Chapter 11 - Blood on the Horizon
The raspy laughter scraping through the cheap speaker of the burner phone felt colder than the winter blizzards of Lake Michigan.
My breath caught in my throat, my fingers tightening around the hard plastic casing so fiercely that the display began to spiderweb with tiny fractures. Across the blooming green pasture of our Montana ranch, Beatrice was kneeling in the soft dirt, gently showing Lily how to plant wild clover while the golden afternoon sun painted halos in their hair. It was a picture of pure, untouched innocence, and every instinct in my body screamed that the devil himself was standing behind it with a can of gasoline.
I kept my voice low, dropping it to a lethal, flat whisper that wouldn't carry across the breezy yard. I demanded to know who was speaking, though deep in the scarred recesses of my memory, the cadence of that gravelly voice was already unearthing a nightmare I thought time had swallowed whole.
The man on the other end chuckled again, a dry, rattling sound like dead leaves scraping across concrete. He told me that a boy who had spent twelve years mourning a ghost brother should know better than to believe in funerals. He asked me if I truly believed my mother Eleanor had possessed the tactical genius or the financial muscle to build a modern empire from scratch. Eleanor had been ruthless, yes, but she had merely been the warden of the Midwest yard, answering to the men who owned the fences.
My heart slammed against my ribs with brutal, suffocating force. There was only one man who spoke with that specific, mocking arrogance, one man who had vanished during a staged dockside shootout when I was barely a teenager.
Marco Moretti. My father.
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The dead patriarch of the syndicate, the man whose oil portrait had hung in our Chicago foyer for two decades, was alive and breathing in New York City.
He told me to stop staring at the girl in the sundress and look toward the ridge line two hundred yards to the north. He warned me that his spotters had been tracking our secluded paradise for forty-eight hours, waiting for the precise moment to turn our peaceful meadow into a slaughterhouse. He gave me a simple, merciless choice: bring Matteo and the ledger's master decryption keys to Manhattan by midnight tomorrow, or watch the mountain soil drink the blood of the only woman I had ever loved.
