Chapter 15 - The Grand Design
"You look just like your mother when you're angry, Dante," Marco whispered, his voice smooth as aged silk and sharp as surgical steel.
He did not flinch, nor did he reach for a weapon. He casually raised a single finger, signaling his remaining bodyguards to stand down as if we were nothing more than unruly children arriving late for Sunday dinner. He removed his gilded mask, revealing cold, steel-gray eyes that possessed none of the humanity or warmth I had desperately remembered from my childhood.
I leaned across the table, my suppressed pistol pressed firmly beneath the mahogany edge, aimed directly at his kneecap. I demanded to know how a father could coldly order the execution of his own flesh and blood, how he could allow his wife to turn his sons into butchers while he hid in luxury.
Marco let out a soft, pitying sigh. He told me that everything that had transpired over the last twenty years was part of a grand, necessary culling. The Chicago syndicate had grown fat, lazy, and vulnerable to federal infiltration under Eleanor's shortsighted greed. He had engineered Matteo's fake assassination to test his survival instincts, and he had allowed Eleanor to rule until her ambition outgrew her competence.
He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto mine with hypnotic intensity. He explained that the High Commission needed a new supreme leader—someone who had lived in the dirt, killed in the shadows, and possessed the ruthless will to command five territories without flinching. Chicago was never the empire; Chicago was merely the proving ground. He had orchestrated the entire nightmare to see which of his sons was made of iron, and which was made of ash.
Then, he dropped the real hammer.
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He slid a high-resolution tablet across the table. On the screen was a live video feed of the surveillance van parked on the street below. Two black tactical vans had silently boxed Beatrice in, their tinted doors sliding open to reveal a squad of heavily armed mercenaries leveling shotguns at her driver-side window.
Marco smiled chillingly and told me that my final coronation required a blood sacrifice. If I put a bullet through Matteo's head right here in the mezzanine, Beatrice and her daughter would be spared, and the entire national syndicate would be placed in my hands. If I refused, the van would be riddled with heavy caliber rounds within five seconds.
