Sir, can you hire me? I can work to pay off my mom’s debts," whispered a six-year-old girl, clutching three dollars and a music box that had belonged to her late father.

By two o'clock in the morning, the rain had turned into a thick, blinding snow that blanketed the sprawling grounds of the Moretti estate.

In the subterranean cellars beneath the former carriage house—a place where the stone walls were four feet thick and completely soundproofed—Marco Vane sat bound to a heavy wooden chair bolted to the concrete floor. His right shoulder was heavily bandaged, his shirt torn away. A single naked incandescent bulb hung from a frayed wire above his head, casting harsh, swinging shadows across his battered face.

I walked down the concrete steps, accompanied only by Leo.

Marco raised his head slowly, his eyes swollen, blinking against the glare of the bulb. The arrogance that had fueled him in the library was completely gone, replaced by the hollow, sickening dread of a man who knows he has reached the end of his rope.

"Dante," he croaked, his lips parched. "Are you going to shoot me yourself, or have Leo do it?"

I pulled up a metal folding chair and sat down five feet in front of him, resting my forearms on my knees.

"You’re not going to be shot, Marco," I said, my voice deadpan.

A faint flicker of pathetic hope lit up in his sunken eyes. "You’re... you’re exiling me? Dante, I swear to God, I’ll take a boat to South America. You’ll never hear from me again. I’ll leave the money—"

"You misunderstand me," I interrupted. "A bullet is an execution for an enemy soldier. It is clean. It has dignity. But you are not an enemy soldier, Marco. You are a thief who stole from the widow and child of a man who worked for us."

Marco swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "What do you want from me?"

"Julian has been running your books for the past four hours," I said. "He found forty-two million dollars stashed in dummy corporations in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. But there’s an anomaly."

I leaned in closer.

"The numbers don't balance. Twelve years ago, the shipment of uncut stones was worth sixty million on the raw market. Today, uncut diamonds of that grade are worth over one hundred and ten million. Where is the rest of the cache?"

Marco’s jaw tightened. Even facing death, the greed that had poisoned his life for a decade refused to leave him. He looked down at the cold concrete, remaining stubbornly silent.

Leo took a step forward, his hand unbuckling an iron wrench from his utility belt, but I raised my hand to stop him.

"You think if you take the location to your grave, you win," I said. "You think you leave behind a secret treasure, like some romantic pirate in a children's story."

I pulled a small leather-bound notebook from my coat pocket and flipped it open.

"Mateo Reyes wasn't just a stevedore, Marco. He was a master carpenter. In the false bottom of the swallow box, behind the ledger slip, there was a coordinate inscribed with a micro-chisel into the brass hinge. Latitude and longitude for the old drydock mooring at Berth 14."

Marco’s head snapped up. The color drained from his face until he looked like a corpse.

"He... he knew?" Marco stammered. "How could he know where I put them? I moved the crate myself!"

"Mateo was the crane operator, you fool," I said with sheer disgust. "He didn't just see you take the crate. He dropped the submerged ballast box into the harbor basin using the secondary winch before you shot him. You’ve been looking for those diamonds in Anna’s crawlspaces and safety deposit boxes for twelve years, while they were sitting twenty feet beneath the saltwater of Berth 14 the entire time."

Marco let out a strangled, breathless cry—the sound of an ambitious man realizing his entire life's work, his treason, his murders, and his eternal damnation had been built on absolute, humiliating failure.

"He beat me," Marco whispered, his voice cracking into a high-pitched sob. "That illiterate dockworker beat me twelve years ago."

"Mateo had something you never had, Marco," I said, standing up from the metal chair. "He had a daughter he wanted to be proud of him. All you had was an empty stomach that could never be filled."

I turned to Leo.

"Notify the harbor reclamation team. Have the submersible crane brought to Berth 14 under the cover of the morning snowstorm. Recover the ballast box."

"And Marco?" Leo asked, his voice low.

"The old laws," I answered, walking toward the stairs. "No blood on the estate. Take him to the federal prosecutor’s office in downtown Chicago at 6:00 AM. Hand him over with the full unedited audio recordings, the manifests, the cufflink, and the forensic records of Antonio’s murder."

Marco gasped, his head jerking up in pure shock. "The feds?! Dante, no! Shoot me! You’re Moretti! We don't hand our people to the federal government! That's a life sentence in maximum security! Dante, please!"

I paused on the bottom step of the staircase and looked back at him over my shoulder.

"You stopped being our people twelve years ago, Marco. In our world, death is too quick a mercy for a man who preys on children. You will spend the next forty years in an eight-by-ten concrete cell in Florence, Colorado, listening to the silence of your own failure."