Chapter 13 - The Black Rose
Vincent ordered his remaining men to lock down the entire medical facility and strip the security servers.
They stood in the sterile, fluorescent light of the nursing home's basement security room, watching the grainy surveillance footage play in absolute silence.
Harper held her breath as the timestamp on the monitor jumped to one hour ago.
The black-and-white video showed Vincent's four elite guards standing casually in her mother's room.
Suddenly, her mother—a woman who supposedly had not walked unassisted in five years—sat up smoothly from the hospital bed.
She reached underneath her pillow, produced a suppressed tactical pistol with lightning speed, and executed all four men before they could even unholster their weapons.
She did not flinch, she did not hesitate, and she did not panic.
She simply stepped over their bleeding bodies, adjusted her silk robe, and walked calmly out of the frame.
Harper felt her knees completely give out, collapsing into a rolling office chair as the air left her lungs.
Vincent paused the footage on a blurry close-up of her mother's cold, emotionless face.
He stared at the screen for a long time before breathing out a name that sounded like a curse.
Eleanor Vance.
Harper looked up at him through blurry, terrified tears and whispered that her mother's last name was not Vance.
Vincent turned to her, his gray eyes devoid of any warmth.
He explained in a low, dangerous voice that twenty years ago, before Marcano or the Rossi family ruled the city, there was only one syndicate that mattered.
It was run by a ruthless, brilliant woman known on the streets as the Black Rose.
She was an assassin who manipulated the city's greatest crime families into destroying each other, leaving her to rule the ashes.
She vanished completely without a trace the night Harper was born, presumed dead by the entire underworld.
Vincent realized out loud that Eleanor never actually died; she had simply gone into hiding to raise her daughter in the shadows.
He looked Harper directly in the eyes and asked the most terrifying question of her life.
He demanded to know if she had known the truth this entire time, playing the innocent waitress to help her mother manipulate him into killing Marcano.
Harper swore on her life that she had no idea, pleading with him to believe she was just as deeply betrayed as he was.
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Vincent did not reach out to comfort her this time.
He turned his back on her, staring at the frozen image of the assassin on the screen, and ordered his men to take Harper back to the estate.
