The numbers are etched into my memory, marking the moment my world split into before and after.
I remember every detail of that horrible discovery at the Port of Chicago.
The warehouse where we conducted legitimate business, where Marco had gone to oversee a routine weapons shipment transfer.
I’d been across town mediating a territorial dispute between two of our subsidiary crews, confident that my cousin could handle the simple logistics of moving product from point A to point B.
Something he’d done numerous times before.
The call came late. Danny’s voice was something I’d never heard from him before: “Boss, you need to get down to Pier 19.Now.”
I found Marco zip-tied to a metal chair in the center of the empty warehouse, his head hanging at an angle that told me everything I needed to know before I checked for a pulse.
But they hadn’t just killed him—they’d taken their time.
Cigarette burns dotted his arms.
His fingernails were gone.
There were cuts that spoke of information extracted through pain, questions answered under duress.
My cousin. My best friend. The only person in the world who could make me laugh genuinely, who remembered the scared kid I’d been before power and violence shaped me into something harder.
Marco had been the moral center of our organization, the voice that reminded me when we were becoming monsters rather than businessmen.
They probably tortured him for information about me.
Things like my location, my security protocols, my personal vulnerabilities.
But in the days that followed, none of our safe houses were compromised, none of our security protocols were breached,and none of the personal details that could have destroyed me ever surfaced.
Marco had died protecting me, enduring agony rather than betraying the man he called brother.
It took months of investigation, but eventually one of my contacts in the underground gambling circuit confirmed the details.
Antonio Conti had sold detailed intelligence about our shipment schedules—route information, timing, security protocols—everything needed to set the perfect trap.
Financial records proved it.
Fifty thousand dollars in gambling debts mysteriously erased just days before Marco’s death.
The timing was damning.
Antonio had received a large cash payment, his debts vanished overnight, and within hours Marco walked into what could only have been a carefully planned ambush.
My cousin had died because a pathetic gambling addict valued fifty thousand dollars more than an innocent man’s life.
“You know what they did to him,” I say to Danny, my voice carrying the weight of three years’ accumulated grief and rage. “You saw the photographs. You read the medical examiner’s report.”
Danny’s expression softens with shared memory.
He’d been the one to cut the zip ties from Marco’s wrists, the one to help me carry my cousin’s body to the car so we could givehim a proper funeral instead of letting the police turn him into evidence in a case that would never see prosecution.
“I remember, boss,” he says heavily. “But Marco wouldn’t want?—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out sharply. “Don’t tell me what Marco would want. Marco’s dead because a pathetic gambling addict sold his life for fifty thousand dollars. Marco doesn’t get to want anything anymore.”
I stand and walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook my estate’s grounds.
