“Talk,” Dominic says. The word is a gravelly command that vibrates through the floorboards.
I step forward, but I don’t move away from Amara. I keep her in my orbit. My hand brushes her back once, brief enough to steady myself, not enough to take the room from her. Touch her and you deal with me. The warning is silent, but it’s there in the set of my jaw, in the way I won’t let anyone get between us.
“We found Vane’s active trail,” I say, and my voice sounds like it’s coming from a long way off, filtered through the static of eleven years of isolation. “Alvarado Vane is alive. He’s in the city. And for at least eleven years, he’s been holding the leash on the Bellanti money.”
A ripple of tension moves through the room. Matteo leans forward, his face hardening into a mask of grief-stricken fury. Dante crosses his arms, his knuckles standing out like knots. They know the name.
Everyone in this room knows the name of the man who hid the money behind the contracts that ended our childhoods. But they don’t know the catch. They never know the catch until I tell them. That is my role. The keeper of the bad news. The one who carries the poison so they don’t have to.
“He’s alive?” Matteo’s voice is a low hiss. “After what his money helped them do to our fathers? After they left my father in that alley like he was nothing?”
“He’s alive,” I repeat, and the memory of my father’s body—cold, grey, dumped like trash in the alley behind a South Side warehouse—flares in my mind. The smell of wet cardboard and congealed blood. I was twenty when I saw what they did to him, and grief still made me feel like a boy.
I spent years trying to scrub that image out of my brain, but it’s tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. I look at Amara, and I see the same ghost in her eyes. Her brother. Curtis. Another body left behind by Vane’s greed.
“Then we end him,” Dominic says. He starts to stand, his chair scraping harshly against the floor. “Tonight. I want his head on this table by dawn.”
“Sit down, Dom,” I say. It’s not a request.
Dominic freezes. The room goes silent. No one tells the Don to sit down. But I’m not just his brother right now. I’m the man who has the ledger. I’m the man who has Amara.
“We can’t just kill him,” Amara says, her voice cutting through the testosterone and the bloodlust like a blade through silk. She doesn’t wait for permission to speak. She just speaks. “If you kill Alvarado Vane today, you lose everything. You, your brothers, your wives. This entire legacy ends in federal raids, frozen accounts, and prison cells.”
Dominic’s gaze snaps to her. It’s a predatory stare, the kind that makes most people shrink. Amara doesn’t blink. She meets him head-on, her gaze as steady as a surgeon’s hand.
“Explain,” Dominic growls.
Amara steps toward the main monitor. She taps a few keys, and a complex web of encrypted nodes appears on the screen. It looks like a nervous system, glowing red and interconnected.
“It’s a dead-man’s-switch,” she says, gesturing to the center of the web.
“Vane is a financier, but he’s also a ghost. He faked his death once to disappear, and he’s spent the last decade building a digital insurance policy. The moment his heart stops, or the moment he fails to check into his private servers for a twenty-four-hour period, a massive packet of data is released. It isn’t a clean confession. It’s a poisoned dump—framed evidence,civilian names, corrupted routes, and enough Costa exposure to bury the truth under federal chaos.”
She looks around the room, making sure every man hears her.
“He has the evidence of your parents’ murders, yes. But he also has the evidence of every retaliation you’ve ever ordered. He has the names of your associates in the city council. He has the bank accounts where you hide your revenue. If he dies before we dismantle this, the feds land on this compound in force within the hour. You won’t be fighting a gang war anymore. You’ll be fighting the United States government, and that’s a war you cannot win.”
The silence that follows is heavy. It’s the sound of a trap snapping shut. We’ve spent years looking for this man, years dreaming of the moment we could wrap our hands around his throat, and now that he’s within reach, he’s rigged himself to explode.
“He’s a coward,” Enzo mutters from the back of the room. “Hiding behind code.”
“He’s a genius,” I counter. “And he’s been playing us for fools for eleven years.”
I look at the map on the screen. The nodes are scattered across the city—hideouts, server farms, dummy corporations. Each one is a lock. If we don’t pick them all at once, the whole thing goes dark and the data leaks.
“How do we stop it?” Dominic asks. He’s looking at the map now, his anger being replaced by the cold, hard logic of a general.
“We dismantle it,” Amara says. “Node by node. There are seven routing nodes, but four primary Chicago anchors keep the switch alive. If we can neutralize the hardware at those sites simultaneously, we can kill the connection to the cloud. Once the switch is dead, Vane is just a man. A man we can kill without consequences.”
Dominic nods slowly. “Show me the locations.”
Amara pulls up the coordinates. The South Loop dead-drop we hit last night is the first. The Wabash warehouse is still the larger hub. Then a logistics warehouse in Cicero, a tech firm in the West Loop, and a Bellanti-controlled private residence in the Gold Coast, nowhere near the Costa brownstone.
“We split up,” Dominic says, his voice regaining its authority. “Four teams. We hit them hard and fast. No mistakes.”
“No,” I say. “Not yet. We need more intelligence on the Gold Coast site. It’s the master node. If we trip an alarm there, the switch triggers instantly. Amara and I need to run a deep-packet inspection on their local network before we move.”
Dominic looks at me, his eyes narrowing. He knows I’m keeping her close. He knows I’m not letting her out of my sight. But he also knows I’m the only one who can handle the technical side of this with her.
