Page 166 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
I hear the scrape of metal, then a grunt, and I move toward it fast, gun raised.
He’s crouched beside a crumbled fresco, pulling back a false panel no larger than a trunk lid.
Behind it, stone turns to reinforced steel.
A hatch door.
Fresh hinges.
Not part of the original monastery.
Marco arrives behind me, scanning the edges.
"No one builds this deep unless they’re trying to hide something permanent."
We pry it open.
The air that comes out is colder than anything we’ve felt all day.
Beneath the hatch is a stairwell, newly cut and angled like an old fallout tunnel.
The walls are lined with insulation and recent wiring, slick with condensation.
I go down first.
The passage leads to a subterranean level.
Clean.
Artificial.
Fluorescent lights buzz to life as I reach the bottom.
The corridor crackles with low voltage.
The walls aren’t stone anymore.
They’ve been stripped, reinforced, fitted with insulation and metal sheeting.
It’s a bunker under a ruin.
A war room wearing the mask of a monastery.
Tomas moves ahead of me, rifle angled low.
Marco stays close to my side.
Every breath I take feels like it catches on the way down.
We enter a chamber unlike anything I expected.
The lights snap to life overhead as we cross the threshold.
The floor is polished to a military sheen.
Console banks wrap the room in a semicircle, each screen pulsing with data: biometric readouts, encrypted trade maps, old Rossi family codes parsed through newer ISN overlays.
There are server towers humming against the back wall and one platform in the center with a biometric key station and an injection tube set into the floor.
