Chapter 7 - A Scent of Ozone and Crushed CarbonI stepped onto the marble dais.
I didn't rush.
I reached down, caught Damon by the lapels of his eight-thousand-dollar pinstripe coat, and hoisted his two-hundred-pound frame off the floor with one arm, slamming him down into the executive chair he had tried to claim.
Damon wept uncontrollably, his hands clamped over his face, unable to look into the obsidian abyss of my eyes.
"Where is my mother, Damon?" I asked, my voice dropping into that terrifying, subterranean register that made the wine glasses along the table hum with tension.
"The... the convent in Sintra," Damon choked out through his sobs, the truth pouring out of him in broken, frantic waves. "The Convent of Our Lady of the Sea... north of Lisbon. She’s alive, Gabriel! I swear on my eyes, she’s alive! I pay fifty thousand dollars a month to the Mother Superior to keep her inside the gardens! Her private wing is guarded by four private security contractors!"
A knot the size of an iron anvil released in the center of my chest.
Six years.
She had been praying behind stone walls on the cliffs of Portugal, waiting for the signal that her son had survived the poison.
I turned toward Frank Moretti.
"Dispatch the long-range Gulfstream from Teterboro, Frank. Take twelve tactical operators. Bring my mother home under an honor escort of thirty men."
"The jet is already on the tarmac, Don Gabriel," Frank answered with an iron salute.
I looked down at Victoria Sterling, who stood pinned against the sideboard, her raw diamonds shivering against her chest, her face the color of sour cream.
"Take off the diamonds, Victoria," I said softly.
Victoria choked on her own breath, her acrylic nails clawing frantically at the platinum clasp behind her neck as she tore the heavy necklace free from her skin.
She dropped the eighty carats of diamonds onto the marble floorboards, weeping in raw, suffocating humiliation before seventy-five members of the society she had ruled since childhood.
"Take Damon Vance and Victoria Sterling down to the subterranean holding cells beneath the Hudson processing terminal," I commanded, my baritone rolling across the hall with imperial authority. "Place them in the dry pump vault. Let them sit in the dark where twelve honest men drowned until Assistant United States Attorney Marcus Vance arrives with their federal murder and treason indictments."
Damon screamed as two armed tactical operators hauled him backward out of the executive chair, his designer loafers dragging across the carpet, leaving dark scuffs through the spilled wine as his cries faded down the long gallery until the heavy iron security doors clicked shut forever.
Silence returned to the grand ballroom.
Pure, clean, and vast.
I turned back to the seventy-five syndicate commanders standing along the table.
"From this day forward," I announced, my voice echoing across the vaulted ceiling, "the Vance Diamond Syndicate does not deal in uncertified blood stones, backroom kickbacks, or the exploitation of our workforce. We clear the harbors. We certify every gem. We defend the families who sweat on our docks."
I reached out, taking Leo’s hand, lifting the fourteen-year-old mute boy onto the raised marble dais beside me.
"Thomas Miller is appointed General Superintendent of the Harbor Terminal, with a permanent seat on the Board of Directors," I declared, my voice ringing with unshakeable sincerity. "And Leo is under my personal wardship, named as the primary beneficiary of the newly chartered Donna Francesca and Leo Vance Educational Trust, funded with one hundred million dollars from the recovered European reserves."
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Thomas Miller wept openly at the end of the table, his rough hands pressing against his face, while Marcus Falcone raised his crystal glass of vintage Barolo high into the air.
"To Don Gabriel!" Falcone roared, leading the assembly in a synchronized, room-shaking toast that rattled the crystal pendants overhead. "To the Diamond Phantom! Long live the house of Vance!"
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