Bianca Coletti violently shoved eight-month-pregnant Serena out of her ornate chair beside the head of the table, sending her crashing to the carpet clutching her belly while coldly sneering that the seat belonged to the real heir’s mother.

With agonizing slowness, Bastian pushed himself upright, using the edge of a chair for support. His tuxedo was torn, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and blood, his eyes wide with the hollow terror of a condemned man.

“What… what are you going to do to me?” Bastian rasped, his voice raw and broken.

“You’re going to give me everything,” Alaric replied, stepping back to stand beside Serena. “Every title deed. Every offshore account. Every ledger your father kept before he died.”

“And if I refuse?” Bastian croaked, trying to find one last shred of defiance. “You kill me? Then you get nothing! The Swiss accounts require biometric authentication!”

Alaric smiled thinly. “You think I care about the Swiss accounts, Bastian? I let you run those accounts because they were pocket change to keep you occupied while Serena finished her law degree. You never understood what power was. You thought power was numbers on a screen. Power is the men standing in this room.”

Alaric gestured to the table. Around the perimeter, twelve capos—men in their fifties and sixties, scarred veterans of the city's darkest decades—stood up in unison. None of them looked at Bastian with anger. They looked at him with the cold indifference reserved for a dead animal on the highway.

“Your own people have already disowned you,” Alaric continued. “Your uncle in Chicago signed over his distribution rights forty minutes ago in exchange for safe passage. You are alone, Bastian. Completely and utterly alone.”

“Wait,” Faye Mercer cried out from the floor, her voice trembling. “Please… what about my baby? He’s innocent! You can’t hurt my baby!”

Serena looked down at Faye. For a long moment, the daughter of the mafia boss remained silent, her expression unreadable. Then she spoke, her tone devoid of warmth but free of cruelty.

“No Montesi has ever laid a hand on a child,” Serena said. “You will have a modest allowance, Faye. Just enough for a small apartment in upstate New York, medical care, and an education for your son. But you will sign away every claim to the Coletti and Montesi names. You will never set foot in Manhattan. If you ever contact my family again, that allowance stops, and you will find out how cold this world can truly be.”

Faye nodded frantically, tears streaming down her neck. “I agree! I swear I agree! I’ll sign whatever you want!”