Chapter 9
Rafael’s first move arrived before breakfast.
Not with gunfire.
With people.
Three retired Vega captains appeared at my outer gate asking to speak with me. Each carried an old family marker identical to the ones Isabel had hidden.
Salvatore wanted them turned away.
I let them in.
That decision frightened Victoria when she heard.
“Don’t.”
I stopped at her guarded doorway.
“Why?”
She laughed nervously. “You think Rafael sends men to talk?”
“No.”
I looked at her.
“I think he sends men who believe they’re collecting something.”
Her face changed.
Exactly.
The retired captains entered my study unarmed. Old enough to have served my father, proud enough to resent being searched.
The first put his marker on my desk.
“My brother died for Rafael in Brooklyn.”
The second did the same.
“Rafael protected my son after the Harbor split.”
The third remained quiet longest.
Then he said, “Your father promised our family the western crews if you ever broke the blood agreement.”
I looked at him.
“What blood agreement?”
He seemed genuinely surprised.
“You don’t know.”
Salvatore disliked that.
I waited.
Before I inherited command, my father supposedly promised Rafael would act as “shadow counsel” to the next boss if family unity ever fractured.
Except nobody ever told me.
The old captain continued.
“Rafael says Isabel broke unity when she stole the markers and turned you against your elders.”
Isabel.
Not Victoria.
Not nine months behind a steel door.
Rafael had already rewritten the story.
If I defended Isabel, he could call me emotional.
If I abandoned her, he proved he could control me through tradition.
I chose neither.
I placed the recovered markers on the desk.
“Your debts belong to dead men and old decisions. None give Rafael permission to hide my wife in my house.”
The first captain shifted.
The second avoided my eyes.
The third remained hard.
“Then settle it with Rafael.”
“Where?”
“At the winter estate.”
A trap.
I knew.
Then he added:
“Bring Isabel.”
My expression changed.
There it was.
Not a meeting.
A display.
Rafael wanted my wife in front of the old debt families so he could make her the reason everything happened.
I looked at the markers.
Then at the men.
“No.”
The third captain’s face hardened.
“If Rafael wants my wife,” I said, “he can come into the house where he helped bury her alive.”
For the first time, one of the old men smiled.
May you like
Not because he agreed.
Because I had just forced Rafael to make the next move where everyone could see it.
