Chapter 3

"I understand. How could I not?"

I sat in that metal chair, staring straight down the barrel, and laughed.

On the floor, Silas was still clutching his broken face, groaning through the blood.

Alessia moved.

She stepped over the blood on the floor. She reached out and gently pressed down on Gideon's wrist, smooth and completely poised.

"Gideon, lower the gun. She's our mother after all. No need to get messy." Her voice sounded calm, almost reasonable. "You're right. The family can't afford an eighty-million loss. But we can't afford the alternative, either."

Gideon lowered the Glock an inch. His eyes flicked to her.

Alessia turned to look at me. The helpless daughter act was gone. Her eyes held nothing but raw, ruthless ambition.

"The High Commission needs an answer they can sell," she said, her mind working with cold precision. "Who do the old men in the Five Families actually fear? The woman who ran Chicago for twenty years, not some punk who throws away cash at the underground fights. If the streets find out Silas sold the route, we lose all our turf. The Commission will strip your seat before sunrise."

She bent down, picked up the exile contract from the dirty floor, and put it right back in Gideon's hand.

"Mom already stepped down. She has no crew. She has no guns. And the rumors are already spreading across the dark web. If she takes the fall and disappears to South America, the Families will just think the old guard lost a quiet war. The Commission gets their pound of flesh. Silas lives. And you keep your throne."

Alessia took a slow breath. When she looked at me again, her voice turned sickeningly cold.

"Step aside, Mom. You had your glory. Trading your life for your sons' future and this family's survival? That's just good business."

The smell of copper and blood burned my throat.

I watched this girl. I taught her how to balance the books, how to wash dirty money, and how to stay alive. She learned well. Cutthroat. Heartless. Willing to slap a price tag on her own family.

"Good business," I said. My eyes drifted to the glowing screen on the table. "That's clever, Alessia. But there's a problem with your timeline."

Alessia's brow furrowed. "What are you talking about?"

"The Black Siren got hit at one-thirty." I pointed at the dark web monitor logs in the corner of the screen. "Ten minutes later, at one-forty, the water was still on fire, but somebody already flooded the dark web with news that I sold out the shipment. They even leaked the private keys to my old terminal."

Alessia's pupils shrank to needles.

"The wreckage wasn't even cold. Who had the power to pin this on me before the Commission even sounded the alarm?" I leaned forward, my voice flat and icy. "The proxy servers routing that leak went through your foundation's nodes. You weren't cleaning up, Alessia. Before the ship even sank, you had already framed me for treason, didn't you?"

The basement went completely dead.

Gideon's face changed. He whipped his head toward Alessia.

"Alessia," Gideon growled. "You're the only one with the keys to the dark web feeds."

"Don't listen to her!" Alessia's voice pitched high, and she took a step back. "She's trying to tear us apart—"

"You want me to read the IP address off the screen?" I cut her off, my eyes locking onto her throat. "It came from the laptop you never let out of your sight. Two months ago, the second Silas took his first thirty-million-dollar marker, you already opened the wash channels to short the family."

"Shut up!" Alessia lost it. The mask cracked wide open. She screamed at me, "What the hell was I supposed to do?! I knew two months ago Silas was going to drag us down! The cartel came to me! They said give up the route or get chopped into pieces! And you? You stepped down! You sat in the garden playing with flowers! Did you care about this family?!"

Her chest heaved, pure venom burning in her eyes.

"Gideon had to take the seat! The family couldn't fall! So what if I hired a hacker to scrub your terminal? You have no power left! You're just an old woman sitting on a dead name! Shoving you into the fire was the only way out! You brought us into this life! Taking the bullet for this family is your damn job!"

Her screams bounced off the bare concrete walls.

Gideon stood frozen, looking like he'd taken a hammer to the skull.

He thought he was the ruthless Boss pulling the strings. He never realized he was just a gun in his little sister's hands.

I looked at the three of them, at this pathetic circus, and I laughed out loud.

The sound tore through the silence of the room.

"A mother's job?"

I stood up slowly. Alessia flinched and took another step back.

I reached out and ripped the five-million-dollar contract right out of Gideon's hand.

Right in front of them, I ripped the paper in half.

Then again. And again.

I threw the shredded contract straight into Gideon's pale, frozen face.

The scraps hit his cheeks and fluttered to the floor, soaking in the pool of Silas's blood.

"Five million for my life?" I stared into Gideon's eyes, my voice dead calm. "I dragged you three out of the mud. I fed you. I built you. Now your teeth are sharp, and you want to tear my throat out?"

I turned away. Looking at them made me sick.

I walked past Gideon and Alessia, my heels clicking across the concrete.

"Stop right there!" Gideon roared behind me.

I shoved the heavy iron door wide open. The howling Chicago blizzard slammed inside, biting cold and full of snow.

Gideon stood at the edge of the light, his gun trembling in his grip, screaming into the storm:

"Walk out that door, and you're a traitor wanted across the whole city! The Commission's hit squads and my gunmen will dump your body into Lake Michigan to feed the fish!"