Chapter 6 - The Setup
The economic war against Richard Hastings was not a loud affair, but it was absolute. By the end of the week, the former titan of Chicago logistics was a ghost in his own city. His club memberships were terminated; his corporate allies refused to answer his calls; even the street-level bookmakers he used for his gambling habits closed their doors to him on orders from the Rossi family.
Richard sat in the darkened bedroom of his hotel suite, the air smelling of stale whiskey and panic. His phone was dead, the service cut off for non-payment. The only line out was the hotel room phone, which rang every hour with messages from his creditors.
He was ruined. Completely, utterly ruined.
But as the desperation reached its peak, a dark, vicious cunning took over his mind. He had one asset left. One card he hadn't played.
Cheyenne.
Damian Rossi had married her for revenge, yes, but Richard had seen the way the young mob boss looked at the folder in the restaurant. He had seen the anger in Rossi’s eyes. It wasn't the anger of a business rival; it was the anger of a protective beast.
He wants her, Richard realized, a hysterical laugh escaping his cracked lips. The mobster fell for the broken girl.
If Damian valued Cheyenne, then Cheyenne was still a currency. Richard just needed to get her out of the Rossi mansion. He needed to isolate her, to use her as a lever to force Damian to sign over the distribution routes and clear his debts.
He stood up, his joints popping in the silent room. He walked to the desk and pulled out a piece of paper, writing a single address in the industrial sector of Cicero—an old warehouse that had been abandoned by his company five years ago, a place the feds hadn't seized yet because it was registered under a dead shell company.
He couldn't call the mansion. He couldn't send a letter through regular mail.
But he knew one person inside the Rossi estate who was always open to bribery.
Silvio, the night gatekeeper, was an old soldier who had been passed over for promotion twice by Damian’s father and hated the new regime. Two hours later, a courier delivered an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in cash—the last of Richard’s hidden emergency reserves—along with a single, handwritten note addressed to Cheyenne.
The note was brief, written in the familiar, commanding script that had controlled her life for two decades:
Cheyenne. The Western Wing room is still active. I have the remote trigger for the secure files. If you don't want the world to see what you looked like when you failed your discipline, meet me at the Cicero warehouse tonight at midnight. Come alone, or the servers go live.
Inside her room at the east wing, Cheyenne held the note, her face turning the color of milk.
The note had been slipped under her door during the staff shift change at 8:00 PM. She knew what the "Western Wing room" meant. She knew what her father had recorded on those hidden security cameras. The degradation, the humiliation, the moments where she had begged on her knees for him to stop. If those files were released to the public, to the press, to the syndicate... she would never be able to look another human being in the eye again. She would be dead long before her heart stopped beating.
She looked at the silver key on the nightstand.
May you like
Damian had given her the choice to leave. He had given her autonomy. But she couldn't involve him in this. If Damian found out, he would go to the warehouse and kill her father, and the files would be automatically released by a dead-man's switch on the server. She had to handle it herself. She had to face the monster one last time.
She pulled a heavy dark woolen coat from the closet, wrapping it around her shoulders to hide the trembling of her body. She slipped the silver key into her pocket, unlocked the French doors, and stepped out into the cold, silent night.
