Chapter 9
The silence in the holding cell was suffocating. Michael’s breath rattled in his chest, his eyes wide as he stared at the terrifying, unmoving presence of his older brother. The bright, harsh light above them illuminated the sweat dripping from Michael’s nose. He was caught in an impossible snare, but the immediate, lethal danger sitting across the table forced his hand.
"If I tell you," Michael wheezed, his American accent slurring through the pain, "they will kill me. They will slaughter my crew."
"If you do not tell me," Dominic replied, his voice a cold, dead void, "you will not live long enough to worry about your crew."
Michael closed his eyes, a pathetic sob escaping his lips. The arrogant younger brother was completely broken.
"It was the Falcone syndicate," Michael confessed, his voice barely above a whisper. "They approached me three months ago. They said your grip on the eastern shipping routes was slipping. They promised me that if I destabilized the family from the inside—if I proved you were weak and distracted by the old woman—they would back my claim to the leadership with their street soldiers."
Dominic’s sharply defined jawline clenched. The Falcone family was a massive, brutal organization operating out of the neighboring state. They had been encroaching on his borders for a year, testing his defenses. To learn they had infiltrated his own home, turning his brother and his wife into treacherous pawns, was a declaration of total war.
"They used you," Dominic murmured, a chilling, analytical calm washing over him. "They knew you could never hold the throne. They wanted you to create chaos so they could sweep in and take the city while our family was fractured."
"I thought I could control them!" Michael cried out, opening his eyes. "I thought I was making a power play!"
"You were playing checkers... against grandmasters," Dominic stated, shaking his head slowly in disgust. He stood up from the wooden chair, his tailored three-piece suit pulling taut over his muscular frame. "You sold out your own blood for a crown made of paper."
"What are you going to do to me?" Michael begged, straining against his restraints. "I told you the truth! I gave you the Falcones! You have to spare me, Dominic! I'm your brother!"
Dominic looked down at the pathetic, broken man. The memory of his eighty-year-old mother kneeling on the floor with a nylon leash around her neck flashed in his mind, obliterating any shred of familial mercy.
"You stopped being my brother this afternoon," Dominic declared softly, his cold eyes completely devoid of forgiveness.
He walked to the heavy steel door and knocked twice. The lead bodyguard opened it immediately, stepping into the room.
"Boss?" the guard asked respectfully.
"Transport him to the secure warehouse on the docks," Dominic ordered, not even looking back at Michael as the younger man began to scream and plead hysterically. "Keep him chained. Give him water, but nothing else. I will deal with him permanently once the Falcone situation is resolved."
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"Understood," the guard nodded, moving to unbolt the chair from the floor.
Dominic stepped out of the harsh, fluorescent lighting of the basement, walking back up the concrete stairs toward the bright, cinematic warmth of his home. The domestic treason had been rooted out, but the confession had unlocked a much larger, infinitely more dangerous reality. The city was on the brink of an all-out syndicate war, and Dominic needed to prepare his army.
