Chapter 6 - The Secret History of Lake Forest
By dawn, Marco had placed a thick, leather-bound folder on my desk. The pages were yellowed copies of century-old documents retrieved from the Cook County archives and the private library of the Chicago Historical Society.
I opened the folder. Inside were architectural blueprints from 1924, alongside black-and-white photographs of a man named Alistair Vance—the original owner of the Lake Forest estate.
"Read it to me," I said, rubbing my temples as I stared at the coffee cup in front of me.
Marco adjusted his glasses, scanning the typed summary report. "Alistair Vance wasn't just a shipping tycoon, Boss. According to police ledgers from 1926 that were sealed under federal jurisdiction, Vance was involved in occult societies operating out of the Chicago tunnels. He built this estate directly over an old natural limestone sinkhole—a site that local indigenous tribes historically avoided, calling it The Threshold of Whispers."
"What happened to him?" I asked, my eyes narrowing.
"In November 1926, Vance’s three infant children died in their nursery overnight," Marco read, his voice dropping lower. "No poison, no trauma, no medical cause of death found by the coroner. Two weeks later, Vance vanished. The house sat abandoned for forty years until a developer bought it in the sixties, but every family that tried to live here fled within a month, complaining of phantom cries, dropping temperatures, and... entities moving through the walls."
I slammed my hand onto the desk, the heavy mahogany wood shuddering under the impact. "And the real estate broker who sold me this place?"
"He disappeared in Costa Rica three years ago," Marco said grimly. "We were scammed, Boss. Or rather... someone set us up to buy this trap."
"Who?"
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"That's the problem. The financial trail leads to an offshore shell company managed by Vanguard Holdings—a front corporation tied directly to the Salvatore Family."
The Salvatores. Our fiercest, most ruthless rivals in the Chicago underworld. For years, we had fought a silent war for control of the docks and the financial districts. If Dante Salvatore—the head of the Salvatore syndicate—had engineered this, he wasn't just trying to kill me with bullets. He was using ancient, unseen horrors to break my bloodline.
