He Let Me Bleed So I Let Him Go Chapter 14
Dante pressed a hand to the edge of the heavy oak desk.
“Who witnessed it?”
The old man did not answer.
“The committee does not reveal a departing member’s new protector to their former Family. The rule exists to prevent a Don from using force to revoke a signed withdrawal.”
Dante stood there, feeling the blood in his veins turn to ice.
He left the club and drove straight home.
The house was empty.
Elena’s clothes were still in the closet, but her engineering drawings, her documents, and her work computer were gone.
He went to the grocery store she frequented. He called her colleagues. He went to his mother’s estate.
The answer was always the same.
No one had seen her. No one knew anything.
Real panic began to set in.
He mobilized every asset the De Luca family had to trace the black sedan from that night.
Three days passed. Nothing.
The vehicle had no public markings. The plates were registered to a shell corporation. After leaving Chicago, it was as if the car had simply vanished from the earth.
Every lead went cold.
Elena Marino had walked out of his world, and the world had closed behind her.
Dante sent word to every boss who did business with the De Luca family. He offered up a high-revenue district in exchange for a single piece of information about where she had gone.
No one responded.
He couldn’t involve law enforcement in Family business. More importantly, he knew that anyone with the power to silence the entire underground information network was at least as powerful as he was.
Dante stood alone in the empty house.
His phone was silent.
And he knew, with a certainty that hollowed him out, that no message from Elena would ever be intercepted again.