Chapter 18 - The Ledger of Blood
Vincent stood slowly, turning his back to Lily so she couldn't see the torment in his eyes.
"When you ran five years ago, Claire," he began, each word sounding like it was being dragged across broken glass, "the five families believed you were dead. They believed you stole forty million dollars of syndicate money to vanish."
"I took nothing!" I snapped under my breath, terrified of raising my voice in front of our daughter. "I took two suitcases, three thousand dollars from my own savings, and the child growing inside me because I knew what this life would do to her!"
"I know that," Vincent said, his voice dropping to a gravelly rasp. "I always knew. But New York demanded recompense. Dante’s father threatened an all-out war across the Midwest unless I solidified the alliance through marriage to Carmela. To stop them from hunting the country for you, to buy time to build my own defenses... I signed the Commission charter."
Below us, footsteps thudded methodically on the grand staircase. Sal and two of our men were holding the mezzanine, firing controlled bursts to delay the advance, but the steady crack of suppressed weapons meant Dante’s mercenaries were systematically clearing every room.
"What was in the charter, Vincent?" I pressed, stepping closer to him, the gun still gripped tightly in my right hand.
"A succession clause," Vincent answered, looking directly into my eyes. "If I died without a legitimate heir born from the Valenti bloodline, the entire Moretti enterprise—the ports, the real estate, the Chicago banking networks—reverts entirely to the New York Commission. But if a biological heir of mine lived, even outside wedlock, the charter dictated that the child must be surrendered to New York to be raised under Commission custody."
A cold dread paralyzed my limbs. "Surrendered?"
"Dante doesn't want to kill Lily, Claire," Vincent confessed, the agony in his voice laying bare five years of silent calculation. "He wants her alive. If he holds Lily, he controls Chicago through her name until she turns eighteen. She becomes their puppet queen, and when she’s old enough, they marry her off to consolidate power forever."
"No," I choked out, nausea hitting me in a violent wave. "I would rather blow this house to ash with all of us inside."
"That won't happen," Vincent said, his voice dropping into that dark, lethal calm that had earned him the throne of Chicago. "Because New York forgot one thing when they wrote that charter."
A massive blast tore through the outer corridor. Sal’s rifle stopped firing.
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The heavy oak doors of the master suite rattled violently as a boot slammed into them from the outside.
"They forgot," Vincent whispered, raising his weapon toward the splintering door, "that a Moretti does not surrender what belongs to him."
