Chapter 7 - THE SHADOW CABINET
The dial tone hummed in my ear like a dying insect.
I lowered the receiver slowly onto its cradle. The silence in the private study was absolute, save for the frantic clicking of the computer terminal as Marco’s team continued scraping data from the captured command van’s hard drive.
“Boss?” Marco asked, his eyes searching my face. “What did they want?”
“Everything,” I said, walking over to the French doors and looking out over the courtyard below.
The tactical cleanup crews were already at work. The captured mercenaries had been zip-tied, stripped of their weapons, and loaded into the back of secure transport vans bound for our subterranean holding facility beneath the industrial yards. The snow was falling faster now, blanketing the blood and shattered glass on the stone pavers in a pristine, innocent white.
They thought they had me cornered. They thought that by threatening my children, they could break the iron discipline that had kept the Moretti name alive for two generations.
They didn't understand the single most important rule of my world:
When you threaten a man’s family, you don't make him surrender. You make him unstoppable.
“Marco,” I said without turning around.
“Listening, boss.”
“Get the tactical unit ready. Not for defense. For extraction.”
Marco blinked, stepping closer. “Extraction? Whose? We have the estate locked down tighter than a vault.”
“Not us,” I turned to face him, my eyes burning with a cold, absolute focus. “Julian Vance. He thinks he’s a partner to the Meridian Syndicate. He thinks he’s sitting in his penthouse downtown right now, waiting for the news that my bloodline has been erased.”
“You want to hit Julian’s headquarters tonight?” Marco asked, a dangerous grin slowly spreading across his scarred face.
“I want to dismantle his entire operation before sunrise,” I said. “And I want Julian sitting across a table from me when I call Geneva back.”
Within forty minutes, two unmarked armored transports rolled out of the estate’s secondary exit, slipping into the pre-dawn darkness of the Chicago highway system.
I didn't stay behind. I left a dozen of my most trusted guards to secure the nursery and the third-floor perimeter, but I rode in the lead vehicle.
The Vance Global Tower loomed against the Chicago skyline like a giant black monolith, its upper floors dark and silent. Julian Vance was arrogant enough to believe that a failed tactical assault on my home would be written off as a local turf skirmish, leaving his corporate headquarters untouched by retaliation.
He had miscalculated.
Our convoy pulled into the subterranean loading bay of the Vance Tower with terrifying speed. The security guards at the rolling gate didn't even have time to reach their panic buttons before Marco’s team swarmed the checkpoint, subduing them with non-lethal precision.
We breached the freight elevator, bypassed the biometric locks using Viktor’s administrative override codes—which we had extracted before securing him—and rode straight to the top-floor executive suite.
The double doors of Julian Vance’s private office didn't open with a key.
Marco planted a localized breaching charge against the heavy brass lock.
Boom.
The doors blew inward in a shower of splintered wood and brass shrapnel.
We flooded into the office.
Julian Vance was sitting behind his massive glass desk, wearing a silk bathrobe over his pajamas, holding a glass of scotch, staring at a laptop screen showing live satellite feeds of my estate.
When the smoke cleared and he looked up to see me standing in his doorway—dripping wet from the snow, holding my sidearm at a low-ready position—the glass slipped from his fingers, shattering against the Persian rug.
“Adrien...” Julian whispered, his face turning the color of wet chalk. “How... how are you here? The team... the team said the nursery was compromised—”
“Your team is currently sleeping off a concussion in the back of my transport vans, Julian,” I said, walking slowly toward his desk, my boots leaving wet footprints across his expensive carpet.
Julian scrambled backward in his executive chair, his hands trembling as he hit the edge of the glass desk. “It wasn't me! It was the Syndicate! They forced me! They said if I didn't provide the blueprints—”
“They told you to watch my children cry through a hidden camera?” I asked softly, stopping two feet away from him.
I raised my pistol, not pointing it at his head, but resting the barrel flat against the center of his glass desk, right over his laptop screen.
“Please, Adrien,” Julian choked out, tears of absolute terror spilling over his lower eyelids. “I have money! I have shares! I can sign over half of Vance Global to you right now—everything I own!”
“I don't want your money, Julian,” I said.
I reached into my pocket, pulled out the satellite phone, and tossed it across the desk until it skidded to a halt against his trembling hands.
“Pick it up,” I commanded.
May you like
Julian stared at the phone as if it were a venomous snake. “What... what am I supposed to do?”
“Dial Geneva,” I said, my voice dropping into a register that brook no argument. “And tell the men on the other end of the line that the Moretti family is ready to negotiate.”
