Chapter 6 - The Confession on the PierThe launch surged through the heavy harbor swells, its carbon-fiber hull slicing effortlessly through the black water.
Ten minutes later, the vessel slowed to an idle, pulling alongside the weathered pilings of Deepwater Pier 9—a secluded industrial coal dock owned by the Caruso syndicate on the outer spit of Long Island.
Waiting on the illuminated concrete pier were four armored Suburbans, their headlights cutting through the fog like incandescent spears.
And kneeling on the rain-slicked wood beneath the glaring halogen lights was Giselle Delacroix.
Her emerald gown was ruined, caked in mud and grease around the hem. Her diamond necklace was gone, her elaborate hairstyle torn down by the wind, and her hands were bound tightly behind her back with heavy yellow zip-ties.
Two of Marco’s guards stood over her with shotguns.
Dante stepped off the launch first, extending his hand to help me onto the pier.
The sea wind was freezing, carrying the sharp scent of low tide, diesel fuel, and salt. I wrapped the wool blanket tighter around my shoulders, keeping close to Dante’s side as we walked across the wet timber.
When Giselle heard our footsteps, she snapped her head up.
Her eyes, usually so haughty and aristocratic, were bloodshot, rimmed with smudged black eyeliner, wide with wild, unhinged panic.
Then she saw me.
She saw the parlor maid walking beside Dante Caruso, wrapped in his blanket, while she knelt in the dirt like a common street criminal.
“Dante!” Giselle screamed, thrashing against the guards’ grip. “Dante, you cannot do this to me! My father is a member of the Canadian parliament! You are committing an act of international war!”
Dante stopped three paces in front of her.
He didn't draw his gun. He didn't raise his voice. He reached into his coat, pulled out a satellite radio handset, and pressed the speaker button.
Over the static, the sound of heavy machine-gun fire echoed from the open water two miles offshore.
Then a man’s voice, screaming in terror in French-accented English, erupted over the speaker:
“Caruso! Call off your gunboats! Cease fire! The hull is breached! We are taking on water in the forward engine room!”
Julian Delacroix.
The proud patriarch of Montreal, reduced to screaming like a cornered animal over an emergency maritime frequency.
Dante brought the microphone to his lips.
“You have five minutes to lower your lifeboats and surrender your navigational logs, Julian,” Dante said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “If your launch does not beach on Pier 9 within fifteen minutes, my torpedo boats will send the Crowned Lady to the bottom of the Sound with you inside it.”
“Caruso, please! My daughter—”
“Your daughter is kneeling in the mud beside the maid whose hand she crushed,” Dante interrupted coldly. “Her fate is already sealed.”
He clicked the radio off, tossing it onto the hood of the nearest Suburban.
He looked down at Giselle.
“Tell me about the yacht, Giselle.”
“I don't know what you're talking about!” she wept, her voice breaking into hysterical sobs. “I was just trying to protect our family’s assets! Your brother Julian was going to blow the whistle on our northern shipping pipeline! He was going to give the federal prosecutors the offshore manifests!”
“My brother was murdered,” Dante whispered, stepping forward until the toe of his shoe touched the hem of her ruined emerald gown. “He was thirty-one years old. He had a wife and an unborn child. And you sat at my dinner table for fourteen months, planning our wedding, while your father’s men were still cleaning his blood off their bow.”
Giselle broke down, pressing her forehead against the wet wood of the pier, weeping with raw, hopeless terror.
“It was my father’s idea! He said Julian Caruso was too rigid, too moral to run a modern syndicate! He said if we took him off the board, you would be forced to accept our alliance to protect your northern flank!”
Dante turned his head toward Marco.
“Did the IT team extract the footage?”
Marco pulled a heavy military tablet from his jacket, tapping the screen.
The high-definition video feed bloomed into view.
It was crystal-clear security footage from the Long Island Sound harbor master’s private radar tower, recorded two years ago. It showed the Crowned Lady accelerating through the no-wake zone at thirty-five knots, deliberately ramming Julian Caruso’s forty-foot center-console boat amidships, cutting the smaller vessel completely in half before speeding away into international waters.
And standing on the flying bridge of the Crowned Lady, holding a pair of night-vision binoculars, was Giselle Delacroix.
The proof was absolute.
Irrevocable.
Dante took the tablet, turned it toward his kneeling fiancée, and held it before her eyes.
“Look at it, Giselle.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, sobbing violently, shaking her head.
“Look at what you did,” Dante commanded, his voice shaking with a terrifying, subterranean wrath that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
He slowly lowered the tablet, handing it back to Marco.
“Put her in the transport van,” Dante said, turning his back on her as if she were nothing more than garbage on the street. “Take her to the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. Hand the video, the decrypted server logs, and her signed confession directly to the Assistant United States Attorney.”
Giselle gasped, looking up in shock.
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“The... the feds? You’re handing me to the government?”
“You thought I was going to shoot you in an alley, Giselle?” Dante murmured, his eyes blacker than the sea behind him. “Death is too fast. You are going to spend the next forty years in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, watching through iron bars while every square inch of your family’s empire is dismantled and sold at public auction.”
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