All Chapters of THE MAFIA'S BLOODY POSSESSION: Chapter 191 - Chapter 199

Ace's PovI had been sitting with the broadcast for forty minutes before either of them came to find me.Nikolai came first. He sat across from me at the table. He did not speak immediately. That was the correct instinct."Say what you know.""The transaction chain may be authentic. We used payment structures in that period that passed through multiple intermediaries. The Moretti family may have used one of those intermediaries to process payment for the operation. That would appear to connect to our finances if you examined it from a specific angle.""Possible.""Yes. Possible. Not confirmed.""It is also possible someone constructed it.""Yes. Also possible. Rem is running verification.""What does your instinct say."He was quiet for a moment. "My instinct says the Moretti family was sophisticated enough to create a financial trail that pointed at us. If the operation was ever examined, that trail would be visible. It is consistent with how they operated. Using the Volkov organizat

 Ace's Pov The Broker's death was public within two hours. By midnight the three questions everyone in the northeastern corridor was asking were the same three questions. Who killed him. Who was he meeting with. What did it mean for the territories his supply lines touched. The supply lines were the immediate problem. The Broker had been a major arms supplier to six organizations in the city. Three of those organizations were not part of the seventeen-piece structure we had dissolved. They operated independently. They were now facing a sudden disruption in their supply relationship without any warning. Independent organizations with disrupted supply relationships made decisions quickly. Those decisions were not always stable. "Three separate territory incursions reported since midnight." Rem had the monitor running a continuous update feed. "Two

 Ace's Pov We were back at the building before I said anything to either of them about how I was actually processing it. The drive back had been quiet. The specific quiet of three people sitting with the same information from different angles. They were not yet ready to put those angles together out loud. I sat at the table. Ivan sat across from me. Nikolai stood at the window. For a while none of us organized the conversation. "She is four months pregnant." "Yes." "Which means she was already pregnant when she made contact two days ago. When she ran the cyber attack. When she locked us in the bunker." "Yes." "She did all of that while four months pregnant." "She is our mother's daughter." I sat with that for a moment. "The inheritance. Seven hundred million acros

 Nikolai's Pov The coalition attacked the eastern stronghold at two in the morning. We were ready for them because Rem had spent the afternoon tracking the three families' communication patterns. He had identified the attack window four hours before it opened. Being ready made the difference between a manageable engagement and a serious loss. We had repositioned ten senior personnel to the eastern stronghold by midnight. We had placed Rem's monitoring equipment at three points around the perimeter. We had established clear communication lines between the three positions we were holding. The coalition came in with more coordination than I had expected from three families that had apparently never worked together before. They had clearly spent the hours between their communications to us and the attack drilling the approach. The three-pronged entry they attempted was too clean to be improv

 Ivan's Pov The twelve block blackout held while we walked out of the stronghold into the street. The city around us ran on emergency power and vehicle lights. The specific disoriented energy of a population that did not understand what was happening surrounded us. Ghost was waiting in the middle of the street. Alone. No backup. No visible weapon. A single person in a dark jacket standing under the partial light of a vehicle's headlamps. The vehicle had stopped when the grid went out. Ghost looked younger than I had expected for someone who had been embedded inside global criminal financial networks for three years. The specific agelessness of someone who lived primarily in systems rather than rooms made the physical reality of them harder to place. "You came out together." "We told you we would." "People say things."