Chapter 5 - The Dowager’s Sovereign DecreeDonna Francesca Moretti slowly pushed the charcoal blanket aside with both hands.
The frail, trembling facade that had deceived four hundred guests in the ballroom fell away like a discarded stage prop.
The Shadow Dowager sat upright, her spine straight as an iron girder, her slate-gray eyes blazing with the ancient, unyielding sovereignty that had ruled the Chicago underworld during the bloody dock wars of the nineteen-eighties.
She reached out, her gnarled fingers closing firmly around Maya’s wrist, pulling the younger woman down until Maya was eye-level with the matriarch.
“Stand tall, child,” Donna Francesca commanded, her dry, raspy voice carrying a resonance that made the surrounding capos lean forward in absolute reverence. “You held my line tonight. A woman who can stare down a Sterling without blinking has no business weeping over ten million dollars. In this family, we do not apologize for our strength.”
She looked up at her son.
“Alexander.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“The Sterling Foundry Trust has siphoned sixty million dollars from our Calumet rail accounts over the past four years,” the Dowager said, her voice dropping into a deadly, clinical register that chilled the room. “Julianna’s father, Charles Sterling, spent the last six months meeting with federal prosecutors in Geneva, attempting to sell the 1974 harbor patents to a European logistics consortium.”
A collective, murderous murmur rippled through the sixty syndicate capos gathered around Table Four.
Alexander’s jaw locked into forged steel.
“You have the documentation, Mother?”
Donna Francesca reached into the lining of her oversized woolen cardigan and withdrew a heavy, fireproof aluminum dispatch key stamped with the serial number of the private vault beneath the Chicago Board of Trade.
She placed the key directly into Maya’s palm, closing the girl’s fingers over the cold metal.
“Maya holds the key, Alexander,” Donna Francesca announced, her voice booming across the vaulted ballroom like a church bell. “The original unredacted ledgers from 2014 are in vault 44-Omega. Charles Sterling didn't just try to steal our railcars tonight. Twelve years ago, he was the man who placed the remote detonator on your father’s limousine on Lake Shore Drive.”
The entire ballroom went completely, horrifyingly still.
Alexander’s dark eyes flared with an abyss of pure, awakened slaughter.
Twelve years of searching.
Twelve years of hunting through rival syndicates in Detroit, New York, and Montreal, believing his father had died in a random territorial dispute.
And the man who had ordered the strike had been sitting at the Sterling Foundry headquarters on Wacker Drive, drinking thirty-year-old scotch, while his daughter paraded across gala floors demanding apologies from servers.
Alexander slowly turned his head to look at Don Carmine Falcone, who stood three paces back, his knuckles white against his ash walking stick.
“Falcone.”
May you like
“Don Alexander,” the ancient underboss answered, his voice trembling with terrifying anticipation.
“Convene the Council of the Great Lakes at our private compound on the river before midnight,” Alexander commanded softly. “Bring Charles Sterling from his penthouse under an armed honor guard of forty men. It is time to settle our accounts with the dead.”
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