Chapter 3 - The Bellamy Syndicate
The name hit the room like a physical blow.
Richard Bellamy. The East Coast shipping magnate, my fiercest corporate rival, and the man widely believed to have been behind the car bomb that killed my wife Sophia eight months ago.
For months, I had been tearing apart the New York underworld looking for the direct link between Bellamy and the Midtown bombing. I had dismantled three of his shell companies, seized two of his container ships in the port of Newark, and driven his stock price down twenty points.
I had thought the war was financial.
I had thought he was fighting me for control of the Manhattan shipping lanes.
I was wrong. He wasn't just trying to bankrupt me. He was trying to wipe out my bloodline.
"He targeted my son," I whispered, the cold fury rising from the pit of my stomach until it filled my throat with the taste of copper. "He couldn't get to me directly, so he paid a corrupt nurse to poison my child's formula from the inside."
"The poison wasn't meant to kill him quickly, boss," Dante added quietly, sliding the tablet toward me. "Look at the lab breakdown of the formula residue from the bottle. It was designed to cause progressive gastrointestinal failure—symptoms that mimic congenital wasting syndrome. If Leo had died slowly over the next month, the coroner would have ruled it natural infant failure to thrive. Nobody would have looked twice."
I looked down at the tablet screen. The toxicological breakdown was right there in black and white.
Beside me, Hunter gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "That's... that's pure evil. He's a baby!"
"Men like Bellamy don't care about age," I said, my voice dropping into a lethal whisper. I turned to Dante. "Where is Bellamy right now?"
"He’s hosting an exclusive private charity gala at the Plaza Hotel downtown," Dante reported, pulling up a live satellite feed on the tablet. "High-society crowd, city aldermen, federal prosecutors. He thinks he's untouchable tonight."
"He's about to find out how wrong he is," I said, reaching down to pick up my holster and sliding the 9mm back into place.
"Mr. Rossi—" Hunter began, stepping forward, her hand reaching out as if to stop me. "You can't just go storming into a public gala with a gun. You'll play right into his hands. If the police or federal agents are there..."
"Let them come," I replied coldly. "A father who finds out someone tried to starve his newborn son doesn't care about courtroom politics."
"Wait," Hunter said, her voice unexpectedly fierce. She stepped between me and the door. "If you go in there raging like a mobster, Bellamy will spin it in the press. He'll paint you as a psychotic criminal, take custody of Leo through family court using your violent record, and win without firing a shot."
I stopped. The brutal truth of her words cut through my blinding rage.
Bellamy wasn't just a thug; he was a master manipulator of the legal and social elite. If I walked into the Plaza Hotel and put a bullet in his head, I would hand him the ultimate posthumous victory, leaving Leo an orphan with a jailed father.
"Then what do you suggest, Ms. Higgins?" I asked, my eyes narrowing as I studied her. "You have a remarkably sharp mind for a housekeeper."
"I have a brain," Hunter corrected, lifting her chin. "And I have access to something Bellamy's security team won't expect."
"Which is?"
"Me," she said calmly. "My sister works catering at the Plaza Hotel. She’s working tonight's gala on the third-floor ballroom service staff. If you get me inside your armored SUV, I can get into that hotel through the service entrance, bypass the metal detectors with the catering crew, and plant a bug on Bellamy's private phone or laptop before midnight."
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I stared at her in stunned silence. "You want to go undercover in a room full of armed syndicate fixers?"
"You saved my financial life, Mr. Rossi," Hunter said, her green eyes burning with a cold, hard resolve that matched my own. "And I saved your son. We're even. Now let me help you finish the job."
