Chapter 3 - The Gathering of WolvesAn hour later, the atmosphere inside the massive oak-paneled study of the Caldwell estate was thick with cigar smoke, expensive bourbon, and barely contained panic.
Four men stood around my mahogany desk. They were the remaining pillars of my syndicate—men who controlled dockworkers, union bosses, and street enforcers across three states.
Dominic Rossi, my chief consigliere, paced back and forth across the Persian rug, his polished leather shoes clicking rhythmically against the floorboards. "Ethan, this is madness. You haven't left this estate in eighteen months. You're blind, you're confined to that chair, and now you want to assemble a convoy and head down to the West Loop rail yards in the middle of the night based on something a six-year-old child whispered to you?"
"It’s not just a child's story, Dominic," I said, sitting rigidly behind the desk. I had poured myself a glass of neat bourbon, though I hadn't touched it. My fingers were wrapped tightly around the cold, rusted skeleton key Sammy had given me.
"Boss," spoke up Frankie 'The Knife' Vitale, my senior enforcer, leaning casually against the bookshelf. "With all due respect, your nerves have been shot since the hit. Petrov’s men have been sniffing around the docks in Pilsen all week. If we roll into the West Loop with a convoy, we’re ringing a dinner bell for a second ambush. And this time, we won't have the element of surprise."
I turned my blind face toward Frankie’s voice. I couldn't see the sharp scar running down his cheek or the expensive tailored suit he wore to disguise his brutal profession, but I knew every inflection in his throat.
"Frankie," I said quietly. "Do you remember the night of the ambush?"
The room went dead silent. Nobody talked about the ambush. It was the unwritten rule of the household—the threshold across which no one crossed.
"I remember," Frankie muttered, his voice dropping.
"Who gave Marcone our coordinates?" I asked.
Frankie frowned, his boots stopping their lazy shift on the rug. "We never found out for sure. We assumed Marcone had a wire tapped into your car's cellular system."
"Wrong," I said, slamming my fist down onto the desk. The heavy crystal decanter rattled against its tray. "Marcone didn't have the technical expertise to tap an encrypted military-grade satellite phone. Someone inside my inner circle sold the frequency. Someone sitting at this desk. Or someone sitting right where you are standing, Dominic."
Dominic stopped pacing instantly. A heavy intake of breath hissed through his teeth. "Ethan, are you out of your mind? After everything I’ve done for this family—after keeping the politicians in line while you were recovering—you think I sold you out?"
"I don't know who sold me out," I snarled, leaning forward, the raw, suppressed fury of eighteen months of darkness boiling over into the room. "And that is why we are going to the rail depot tonight. Not to negotiate, not to hide, but to dig up the past before someone else does."
Before Dominic or Frankie could mount another argument, the heavy oak doors of the study swung open without a knock.
Vince, my head of internal security, strode into the room, his face pale, clutching a glowing tablet.
"Boss," Vince said, his voice breathless. "We just intercepted a scrambled radio transmission on the police scanner frequency we monitor. Petrov’s crew just mobilized six vehicles out of their Cicero warehouse. Their destination is the abandoned West Loop rail yards."
The room erupted. Dominic swore loudly in Italian, while Frankie whipped a suppressed automatic pistol from his shoulder holster, checking the chamber with a sharp clack.
"They know," Dominic hissed, staring at me with wide, panicked eyes. "Somebody leaked it. Ethan, they’re heading straight for the cache. If Petrov gets his hands on those ledgers, every judge and prosecutor we own will flip within twenty-four hours. We're finished."
I sat back in my chair. A cold, dark calm washed over me—the exact same terrifying clarity that had made men call me the King of Chicago in the first place.
The fear I had felt in the garden earlier that morning, sitting in the wheelchair weeping before a child, was gone. It had been incinerated by rage.
"They think they’re walking into an abandoned ruin to pick the bones of a dead man," I whispered, a chilling smile stretching across my face. "They have no idea what it's like to hunt in the dark."
I reached out, my fingers sliding across the mahogany desktop until they found the hidden release latch of the upper-left desk drawer.
Click.
May you like
The drawer slid open. My hand closed around the cold, steel grip of the Beretta 9mm. I pulled it out, checked the slide by touch alone with the practiced muscle memory of a thousand gunfights, and laid it across my lap.
"Frankie," I commanded, my voice cutting through the room like a razor blade. "Call the boys from the North Side docks. Tell them to load up every shotgun and submachine gun in the armory. We’re going for a midnight drive."
