"“Can you be my daughter for one day?”

The basement holding cells beneath the Moretti estate were cold, damp, and designed to break even the most stubborn men.

Marcus sat chained to a heavy iron chair in the center of the concrete room, his expensive suit rumpled, blood trickling from a split lip where Dante had introduced him to the wall.

Adrian rolled his wheelchair through the heavy steel door, stopping two feet away. The overhead fluorescent light hummed angrily.

“Why?” Adrian asked. The single word carried the weight of a mountain.

Marcus spat a glob of blood onto the concrete, looking up with a defiant, bitter sneer. “Why? Because you grew soft, Adrian! You built an empire, but you let sentimentality cloud your judgment. You started talking about walking away from the docks, about legitimizing the family, about playing family man with Claire and Sophie.”

Adrian’s fists clenched tightly over his armrests. “So you killed a four-year-old child?”

“I didn't mean to kill the girl!” Marcus snapped back, his voice cracking with sudden, hysterical panic. “The bomb was meant for you. It was supposed to cripple you, take you off the board, and let me consolidate power while you were rotting in a hospital bed. The kid just... she wasn't supposed to be in the front seat that morning. She climbed back there at the last second!”

A terrifying, dead silence filled the room.

Adrian’s face didn't move. He didn't shout. He didn't strike him. But the look in his eyes promised a torment far worse than death.

“You took my daughter,” Adrian whispered, his voice trembling with suppressed rage. “You took my wife. And you let me spend three years believing it was my enemies when the snake was sitting at my own table.”

“Go ahead,” Marcus snarled, chin lifted. “Kill me. Put a bullet in my head.”

“Kill you?” Adrian let out a cold, humorless laugh. “No, Marcus. Death is too easy for you. You’re going to spend the rest of your natural life in a black-site prison where the sun never shines. No trial. No lawyers. Just the dark.”