Chapter 6 - Blood on the LaSalle Bridge
Marcus Vance didn't run like a tactical operator. He ran like an old man who had suddenly realized that the check he wrote with other men’s blood was about to be cashed in his own.
He slipped in the black mud, scrambling on his hands and knees through the industrial drainage culvert that led toward the riverfront dock where his private launch was tied off. His expensive cashmere coat was torn, smeared with grease and filth, his breath wheezing through his lungs in ragged, desperate gasps.
“Alexander!” he shrieked into the rain, his silver-plated Colt waving wildly behind him. “Don't do this! You don't understand the board! Julian was the one who authorized the funding! Julian brought in the cartel contacts!”
I didn't run. I walked.
My wingtips crunched deliberately on the gravel. Every step was measured, steady, relentless.
“You gave my wife poison, Marcus,” I said, my voice cutting through the roar of the river behind us. “Every single morning. For eighteen months. You sat at my Thanksgiving table, drank my scotch, and asked how her treatments were going.”
Marcus reached the wooden edge of the pier, his boots slipping on the wet timber. He turned around, backing toward the deep, swirling black water of the Calumet River.
The silver Colt shook violently in his hand, pointed straight at my forehead.
“She was going to ruin everything!” Marcus screamed, spit flying from his lips as his composure completely shattered. “Your father wanted Moretti Holdings to be an institution! A permanent dynasty! But you—you were soft! You spent half your time on philanthropic foundations and medical clinics because your little Harvard bride couldn't produce an heir! The company was slipping! Wall Street was circling!”
“So you killed her?”
“I tried to clear the board!” he sobbed, his eyes wild with terror under the falling rain. “If she died, you would have remarried! You would have taken a woman from the Carrington or Sterling families—a woman who understood dynasty! But you refused! You spent five years living like a monk in that mausoleum!”
“And my sons?” I took another step forward. The barrel of his gun was ten feet from my face. “What was the plan for four innocent four-year-old boys?”
“They were loose ends!” he roared. “They carry your DNA! Under the trust, the second they turned eighteen, my control would have ended! I spent twenty-five years building your father’s empire, Alexander! I BUILT IT! NOT YOU! NOT THOSE BASTARDS!”
*Click.*
I took one more step. The cold muzzle of his Colt touched the skin between my eyebrows.
Marcus was hyperventilating, his fingers white on the trigger. “Back away, Alexander. I swear to God, I’ll pull it. Back away and let me take the boat. I’ll leave the country. I’ll transfer the offshore bearer bonds to your account. Five hundred million dollars! You can keep the boys! Nobody else knows where they are!”
I looked into his eyes. There was no soul left behind them. Just the rotting, diseased vanity of a parasite who had spent a quarter of a century feeding on the strength of a better family.
“Sophia gave me a message for you,” I whispered softly.
Marcus’s eyes flickered with confusion. “What?”
“She said your clock ran out.”
Before Marcus could register the muscle twitch in my shoulder, my left hand slapped the cylinder of his Colt, pushing the barrel up and away from my face.
*Crack!*
The round discharged uselessly into the rainy night sky.
In the same fluid motion, my right fist—reinforced by thirty pounds of forward momentum—slammed into the side of Marcus’s jaw. The sound of fracturing bone echoed over the water.
Marcus crumpled against the wooden pier railing, the silver gun clattering into the dark river below.
He choked, clutching his broken jaw, blood pouring through his fingers into the mud. He looked up at me with pure, animal terror, dragging himself backward along the wet planks.
“Please…” he gurgled. “Alexander… please. Mercy.”
I stood over him, my silhouette blocking out the gray light of the dawn breaking over Lake Michigan behind us.
I reached down, grabbed him by the collar of his ruined cashmere coat, and hauled him to his feet. He hung in my grip like a broken rag doll.
“Mercy is for human beings, Marcus,” I said, looking into his terrified, bloodshot eyes. “You’re just a pathogen. And it's time to sterilize the house.”
I didn't throw him into the river.
Drowning was too clean. Drowning would allow him to die before the world saw what he was.
Instead, I dragged him toward the idling Mercedes G-Wagon, threw his battered body into the steel cage of the rear cargo compartment, and slammed the heavy door shut.
I pulled out my satellite phone and dialed David Reyes.
*“Reyes here.”*
“David. Bring the boys to the penthouse at Moretti Tower.”
A beat of silence. *“Is the perimeter secure, boss?”*
“The perimeter is gone,” I answered, wiping the blood and rain from my eyes. “The war is over. Tell Eleanor to get the boys dressed in their best clothes. It’s eight in the morning.”
I climbed into the driver’s seat of the armored G-Wagon, turned the ignition, and pointed the heavy grille toward downtown Chicago.
May you like
“It’s time for the Moretti Holdings emergency board meeting.”
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