Chapter 7 - The Ghost Returns
The grand ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel in downtown Chicago was filled with the elite of the city’s criminal underworld. Don Carmine Marcone, an aging, arrogant tyrant who believed he had finally conquered the Lombardi throne, was hosting a victory gala to celebrate the unification of the territories.
The atmosphere was thick with jazz music, expensive champagne, and the smug laughter of men who believed their enemies were dead or broken.
"To the new era," Carmine Marcone announced, raising a crystal glass before a crowd of fifty high-ranking mobsters and corrupt city officials. "Where the Lombardis are nothing but a memory!"
The heavy double doors at the back of the ballroom slammed open.
The jazz music shrieked to a sudden, discordant halt. The laughter died instantly. Fifty bodyguards instinctively reached for their holsters, but stopped when they saw the perimeter security team—their own men—standing behind the newcomers with their hands raised.
Walking through the doors, entirely unassisted, dressed in a flawless midnight-black three-piece suit, was Sebastian Lombardi.
He didn't have a cane. He didn't have a limp. He walked with a smooth, powerful, predatory stride that commanded the entire room’s gravity. Beside him walked Gabriel, flanked by twenty heavily armed Lombardi loyalists who had spent the last four months waiting in the shadows for this exact moment.
The collective gasp that rippled through the ballroom was comical. Carmine Marcone dropped his crystal glass. It shattered against the marble floor, champagne spraying across his expensive shoes.
"Impossible," Marcone whispered, his face turning a sickly shade of gray. "You're... you're a cripple. You're supposed to be hiding in a hole."
"I was restructuring my assets, Carmine," Sebastian said, his voice echoing through the silent, terrified ballroom like thunder. He stopped ten feet from Marcone’s stage, his legs spread wide, perfectly balanced, perfectly healed. "And I was giving you enough rope to hang your entire family with."
Gabriel opened a leather folder, turning it toward the crowd of capos. "Over the last ninety days, while you were celebrating your victory, we purchased seventy percent of the debt holding your front companies together. We bought your politicians. We bought your union leaders. The Marcone family is bankrupt, Carmine. Your men haven't been paid in two weeks, and they've already agreed to a new management structure."
A ripple of murmurs broke out among Marcone's own capos. Several of them slowly stepped away from the old man, lowering their heads in a silent sign of surrender to Sebastian. They didn't want to fight a man who could rise from the dead and walk away from a paralysis everyone thought was eternal.
"You think you can just walk in here and take my city?!" Marcone shrieked, pulling a gold-plated derringer from his vest pocket in a fit of desperate, senile rage.
He never got the chance to aim it. Gabriel fired a single, silenced shot from his hip. The weapon flew out of Marcone's hand as he collapsed onto the stage, clutching his shattered wrist, screaming in agony.
May you like
Sebastian looked down at the old man without a shred of pity. "The era of the old wars is over, Carmine. You're going to retire to a nice villa in Arizona. And if I ever see a Marcone name on a business registry in Chicago again, I won't send Gabriel. I'll come myself."
He turned around, his black coat billowing behind him, and walked out of the ballroom with the same flawless, powerful stride. He had taken back his city without a war, using nothing but the terror of his resurrection.
