Vanessa called me a worthless maid for serving Luca a chipped bowl of chicken soup, but the moment he tasted it, he realized his mother had been waiting downstairs for nearly two hours.

The clinking of iron chains echoed from the far end of the bunker.

Two Phoenix guards dragged a battered figure into the light of the low-hanging fluorescent bulbs. It wasn't Corrado—he was being held in St. Jude's sub-level.

It was Vanessa Bellini.

She looked utterly unrecognizable from the haughty heiress who had sneered at me in the foyer of the penthouse, who had stepped on my fingers and demanded I be thrown out into the blizzard. Her silk gown was torn and stained with soot, her golden curls tangled like a bird's nest, her mascara running in black streaks down her pale, shivering cheeks.

"Luca!" she wailed, falling to her knees on the cold concrete. "Luca, please! I didn't know! I swear on my mother’s life, I didn't know Marco was going to kill you!"

Luca didn't stand up. He didn't even look at her with anger. His gaze was colder than the winter outside—the indifference of a man looking at a discarded cigarette butt.

"You knew enough to steal my private seal from my desk," Luca said flatly. "You knew enough to let Corrado’s men clone the security frequency of the penthouse."

"They threatened my father!" she wept, crawling toward him until one of the Carbone guards planted a heavy boot in her path, stopping her in her tracks. "Corrado told me if I didn't give them the access codes, they would liquidate every Bellini asset in Europe! They were going to throw me out on the street like... like a beggar!"

"Like a maid?" I asked, stepping out from the shadow of the planning table.

Vanessa’s head snapped up. When her bloodshot eyes locked onto me, her breath hitched violently. She looked at my pristine posture, at Lorenzo Carbone standing like a protective titan at my right shoulder, and at Mrs. Moretti standing at my left.

"You..." Vanessa gasped, her voice cracking in hysterical disbelief. "You were... you were cleaning the bathroom floor yesterday... you were scraping burnt eggs from the pan..."

"And today," I said calmly, crossing my arms, "I am the only person standing between you and a six-foot ditch in the forest. You called me worthless, Vanessa. But when the fire started, you were the first thing Luca burned."

She swallowed hard, trembling so violently her teeth clicked together.

"I can give you something," she blurted out, desperate, humiliating herself in the dirt. "I have something you don't have! Marco left a briefcase in my dressing room. A leather lockbox. He said if everything went wrong, it contained the override cipher for the Zurich transfer! He said it was the insurance policy of 'The Architect'!"

Lorenzo and Mrs. Moretti exchanged a sharp, electric glance.

"The Architect," Lorenzo muttered, his jaw hardening. "So he's here in Chicago."

Luca stood up, towering over the broken woman on the floor. "Where is the briefcase, Vanessa?"

"It’s... it’s at the private hangar at Midway," she sobbed. "A charter jet is waiting to take off at 4:00 AM for the Cayman Islands. Marco gave the key to the pilot!"