to the chairs.
"You will never see Laura again," Cassian told them, his voice final as a headstone being lowered into the earth. "If either of you ever steps foot within five miles of her, if either of you ever speaks her name, my men will not bring you to a warehouse. They will put you in a barrel and drop you into Lake Michigan. Do you understand?"
Martha nodded frantically, her tears dropping onto her filthy coat. "Yes... yes! We promise! We'll leave Chicago! We'll go away!"
Cassian turned his back on them.
"Cut their ties," Cassian commanded his men as he walked toward the door. "Put them in a van and dump them on the curb outside the 14th Street shelter. Let them spend the rest of their miserable lives freezing in the city they helped pollute."
Cassian walked out of the warehouse into the howling snowstorm.
As the heavy black SUV accelerated back toward Lake Shore Drive, Cassian leaned his head against the headrest, closing his eyes.
May you like
The dark account was finally settled. The bullies were destroyed.
Now, his only duty was to protect the delicate, beautiful soul sleeping quietly in his penthouse high above the frozen city.
