I go anyway.
There’s a chamber deeper than the vault Santino opened.A chamber the Rivas heirs don’t know exists.Giovanni built a chamber of secrets that even his own blood could not access.
I reach the fork.Turn left.Run my fingers along the wall until I find it — a faint carved imprint, almost invisible unless you know what you’re searching for.
The sigil of a scapegoat.
My throat burns.My pulse spikes.
“He was here,” I whisper.
And tonight, I’m going to see everything he died for.
The Chamber Giovanni Died For
The tunnel narrows until I’m forced to turn sideways, my shoulder scraping along damp stone. The air drops in temperature the deeper I go—colder than the upper vaults, colder than the storm outside.Not natural cold.Engineered. Preserved.A warning delivered through the air itself.
My lantern flickers when the passage widens into a small alcove. Symbols—old, jagged, carved with a ritualistic precision—arc across the stone overhead. I recognize them from my father’s journal, from pages he kept locked away until the day he died. He told me these markings belonged to the older families, the ones who built power long before the Rivas claimed their throne.
One symbol sears the breath from my lungs.
A crooked triangle slashed straight down the middle.
The mark of a scapegoat.
My stomach twists.My father didn’t just get framed.He was branded.
I lift trembling fingers and trace the symbol. Cold radiates from the stone, almost pulsing, like an old pain stored in the rock itself. My throat tightens.
“He was here,” I whisper. “Right here.”
The door in front of me is smaller than Santino’s vault—rounder, uneven, ancient. No Rivas crest. No serpent crown. No polished metal pretending to be divine.
Just stone.Scarred.Unforgiving.
Set into its center is the shallow imprint—the same strange shape carved into my father’s coded map. I reach into my coat with numb fingers and pull out the imprint key. It shifted the upper lock earlier, but didn’t open it.
This door accepts it instantly.
A hard click snaps through the corridor.Dust trickles from the ceiling.Then the stone shifts.
Grind. Groan. Drag.
Heavy internal locks disengage one by one, each vibration rolling through the floor and up my legs like a slow-building earthquake. When the door finally cracks open, stale cold air spills out.
Not sterile cold.
Cold that smells like metal.Like sweat.Like old blood.
My breath stutters.
I push the door wider and step inside.
The chamber is bare.Just three things:
A single metal table bolted to the ground.A metal chair chained to a ring on the floor.A reinforced safe with industrial rivets.
They did not build this place to store secrets.Someone built it to extract them.
