Chapter 3 - Blood on the Mahogany
The garage smelled of motor oil, copper, and the cold, damp concrete of a November night.
The two survivors of Bernardo’s strike team were kneeling between my custom Mercedes Maybach and a vintage Alfa Romeo that had belonged to my father. Their hands were zip-tied behind their backs, their tactical helmets discarded on the oil-stained floor. Both of them were bleeding from shrapnel wounds, but their eyes were wide, white-rimmed with the absolute, animalistic terror that came from knowing whose basement they were in.
Frank stood over them, holding a heavy iron tire iron, his dark trench coat stained with soot. Six of my most trusted men—men who had sworn loyalty to me, not the Moretti name—stood in the shadows with short-barreled shotguns rested across their forearms.
When the hydraulic door at the back of the garage opened and I stepped out, every man in the room straightened up.
I had washed the blood from my face, but I hadn't changed my clothes. The Kevlar vest was still strapped over my dress shirt, the P226 holstered at my hip. I walked with the slow, deliberate stride of a judge approaching the gallows.
“Alejandro,” Frank muttered, stepping aside. “These aren't local street muscle. These are former tier-one operators from Black River Tactical. Their contracts were funded through a shell company registered in Panama called Vesper Holdings.”
“I know who owns Vesper Holdings,” I said, stopping three feet in front of the two men on their knees. “My uncle Bernardo uses it to buy racehorses in Kentucky.”
I looked down at the man on the left. He had a broken nose and a jagged tattoo of an osprey on his throat. He was trying to keep his chin up, trying to play the professional mercenary who understood the risks of the contract.
“Who gave you the order to breach the dining room?” I asked.
The man spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the concrete between my shoes. “Contract rules, Moretti. We don't disclose the client’s parameters. You kill us, you get nothing. You let us walk, we tell our handler the site was empty.”
I didn't answer with words.
I reached down, took the tire iron from Frank’s hand, and swung it in a short, brutal arc.
The iron struck the man’s right collarbone with a sickening, wet crunch that echoed off the steel ceiling. He shrieked, collapsing onto his side, his legs kicking violently against the garage floor, his face pressed into the oil slick.
I looked at the second man.
He was younger, barely twenty-five, with pale blue eyes that were practically vibrating in their sockets. He looked at his partner thrashing on the floor, then looked up at the tire iron in my hand.
“The old man,” the younger one gasped, his voice pitching into a hysterical squeak. “Don Bernardo! He’s at the Union League Club downtown! He has thirty men from the Corvo family out of New York with him! He called an emergency meeting of the Commission for midnight!”
“Why midnight?” Frank barked, stepping forward.
“Because he told the Commission that Alejandro went insane!” the kid sobbed, tears spilling over his bruised cheeks. “He told them Alejandro found out about his wife’s infidelity, that there were four bastard children hiding in the city, and that Alejandro was going to execute them to purge the family shame! He told the Five Families that Alejandro had broken the ancient code—that he was slaughtering children!”
I let the tire iron slip from my fingers. It hit the concrete with a dull, heavy clatter.
The sheer, monstrous genius of the lie struck me like a physical blow.
Bernardo hadn't just sent a hit squad to kill my sons. He had framed me for their murder before they were even dead. He knew that the Commission—the five governing mafia families that maintained the fragile peace between New York, Chicago, and Detroit—operated on one unbreakable, sacred law: Children are off-limits. A boss who killed kids was a mad dog. A mad dog had to be put down by unanimous vote of the Commission, his empire carved up among the survivors.
If the strike team had succeeded, Bernardo would have displayed the four small bodies to the Commission, pointed to my bloody house, and claimed he had arrived too late to stop my madness. The families would have executed me with their blessing, and Bernardo would have walked into the Moretti throne room as the heroic savior who avenged the innocent.
“He played the entire board,” Frank whispered, his face turning pale under the fluorescent lights. “Alejandro... the Commission is already gathering at the Union League. Don Carmine from New York is already there. If Bernardo takes the floor at midnight without you there to dispute it, they’ll issue an open kill order across the entire continent.”
I checked my watch.
10:42 PM.
Seventy-eight minutes before the clock struck twelve.
“Frank,” I said, my voice dead, flat, carrying the cold finality of an open grave. “How many men do we have ready to roll?”
“Twenty-four at the warehouse on Grand. Another dozen at the docks.”
“Mobilize every rifle, every drum magazine, every plate carrier we own,” I commanded. “I don’t want them in suits. I want them in full tactical gear. We aren't going to a council meeting, Frank. We’re going to an execution.”
“And the boys?” Frank asked, glancing toward the hidden hydraulic elevator door. “We can’t leave them here, Alejandro. If Bernardo has spotters outside the gates, they’ll hit this house with an RPG the moment our convoy clears the tree line.”
I turned toward the door.
I thought about leaving them in the bunker. I thought about locking them behind three feet of steel and concrete, miles away from the gunfire that was about to consume downtown Chicago. But I remembered Sofia’s handwriting across the bottom of that photograph: KEEP THEM SAFE FROM ALEJANDRO.
She had thought the danger was my world. She had thought the only way to save them was to hide them from the shadow of my name.
She had been wrong.
The only thing in this rotting, predatory world strong enough to protect my sons was the monster who had fathered them.
“They come with me,” I said.
May you like
Frank stared at me as if I had lost my mind. “Alejandro, to the Union League? In the middle of an ambush?”
“They ride in the Maybach,” I told him, stepping past the prisoners without looking down. “Behind four inches of ballistic glass and reinforced titanium armor. Elena sits between them. They will watch their father dismantle the men who hunted their mother into an early grave. It’s time they learn what it means to be a Moretti.”
